narimi narimi said the bird

Nadia Danon.  Not long before she died a bird

on a branch woke her.

At four in the morning, before it was light, narimi

narimi  said the bird.

What will I be when I’m dead? A sound or a scent

or neither. I’ve started a mat.

I may still finish it. Dr. Pinto

is optimistic.: the situation is stable. The left one

is a little less good. The right one is fine. The X-rays are clear. See

for yourself: no secondaries here .

***

The bird wakes her. Lying on her back with her eyes shut, thinking

What’s left apart from the place mat she’s started and may still finish.

What’s left is a wish that the pain will go away

that it will all go away and stop bending over her.

She lies as though she has left her launching pad and is now

moving along the Milky Way and already the planet

from which she was launched is far off, has shrunk till it can no longer be

distinguished from tens of thousands of other stars.

A bird on a branch calls to her and Nadia is lying

wiping away the good and the bad, like a woman who has nearly

finished washing the floor, walking backward toward the door, drawing

the mop toward her, all she has left to do is to wipe away the traces on

the wet floor of her won footprints. The pain is still sleeping: her hostile

body has not woken with her with the sound of the bird, with all its knives.

Even shame, her lifetime companion, has gone. It has ceased to gnaw at her.

Everything is letting go of her and Nadia is letting go of everything,

like a pear from a branch: the pear is not picked but a ripened pear drops.

Right now at four in the morning Nadia is the most alone she has ever been,

not alone like a sick woman hearing a bird in a garden but alone like a bird

with no garden no branch no wing.

-          From The same sea, a novel in verse by Amos oz