LIVING WITH BEARS
We are all immigrants and what sustains us
is the failure of desire and need.
Each question you resurrect from the debris of childhood
I want to believe in, but I come from a long line
of bear worshippers who survived the potato famine.
I don't eat red meat. Icons in dark niches, guttered candles,
a menorah, and the ritual of our bodies—
there's always an ocean, a continent, or a lover in the way.
One of the wounded, you're trapped in the dark heat of the city
instead of feasting on onion domes in the Red Square with me.
I taste your words as if they were ripe
huckleberries pale with bloom in late August.
But I'm omnivorous. Did our tongues really find the faith?
We could spend a lifetime looking at the ground, or love.
The phone rings, your exlover reminds me
with silence, of what we have in common.
Kiev celebrates a millennia of civilization.
Sasha says in Russian, There is no verb to be in the present.
It is understood. We do not live with white bears,
tovarishchi, are you all capitalists, then?
We are the same people. We are breaking the images.
He says, Afghanistan is Russian for Vietnam,
pulling on a cigarette with his good hand.
An idea called napalm has melted his face.
An American vet trembling like a lover, offers a light,
and touches his hand, the half-formed word brother on his lips.
The steppes have no natural boundaries.
No more bison, cossacks or mongols sweeping the open plains.
I am lost on the limitless horizon. Mnogaya leta.
Voices sing with the quality of wind on the land.
The future is no more uncertain than the past.
And yes, the failures between us are what we know best.
But even at fifty below, the arctic pools, the polinii
don't freeze over, where in winter the bears come to feed.
Within the earth, wood grows upward without haste & without rest.
Sometimes I hear it in your voice —
vulnerability slips in and we find sum totals
have nothing to do with tenderness or faith.
A brittle sheet of gold foil tremors
the geography of who we are.
7/28/89
