Passover



They hid in the swamp
and they were saved.	


2.  Prologue

They'd killed Tsar Alexander, just like they'd killed the Son of Man.  
Or at least, that's what the men with the dogs said.  They panted it 
out in thick clouds that Great-Grandmother could see rise above the 
pines while she crouched in the swamp for the first time, water just 
warm enough to be fluid, trying not so much to stop shivering as just 
to match her muscles' jumping to the movement of the wind-shook rushes.

3.  1919

In 1919's swamp, the men and dogs came thirty times.  

—Twelve times it was the chief of the military who sent
  them.

—Five times it was the White Army.

—Eight times it was the Green Armies.

—Twice it was the Red Army, but those visits weren't
  official, the rifle snouts wavering ten feet away nothing
  but spectres of rifle snouts because the men were on
  their own time.

Now it was summer and the water was warmer but mosquitoes sunk needles 
into her and she couldn't swat them, instead dripped waterfalls of blood 
down her legs, a scale model of the Tsar's red rapids flowing into the 
Catherine Canal thirty years before, praying as she had been encouraged 
to do and as her parents and brothers and sisters were doing, all quietly 
and with shallow breaths, below the amplitude of the wind's sighs.  

4.  2009

In another now, 
this now that you and I are in, 
when we lie here and the sheet is soaked through 
	 between your legs 
and it's not even deep enough
for it to pool and breed mosquitoes overnight, 
and you roll over and reach for a towel to lay over it so
	we can sleep like abstract ideas that don't leak fluids
	all over each other, 
I kind of want you to leave it, 
don't mind the clamminess of evaporation on my skin because 
I feel like I owe something to Great-Grandmother
and her family back in Kiev 
in 1919—

1.  Conclusion