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Mario Susko
In The Image Of: Daughter Visited
I remember the day, lace-like windows
in January that turned one's breath
into crystallized milk, when you
left home never to return, and I
smashed my head against the hall mirror.
You went to explore life;
I stayed to explore death.
You didn't take anything with you,
though you robbed me of everything,
even those future words that I thought
might save one from his fate.
I look out of the window at night
and it looks back at me with me.
It was the likes of my image
you recognized in yourself
that you set out to obliterate.
Now that we both survived a war,
cast away on two different shores,
and your son is a picture of you,
you want to uncover how much of me
might be in him, I, only to release
my soul pent-up in the memory.
A week into my visit you said
with a smile I couldn't quite read:
I'll take care of you in your final years;
and that night I packed my suitcase,
twice grazed by shell fragments,
and waited for the day to break,
while leaning against the edge of the bed
and staring at the oval veined mirror
that had me hang on your guest room door.
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Mario Susko,
a witness and survivor of the war in Bosnia, returned to the US at the
end of 1993. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from SUNY at Stony Brook in
the 70s and has lived, on and off, in this country half of the past 33
years. More recently he has had his poems published by The Progressive; Glass Tesseract;
Phantasmagoria; Sonora Review; Poetry International Web (the
Netherlands), The Paumanok Review,
and Dream Catcher (UK).
He is the author of 22 books of poems, his third book in English, "The
Life After," having been released in 2001. He is the recipient of
several awards, including the 1997 Nassau Review Poetry Award, the 1998
Premio Internazionale di Poesia e Lette- ratura "Nuove Lettere"
(Naples, Italy), and the 2000 Tin Ujevic Award for "Versus Exsul" as
the best book of poems published in Croatia in 1999. His most recent
work includes an integral edition/translation of Walt Whitman's "Leaves
of Grass" (Zagreb: Meandar, 2002) and his selected poems 1982-2002
"Reading Life and Death" (Zagreb: Meandar, 2003). His new book of poems
will be released by Turtle Point Pressin Fall 2005. email: M.Susko
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