Happiness Index

Your children are always grinning, doing backflips,

           scaling trees in the black-and-white photos. I wonder

how they lived in so much joy knowing

           the way the world can swallow a person.

Could you have imagined it then?

           Five years in a cell,

you were fed bread and little else.

           I call to you from a place where bodies

slip through hands like loose grain.

           I think of your wife alone,

how she ironed collars for men in town.

           She stitched them and starched them, carted them

in a wheelbarrow. Last month Mary Lou and I

           braided choreg—sprinkled with nigella seeds.

I don’t know if it was the right way.

           I believed only what the computer told me

and it rose under soft towels all night.

           Those years in prison, whose words did you turn to?

I grasp for yours, but they are lost.

           One script shrouded in another.

Why did they hold you and then release you;

           the poets being such a burden

and you the enemy after all? Did you

           ever long to slip into the fabric

of a different world? Moths can mimic

           the flutter of  bird wings to ward off  predators.

One moth learned to hiss like a snake.

           I remember my own body

soft under pastel parchment flowers.

           When the nurse held my hand, I wondered

who made them. And I wonder it again now.

           Once, I watched a giant oak split then crash

in a cemetery. Do the dead see everything?

           What is the suffering to joy index?

Today the land you were forced from is famous

           for ice cream. You don’t have to tell me. I know

that not all days are like the day I swam

           in the Adriatic then ate zucchini flowers in garlic

and watched an octopus dance while drying in the wind.