Doina

A type of traditional Romanian melody

Savannah Thorne

They load the dead
On low trundles at night,
Laden with stones
So that they will not walk again.

The cold white of dead faces
In moonlight by the dark-powered Danube—
The cart squeaks and thuds, stops,
Throbs over mud as thick as tied sacks.

The fierce blood of language Is the river’s song this night
While trowels ring on stone
And scrape clogged rivermud.

The tour guide laughs frankly:
Stupid peasants. He is modern,
Taking the road at a trot,
The legends with salt: fearless.

The others are filled with it,
The fear, till their eyes turn white
And their hands come knotty
Like knuckled wood. They watch

For any unwanted resurrection
Among the naked limbs
Stacked like ricks of wood.
There has been much death this year

Even for those used to the carts,
The stains, the riverbank’s unclimbable slip,
The lean bones and blooded tongues.
The ringing of shovel on stone ends.

They tilt the cart downhill.
The harvest god accepts the offer. Inch by inch the dead sink.
Inch by inch they are forgotten.

On Teaching My Daughter

I’m the kind of mother
Who hides behind flats
Of flowers at Wal-Mart to feel 

The boom of water
Shattering the leaves like God.
The kind who pulls her daughter along 

Through red towers of forest
Till we’re tangled and laughing.
My own mother 

Left when I was 7, then
Died before I knew her. My life
Revolves around that hole. 

In my crib
I dreamt of her leaving
And cried when I woke. 

Should I even remember?
That night will fade
Into the yellow wallpaper 

Of a hallway of nights. But—
What if it didn’t?
What if it skittered,

Spreading mad and quick
Like fire on delicate tissue,
Devouring, 

Moving, crazed
Across other dreams,
Into nights and nights of mothers and daughters?