In the weightlessness of space,
an astronaut's heart shrinks.—Omni Magazine
A VOICE from home via the satellite link-up lessened the burden of homesickness. But where were the poems hidden? Why didn’t they come? Maybe living in another country would open the dam. Amster-dam: the 16th c. dam on the Amsterele river is real, not a metaphor. I've given into the timelessness of being at loose ends—no agendas, hidden or otherwise—in a country not my own, seeking what oddities life has to offer, for death takes such a long time coming in. In another country I could no longer dam my grief, I shed my skin, undressed down to the bone, and resurrected small pieces of myself from the ground up, for death irrevokably changes you, you cannot go home to who you were. Ever.
Death arrived out of breath, I was an orphan. I trolled old sources searching for my lost art. Page One of my journal documented the oddities of The Final Frontier: After fighting three years with Soviet bureaucracy to hook up a computer telecommunications system with the Ukraine for a cultural exchange program, I finally let go of the idea. Then, one April Fool's Day, my first E-mail message arrived from my ex lover via GlasNET. Incongruous to read a satellite message transmitted half-way around the world that began with: “Cosmonaut lands, doesn't recognize his own country.” My first message from the new independent nation, Ukraine, was not about freedom, but about space, the final frontier.
In another journal I found the story of a physicist who told me a story how he demonstrated jet propulsion while seated in his daughter’s Red Racer wagon; using a fire extinguisher for a booster rocket, he shot through the ivy league halls to the surprise of students and faculty alike. He liked to clown around, to act foolish. He gave me one of the first holograms ever made of a chambered nautilus sliced in half. It reminded me of the cross section of a space ship. I was not immune to his charisma or the three dimensional illusion of physics: a rainbow of light, the visible spectrum trapped on that sheet of mylar set my blood racing, but I was uneasy with the whispered secret rumors. Was it in spring? The word fool once meant someone who was in love. Foolish love. April Fools, a day for practical jokes and sex role reversals. My foolish Papá, said the daughter whose warrior soprano vision guided us through the turbulent protests of the ’60s and ’70s. Show me the prison, show me the jail... I study the exposed labial chambers of the nautilus for clues. What’s worse, the walled silence, or the knowing? Will I be silenced for writing holographic truth dammed behind the slander of divided light?
Inexplicably it reminded me of a hologram of St. Steven’s crown with its bent cross László gave me as we stood on the banks of the Danube the day my half-Russian childhood best friend, Stephanie was cremated on the other side of the world. My hands let rose petals stain the muddy river, I wanted to be home to touch the place where the wind took her up. Home to where her Nanna greeted us each day after school in the old tongue where ikonii and troikas were uttered in the present tense. That place called home that Nanna left, became the wind’s body, Stephanie came to me in sleep, we rode our horses out into the deep. Orion’s belt marked our crossing. She was mute, her eyes like stars. Death swallows the unspoken words hovering in the mouths of the dead. When she comes to visit from the other side, my grandmother’s mouth is a thin line dividing worlds in the country of death. I watch Lír’s sea foam horses racing the wind down the strand.
Death nearly boarded the spaceship Mir, forgotten during the 1991 August coup. Stranded Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev helplessly watched his country disappear: changing its name, anthem, and political order. The abandoned space program was officially broke with no way to get him home. Secret calls in the night; someone trying to sell Soviet space ships for hard currency. When Krikalev returned to Earth after ten months in space, he didn't recognize his own country. White ravens in the snow. In the weightlessness of space, an astronaut's heart shrinks. A loss of innocence. Complex metaphor approaching from the starboard side. In the safe harbor of Amsterdam, I mourned the mounting bodycount, my uncles, parents and best friend. I couldn’t go to Russia after the Fall, to see for myself, the changes. Instead, I translated mute testimony from the dead: my words took on the art of silence and omission. I placed my heart on a small casket, set it adrift in a dark, weightless sea.
Said No to another man who wanted to own me because he loved God more than me.
Who could compete with that?
© 1997, revised 2000 Maureen Hurley
Showing posts with label putscht. Show all posts
Showing posts with label putscht. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 1, 1997
Monday, September 2, 1991
JUNO AND AVOS
JUNO AND AVOS
The labor of love begins in the mind
works its way down into the body—
hollows imperfect architectural notions —
the way a termite hungers for wood.
At Goat Rock, or Slavic Gate,
I turn and speak to my Russian friend
in the few nouns I know.
Called home by the tzar in 1806,
Count Rezanov must have felt this hollowness
as he gazed upon his betrothed,
the Presidio Commander's young daughter,
ConcepcÌon de la Maria — or Conchita, as he called her—
before he set sail on the Juno that summer.
To love was to commit treason against church and state —
But by taking a wife, he could take a country too.
Besides having to woo the Tzar, the Patriarch,
and the Vatican, the King of Spain also had to give consent.
Teaching Conchita her first foreign words,
We must have faith, he said. Mea maxima culpa, she replied.
Did Rezanov and his secret bride pantomime desire
and willingness to wait in their own languages,
each hoping the other would understand?
Adios — go with God, she whispered to the wind.
That same Fort Ross bell still tolls for love:
I am the music of the field, what do you want of me?
Under the Russian-American Company flag,
the Leningrad Rok-Opera renders their love story
into Juno & Avos. We celebrate
the end of the August putsch and the 250th anniversary
of the Bering — Chirikov discovery voyage to America
by feasting most sumptuously on salmon, caviar, and borscht.
We raise a bilingual toast to peace, friendship,
and to the offshore flotilla anchored in the bay —
the frigate Pallada harvests only the wind in her sails.
Peter the Great must've dreamed of a moment such as this.
The end of summer, the square-rigger,
To the Pomo, the tall ships were exquisite winged gods
rising from the belly of the sea. Tabula Rasa. New lands.
After 150 years, the otter is making a slow comeback
from the brink of extinction, no more fur-traders left in the new world,
and freedom has resurrected Leningrad
once again into Petrograd. Peter's city.
The Russian singer calls me his Conchita,
naming himself as Rezanov.
The night is empty, cold ikonii.
No one told her Rezanov, weakened by illness,
was killed by a fall from a horse in Siberia,
and she waited 10 years for his return
before defecting to the veils of God —
as California's first nun.
No one can tell me the dark secrets
gnawing at the singer
who falls to his knees, and blesses me
on this feast day of the three Maries —
as if he were an apostle,
and I, a heathen in need of salvation.
He asks: Are we Romeo and Juliet?
I shake my head: No, wrong metaphor —
Too seasoned a warrior to die for ideal love,
I keep an uneasy truce with religion.
As a child I was a cynic, I deliberately armed myself
by collecting small bright stones of venial sins,
insurance against conscription to Jehova's cloisters.
In as many days as it took to make the world,
he sings arias to me, Ave Maria, wooing me.
A chance meeting: have I fallen in love with the art,
mistaking it for the man?
But maybe there's no other way out,
maybe this is a natural reaction to so many years of denial.
Avos. Perchance by sleeping with the enemy,
we find we are one people after all.
On our final journey back to the ship's berth,
his first sentence in English: Marina, I want…kiss you,
I nearly drove off the road,
last night's horses dreamed us into being,
having no common tongue.
Pointing at the dictionary, he gestures,
dumb and mute, I nod, yes. I understand.
He shows me the words serious and tenderness,
pointing to his heart. What do you want?
I confuse the Russian word soul for rain,
and answer, No, the stars are shining.
At a friend's trailer, we sang
until darkness melded us to the redwoods,
Venus burned, we broke apart a sand dollar,
freeing the five small white doves inside.
Rick said: It's a gesture of peace
to each take a dove upon parting.
Los aves, I say in Spanish. The Cold War is over.
Handing me a half a loaf of Russian bread,
and blowing me kisses, the singer asks
when I'll come to him in Leningrad.
I answer, In the night wind instead of In spring.
Our final kisses through the porthole need no translation
as the Akademik Shirshov shudders away from the dock.
A modern-day Conchita,
I race the ship to the Golden Gate Headlands
and wave my impromptu flag — red pants —
feeling as she must have so many years ago,
with her snowy petiticoats held aloft to the wind.
The vessel returns my salute with two blasts of her horn;
a white ship brilliant as an idea merges with the fog,
returning home to an uncertain future,
towards the westering sun to Vladivostok and Siberia.
Hammer and Sickle. What dawning country awaits?
The paradox of sailing west only to arrive in the east,
thus losing the day already gained,
is no less strange than this love.
I am hollow sacrament,
the chambers of my body,
riddled with light.
Labor Day 1992
Marin Headlands
1993 Maverick
The labor of love begins in the mind
works its way down into the body—
hollows imperfect architectural notions —
the way a termite hungers for wood.
At Goat Rock, or Slavic Gate,
I turn and speak to my Russian friend
in the few nouns I know.
Called home by the tzar in 1806,
Count Rezanov must have felt this hollowness
as he gazed upon his betrothed,
the Presidio Commander's young daughter,
ConcepcÌon de la Maria — or Conchita, as he called her—
before he set sail on the Juno that summer.
To love was to commit treason against church and state —
But by taking a wife, he could take a country too.
Besides having to woo the Tzar, the Patriarch,
and the Vatican, the King of Spain also had to give consent.
Teaching Conchita her first foreign words,
We must have faith, he said. Mea maxima culpa, she replied.
Did Rezanov and his secret bride pantomime desire
and willingness to wait in their own languages,
each hoping the other would understand?
Adios — go with God, she whispered to the wind.
That same Fort Ross bell still tolls for love:
I am the music of the field, what do you want of me?
Under the Russian-American Company flag,
the Leningrad Rok-Opera renders their love story
into Juno & Avos. We celebrate
the end of the August putsch and the 250th anniversary
of the Bering — Chirikov discovery voyage to America
by feasting most sumptuously on salmon, caviar, and borscht.
We raise a bilingual toast to peace, friendship,
and to the offshore flotilla anchored in the bay —
the frigate Pallada harvests only the wind in her sails.
Peter the Great must've dreamed of a moment such as this.
The end of summer, the square-rigger,
To the Pomo, the tall ships were exquisite winged gods
rising from the belly of the sea. Tabula Rasa. New lands.
After 150 years, the otter is making a slow comeback
from the brink of extinction, no more fur-traders left in the new world,
and freedom has resurrected Leningrad
once again into Petrograd. Peter's city.
The Russian singer calls me his Conchita,
naming himself as Rezanov.
The night is empty, cold ikonii.
No one told her Rezanov, weakened by illness,
was killed by a fall from a horse in Siberia,
and she waited 10 years for his return
before defecting to the veils of God —
as California's first nun.
No one can tell me the dark secrets
gnawing at the singer
who falls to his knees, and blesses me
on this feast day of the three Maries —
as if he were an apostle,
and I, a heathen in need of salvation.
He asks: Are we Romeo and Juliet?
I shake my head: No, wrong metaphor —
Too seasoned a warrior to die for ideal love,
I keep an uneasy truce with religion.
As a child I was a cynic, I deliberately armed myself
by collecting small bright stones of venial sins,
insurance against conscription to Jehova's cloisters.
In as many days as it took to make the world,
he sings arias to me, Ave Maria, wooing me.
A chance meeting: have I fallen in love with the art,
mistaking it for the man?
But maybe there's no other way out,
maybe this is a natural reaction to so many years of denial.
Avos. Perchance by sleeping with the enemy,
we find we are one people after all.
On our final journey back to the ship's berth,
his first sentence in English: Marina, I want…kiss you,
I nearly drove off the road,
last night's horses dreamed us into being,
having no common tongue.
Pointing at the dictionary, he gestures,
dumb and mute, I nod, yes. I understand.
He shows me the words serious and tenderness,
pointing to his heart. What do you want?
I confuse the Russian word soul for rain,
and answer, No, the stars are shining.
At a friend's trailer, we sang
until darkness melded us to the redwoods,
Venus burned, we broke apart a sand dollar,
freeing the five small white doves inside.
Rick said: It's a gesture of peace
to each take a dove upon parting.
Los aves, I say in Spanish. The Cold War is over.
Handing me a half a loaf of Russian bread,
and blowing me kisses, the singer asks
when I'll come to him in Leningrad.
I answer, In the night wind instead of In spring.
Our final kisses through the porthole need no translation
as the Akademik Shirshov shudders away from the dock.
A modern-day Conchita,
I race the ship to the Golden Gate Headlands
and wave my impromptu flag — red pants —
feeling as she must have so many years ago,
with her snowy petiticoats held aloft to the wind.
The vessel returns my salute with two blasts of her horn;
a white ship brilliant as an idea merges with the fog,
returning home to an uncertain future,
towards the westering sun to Vladivostok and Siberia.
Hammer and Sickle. What dawning country awaits?
The paradox of sailing west only to arrive in the east,
thus losing the day already gained,
is no less strange than this love.
I am hollow sacrament,
the chambers of my body,
riddled with light.
Labor Day 1992
Marin Headlands
1993 Maverick
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