CHRISTMAS LETTER FROM POLAND

CHRISTMAS LETTER FROM POLAND

                      Love is a drowning in flood waters

                        —Irish anon., 9th C. 

                                           to Richard Benesivitch

1. A friend I thought afraid of commitment,

writes he married the girl next door

twice: a civil wedding and a church one,

as if the first one didn’t quite take—

Soviet-style bureaucracy still applies.

He sends photos of a post-industrial Walbrzych

where happiness is possible because the mines have closed.

Richard’s letter smells of cheap tobacco and coal smoke.

Lonesome for California, he sits at a Hard Rock cafe in Wroclaw.

Sends translations and poems in an adopted tongue—

his Polish is improving; confesses Lithuanian is his first love.

From the look of his letter, I’d say he’s losing his English.

Tak! I thought of Czeslaw Milosz’s lament:

I did not choose California, it was given to me. . .

Never again will I kneel in my small country, by a river,

So that what is stone in me could be dissolved. . .

I write here in desolation.

2. Another friend searches for ancestors in winter;

only the City of Light offered refuge

from the darkness of Prague and Krakow.

She writes about growing up hunkie,

the silent steel mills of Pittsburgh

where her barrelchested father first worked,

then later, as a mechanic in the hangars,

but he never flew the blue distance of sky to homeland.

Before his stroke, we spoke a rough English

peppered with Polish and Ukrainian.

Now it’s too late to translate secrets trapped in his eyes.

A slagheap of words slide down the slopes of despair.

3. We never finish poems, they abandon us.

Or is it the other way around?

New Year’s rain fell in biblical proportions

as if the sky knelt down by the river, opened a vein.

My blood thinned after my father’s death one Christmas,

within a year my mother, then my uncle followed. . .

I just went down, down, down.

Little in the way of poetry surfaced,

I became stone, no coming up for air

as if grief were a river to drown in.

I learned to crawl,

suffered a purgatorial floundering

in the baptismal font called California.

Zgoda, zgoda—peace flooding the roads.

The beginnings of a poem roils and fights for breath,

a steelhead flexing on a thin line, escapes

so that what is stone in me may be absolved. . .

1/23/97 Moon in Leo

SUPER BOWL SUNDAY

The terrible beauty of the storm clouds 

reflected in the river with the promise of more rain this evening. 

Vines emerging from the water like drowned snakes.

Building an Arc in the Dark of the Year

(I was obsessed with the overlap of science and poetry, so these fragments represent at least a half a year’s writing, if not the entire year…At first it was an ark, a winter of massive floods of epic proportions, then it became an arc.)

—for Max "Sonny" Lowe

The story of rain begins and ends in the oceans. The river, called St. Ignacio, Slavianka, el Río Russo, the Russian River—leaps its banks, pays us a neighborly visit. Divulges its real name to the sea. Encircling each tree, the rising river claims small, vertical kingdoms. Mountains caught in the act of becoming islands & isthmuses again. Ancient shores & riverbeds unveiled. Centuries of mud erode in the afternoon, fossils come to light. We’re marooned. Again. After a decade, or two—depending upon who’s keeping score—the great California drought officially ends. The cats bitterly complain about the weather. My neighbor notes it’s been 40 days since we’ve seen the sun. On the eve of the Epiphany we measure rain falling in biblical proportions by the foot, & threaten to build an arc for when our cabins fail us.

When I found Paleolithic fossils of raindrops frozen in stone, I envied the age of redwoods on the 100-year flood plane recording weather in annular increments—decades but a moment in time. The warrior rain on the roof drums up a tattoo of words to engulf the muse. My poor drowned heart.