USSR journal, New Year’s Day, 1990

I promised myself I would write in my journal every day – so much has happened, it’s hard to write about life when you’re preoccupied with living it. Pigeons peck at the small curtains of snow. The woman stops to watch, children follow their teacher down the street. Snow falling in large constellations, drifts across uneven pavement, eddies and swirls. In the corrugated iron troughs of roofs, the liberation of snow is an illusion through lace curtains. Cut somewhere between the intersection of prose and poetry, I too am held captive by glass, by my own choosing. Nadja puts her head in her hands, her glasses utter a sharp staccato. I cannot even ask her what is wrong because the man we share has gone off to work. I’m going as stir crazy as she is. His hand, a silk cup thirsty beneath my nightgown. Desperation has developed tiny claws and like burs we transport it from room to room until there is nowhere left to go. Even inside this house, snow collects, migrating slowly towards death. The sugar in my coffee harbors an eventual madness, measured in small increments and hoarded like the coffee, long invisible lines are waiting at our door. Who lined up all the birds in the sky? The dead pigeon on Arbat, feet up, a dark question in the snow. People wander in clusters, shapeless bundles of darkness, mammalian consequences. My camera can only witness so much. The thirsty, dry dust will not drink again until the next fall. The snow cannot enter the heart of winter, indifferent. Snow gathers in the gutter like cottonwood down back home in spring, but I am always comparing one thing to another—even the soft cheese they eat with sugar reminds me of snow.

Cherkassy, Ukraine

• USSR journal: Frankfurt to Moscow, after the solstice