Swear—
~ after three lines by Marina Tsvetaeva (1919)
— by the cold beards
of frosted stones,
by stoic stead-
fast winter pines,
by the crystal-
frosted window
where my lonely
candle peers out:
swear: when summer
comes I won’t let
even one skiff
pass by on my
river without
my inviting
it: Stop! Moor here!
I won’t let one
singer stand at
my listening
door without my
saying — Come in!
Let us hear you.
* * * * *
Anemone
~ after some lines by Boris Pasternak (1917)
The anemone stares with
its wide-open petals
at all the new morning
flowers around it.
~
Awake through half the night as
you sleep, I’d happily go
sleepless for a century
if I could do it
here, listening to the air slowly
swaying inside the room, and beyond
the window, too, like calm sea waves
among these boats we call our
houses. Both the air and I are
trying not to wake you, and so’s
the hermit thrush that’s singing
now as softly as it can.
~
Even one anemone is
a cosmos. Maybe the stars
were made only for
laughing — with their
inconceivably bright
breath.
Add everything up —
orchard, fence, pond, wild
wooded mountains, and in
the empty kitchen a glass
of clean water and the whole
pitch-black universe, lit by
frothing nebula-
white screams …
All of it at once,
all of it
is the release of what
one child, soft-stemmed as
a weed blossom, still unable
to comprehend her own
suffering, has in her own
small heart and does not
know how to let
pour out.
* * * * *
Paris…Moscow, 1925
[after lines in two poems by Marina Tsvetaeva addressing
Boris Pasternak]
Versts, miles — such distances
and dys-stances —
you and I so sundered by them —
disposed
at two extremes. We failed not
to become,
each of us, a world apart
from the other.
Time strides on roads of time,
refugee
days straggle their way here
and can’t go
back because what was, where
they began —
where you are — is no longer,
while where I am,
no place will be made for me
by these maimed years.
~
I’ve said farewell to the fields
of Russian rye —
where a woman may need to
shield her eyes
from fires of wood and blood, from
graves, rivers,
imprisoned outstretched arms …
from any
alloy of tendons and visions …
I am your
detached retinue. You’re mine.
Gusts of rain splatter against
my glass heart
like happiness or misery.
I — still here
at my bodily outpost —
in this city
of resplendent indifference,
penury,
a feral winter in the soul.
~
You — distant but visible in
the soviet of
poetry — which you hate! You — not
inside their stanzas
of ordure, murder, evils. Be
like Homer inside
his hexameters, instead. Chant
your sunset
quatrains and reach toward me —
reach — like a train
slowly crossing the steppe —
here. Where my
one hand — for lack of the best rhyme:
the word that loves
its discovered mate-word — is
holding the other.