Rachel Galvin

Speaking of blindness, the man told his one-eyed fiancée, have you heard about the ortolans? Fig-peckers of yellowhammer descent. Thumb-sized or tongue-sized. Kings used to catch them at summer’s end, knife-blind them so that in their darkness they’d feast on millet all day, all night, a break from beetles and seeds, until they grew from one ounce to four. Drowned in Armagnac, plucked, placed in a saucepan, roasted, you eat them whole, so the head dangles between your lips, crunch bones like hazelnuts, underneath the linen napkin you must place over your head to create a scent tent or, so God won’t see your shame. (Proust paired them with sips of Yquem, a sauterne born of noble rot — grapes like ashes, their wet dried in the nick of time, so honeysuckle turns to bitter finish.) Mediterranean salt emerges as flight bursts in your mouth. Imagine yourself a memory, a body full of meal, as Mitterrand must have, eating ortolans eight days before dying, his last illegal act. Fifteen minutes of savoring a supple, burning ball of fat until you exhaust its roast juices. When you finally swallow, you will regret the end of a sensual experience. At least once in your life, you must pay the price for this princely folly.

My eyes are polished smooth by sight, they clot like crystals in storm glass, like my sister brewing beakers of toxin. If we had seen what had been done, what the helicopter pilot did in our name, what the special ops team did in our name, what they did with their hands in our name. What if it were my sister, what if it were her, what? If we had seen with our own smooth eyes. Mark the diacritical, my lovely: we’re all wearing our knee-high boots, every last one of us, we live in a booted nation. A nation girded and gunning. This moment, this is precisely all, watching takes work, sight takes hours, takes my eyeglasses, every last one of them, as if they were yours. You can see there’s a sigh in our sight. What if it were my sister? What if it were, what. What we saw ground into our eyes with the photos, with the newspaper reports. What would I say, what can I say if, what would I say if it were my sister, my own? With my own beakers of toxin, my own boots, my own hands in my own name?

For Joseph Flum When he got to the farmhouse, he rifled through the cabinets, drawers, and cupboards, and his buddies did too. The place was abandoned, or so he thought, and his buddies did too. He tried to talk to people in town, and his buddies did too, but he was the only one whose Yiddish made it across into German. They took his meaning. He, in the farmhouse, took a camera and a gun, but his buddies, who knows. About the gun, it’s also hard to say, but after the war he took up photography, why not, and shot beautiful women for years. Got pretty good at it, and how. Won prizes and engraved plates, put them in a drawer, forgot the war, forgot his buddies, forgot the women, forgot the drawer.