Thursday, October 19, 1989
Tuesday, October 17, 1989
LIVING ON THE EDGE, 10/17/89
LIVING ON THE EDGE, 10/17/89
–for Susan Swartz
I yell at the cats fighting in the basement,
my cabin dips and sashays a slow dance toward the creek.
The mirror sways in supplication, oak trees shimmy,
acorns, falling hailstones, scolding squirrels and cats
aren't to blame, the deep growling is the earth itself.
Half-dressed, I run outside, laughing with neighbors,
there is almost a festive air, the ground undulating
beneath bare feet, a small boat on a bilious sea.
Eerie static fills the airwaves, when news finally breaks,
we are voyeurs watching events unfold on TV.
The Bay Bridge, a toy drawbridge, toy cars,
a mile and a half of collapsed freeway, Cypress St.,
a roller coaster bed, with cars sandwiched underneath,
bottles of unbroken wine no one scavages,
a column of literate smoke from the Berkeley Library.
The Marina's on fire and sinking, someone says.
A B-grade disaster movie upstaging the World Series`
and space shuttle to Jupiter. Atlantis rising.
The Ferry Building clock stops at 5:04 pm.
Women jog with firehoses, victory streamers,
bikers carry the old ones to safety on their backs.
Just five minutes from the street of death,
my exlover interjects how he's single again
and of the two women living in his house.
4It takes a 7.0 on the Richter Scale to break the ice
but patterns of behavior limit us. Rescuers,
out of body bags, switch to sleeping bags, who will help them?
Gallons of paint, spilled rainbows, symbol of hope,
my friends draw arches in the dirt to heal themselves.
The Pacific plate leaps ahead of the American plate`
in a slow race toward home—Alaska. Terremoto.
Like a war zone, as the landfill liquefies into jelly,
rubble from the 1906 quake rises to the surface
–for Susan Swartz
I yell at the cats fighting in the basement,
my cabin dips and sashays a slow dance toward the creek.
The mirror sways in supplication, oak trees shimmy,
acorns, falling hailstones, scolding squirrels and cats
aren't to blame, the deep growling is the earth itself.
Half-dressed, I run outside, laughing with neighbors,
there is almost a festive air, the ground undulating
beneath bare feet, a small boat on a bilious sea.
Eerie static fills the airwaves, when news finally breaks,
we are voyeurs watching events unfold on TV.
The Bay Bridge, a toy drawbridge, toy cars,
a mile and a half of collapsed freeway, Cypress St.,
a roller coaster bed, with cars sandwiched underneath,
bottles of unbroken wine no one scavages,
a column of literate smoke from the Berkeley Library.
The Marina's on fire and sinking, someone says.
A B-grade disaster movie upstaging the World Series`
and space shuttle to Jupiter. Atlantis rising.
The Ferry Building clock stops at 5:04 pm.
Women jog with firehoses, victory streamers,
bikers carry the old ones to safety on their backs.
Just five minutes from the street of death,
my exlover interjects how he's single again
and of the two women living in his house.
4It takes a 7.0 on the Richter Scale to break the ice
but patterns of behavior limit us. Rescuers,
out of body bags, switch to sleeping bags, who will help them?
Gallons of paint, spilled rainbows, symbol of hope,
my friends draw arches in the dirt to heal themselves.
The Pacific plate leaps ahead of the American plate`
in a slow race toward home—Alaska. Terremoto.
Like a war zone, as the landfill liquefies into jelly,
rubble from the 1906 quake rises to the surface
in a horrible resurrection
of chaos, a system of physics, wild and convoluted.
of chaos, a system of physics, wild and convoluted.
Parking garages squash
into cement pancakes. Apartments fall, card houses.
into cement pancakes. Apartments fall, card houses.
Already the dispossessed talk of rebuilding on the ruins.
Fissures in the streets boggles the mind.
In the time it took God to make the universe, the ballgame
is rescheduled. Disaster transcends the World Series.
When Gorbachev offers aid, many weep.
Fissures in the streets boggles the mind.
In the time it took God to make the universe, the ballgame
is rescheduled. Disaster transcends the World Series.
When Gorbachev offers aid, many weep.
It takes the heat of Chernobyl & the 25,000 dead of Armenia
to thaw the Cold War. Thousands homeless.
VP Quail smiles photogenically in the face of tragedy.
Bush calls up to say his presence would be a distraction,
then changes his mind. Though scientists claim there's no such thing
as earthquake weather, it's hot, still, like April 18, 1906.
We've become impatient with the notion of the unseen, the unexplainable.
Children are hearing things, closer to nature they feel it sooner.
With phone lines jammed, I don't even know if my mother is alive,
I get an obscene phone call. A media carnival descends upon us.
One more good aftershock and the newscastors would sink into the bay.
In a few million years, Los Angeles will be somewhere
off the Bering Straits. Hollywood, USSR.
An occupational hazard of living on the edge of the continent,
we're always waiting for the Big One to strike out.
Bush calls up to say his presence would be a distraction,
then changes his mind. Though scientists claim there's no such thing
as earthquake weather, it's hot, still, like April 18, 1906.
We've become impatient with the notion of the unseen, the unexplainable.
Children are hearing things, closer to nature they feel it sooner.
With phone lines jammed, I don't even know if my mother is alive,
I get an obscene phone call. A media carnival descends upon us.
One more good aftershock and the newscastors would sink into the bay.
In a few million years, Los Angeles will be somewhere
off the Bering Straits. Hollywood, USSR.
An occupational hazard of living on the edge of the continent,
we're always waiting for the Big One to strike out.
10/17/89
Forestville
Thursday, October 5, 1989
THE ANIMAL SORROW OF WOLVES
THE ANIMAL SORROW OF WOLVES
That philosophical understanding of carnage,
that concentration
of the species.
—Gerald Stern
It was not easy making friends with wolves.
I'd sit on a ladder by the wire-link fence,
careful not to make eye contact or they'd lunge—
their yellow eyes; calendulas eating the sun,
hot flickering grassfires and phosphorus.
I'd listen to them worry cow hocks (or was it
horse?)
across the stained plywood partition,
the bones echoing with a hollow thud.
Was it the slaughterhouse stench of dead meat
or the primal odor of concentrated wolf?
Full moons, they'd answer in chorus for unseen
kin—
ambulances, fire engines and police cars
the cubs knowing only the endless pacing of
caged life.
The man who kept wolves—the town dog catcher.
Late afternoons, I heard his woman sobbing and
crooning
like a sleepy child. Did she really come like
that?
I felt envy, slow to notice my lover's eyes had
turned
the color of Indian corn. I learned to sing
louder
and longer with each passing stranger
running a practiced hand along my flank
until I was wolf-mother beneath the fig tree
sucking a rivaling empire of boys in men's
bodies.
Sensitized by pain, I sang best, seeking asylum,
I studied the flight of vultures and despaired;
was the idea of love, a vulgar carcass of bees
and hornets,
romance, attainable as the horizon, or Mars?
Each moon, a new eye. I learned carnelian
hunger,
my spoor took on the scent of wolf
and I devoured the Möbius circle of desire.
It was never so bad or as good as this.
10/5/1989
10/5/1989
Thursday, September 28, 1989
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
The first hunters who crossed Siberia
survived winter's ancestors
because they wasted nothing—
something of the Inuit remains.
What do we know of Siberia?
We say Siberia, naming the nameless zone
between the taiga
and the tundra.
We say it because it conjures up the idea of
wind and snow
unfettered by man to come and go where it
pleases.
When we say Siberia the air fills with tundra
flowers
and we mean the Siberia of stunted pines
and caribou migrations, but it's also the
Siberia
of strip mines and nuclear physics.
We say it midsummer, under a curtain of fire,
where night never begins;
and in winter, where it never stops.
We say it to sustain us as the invisible wolf
testing the strength of double-paned glass
stares in from the pupiled eye of night.
We say Siberia, stretching out syllables
until it becomes the wind's voice.
Sigh-bier-ria.
We say it as a punishment to our children.
We will ship them off to Siberia.
Banishment is always another country.
We make jokes about it,
and so I touch your golden skin in summer,
how it radiates the sun
while mine is the white of winter.
In the land of exile,
the land of the long ruble,
of opportunists and political prisoners,
where does the Siberian tiger sleep now?
We say Siberia and know nothing about it.
You tell me someone has to be the first
to love across political boundaries
until nations put down their ideals.
There's little comfort in knowing tears or blood
are the same chemistry as their mother, the
ocean.
In Novosibirsk, scientists in white rooms
play nuclear physics with God—
like ours at White Sands and Alamagordo.
Something of the landscape must touch them
surely they dream?
Last night, the sky wore red
and I stood between two rainbows.
Prisms and physics could not explain away
refracted light.
There are those desperate enough to drink
perfume.
They must've pissed the very heart of summer
flowers into snow
only to go blind, was it worth it? Nosdrov'yeh,
a toast clawing olfactory nerves and tissueó
the period between midwinter and spring.
Asylum.
But you've been there too, a spy among inmates,
your drawings record far better than any camera
life within the walls of insanityówho's more
insane:
the Georgian man over and over again in pencil,
the scientists who turn their backs on the
earth,
or those who send the flower of their youth
to front lines to bathe in jellied gasoline
in the name of an idea?
We are all crazy.
It comes with the territory.
Did I tell you Solzhenitsyn lives in a fortress
of his own choosing, deep in the mountains of
Vermont?
It's the Gulag
all over again.
He brought his Siberian islands with him.
Dogs patrol the electric fence in regimented
intervals.
Stalin's been dead nearly as many years as we've
lived.
America is also an experiment,
an armed song singing itself
toward extinction like all the rest.
Yes, we are victims of historyó
fill the silos with grain.
But I touch your face,
my fingers memorize geography.
You ask, how does it feel to be living with
bears?
Everyone loses their teeth in Siberia
and you never met a woman before who bites.
I cannot forget your eyesóall that blue,
not of glaciers and ice but of the soft secret
heart of stone.
Translucence leashed and folded like linen
bedsheets.
Your hand reaches for the moon hidden beneath my
shirt,
seeking familiar patterns in a gesture that's
timeless.
Learning to live with the land is something the
Inuit knew
but even they've begun to turn their backs on
it.
We should be around the fire telling stories,
buried in thick furs, safe in each other's arms
but we're not dressed in skins.
I carry a bear's tooth in my pocket
and keep skulls outside my window, just in case.
We live on opposite sides of the earth,
lovers in exile, but love is like that.
We need visas and annulments.
By naming it, it's too late,
we're no longer in the country of origin.
Siberia is singing from the heart of deepest
night.
Small hooves pound in our chests.
We live on blubber,
savor fatty tissue and cannot sleep.
V'kusna ? Out of death comes life;
from life, death follows like wolves
trailing the caribou herd.
9/28/89
Friday, September 22, 1989
SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS
SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS
Тіні забутих предків — based on the 1964 film
by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov
Ivan fed Marichka guelder-rose berries.
The deer witnessed their love in the rain.
They cannot marry. Their families—enemies so long—
they've forgotten why. He promised to return in autumn.
In the mud: a horseshoe, a cowbell, a ram's horn.
A vee of sheep, like blazing light, entered the circle.
But winter came early. Low wind under the doors & incessant rain.
Ivan, gazing at a bright star, slept fitfully on the grass.
Beskid, why don't you marry? the wind asked the mountain.
Because the green field will not have me, said the mountain.
Time melted into the boundless expanse
when she came through the birches to find him —
and fell from such a height, the birds were jealous.
The hunters brought a bear down from the mountains.
A constellation hanging from a trapezoid of birch boughs.
When Ivan returned, the mute could tell him nothing.
Marichka, so young and so drowned. Shadows everywhere.
Torches along the river at night—venial stars and eyes of fish.
He followed her downriver on a raft. What else was there to do?
To be buried among birches in the Carpathians by a lover,
who buried the child in you, required a special kind of music.
Grave-digging, he became fascinated with the texture of earth.
Tamed by his grief, the deer came to listen.
His mother held an invisible axe to her heart.
Slender candles in the church — bent tapers of life's roads.
Don't blow out the horse fire, it has to go out by itself.
It's shameful what love has done to him, the villagers cried.
They made up songs about his life. The icons knew suffering joy.
The villagers gave him a burning crown of thorns, a lamb for warmth,
but temptation arrived in the shape of a woman on a white horse
who cast a shoe. As he bent to the pony, she lifted her red skirt.
His eyes, slow as a summer river, rose to her face, where east meets west.
She offered him an apple. Why not? he shrugged.
Harnessed together like common oxen, they began a new life.
But he broke her coral beads, thinking of Marichka,
another broken necklace, one summer among birches.
Yarrow and aster fell before his scythe; he cannot love his wife.
His thirst, so great he kissed the mirror of the river
where Marichka slept. The deer came to lick salt from her grave.
Even the wind knew something of her name.
So they blew away spirits of the dead — insistent candles.
The pine burst into flame, the shaman and the woman conspired,
their lips seeking another kind of secret. Sleeping with geomancy,
& wanting a child, she stood naked in his circle of sycamores.
Signs of earlier fires. Trinal jealousy. A nest of hoodies, young crows.
Who throws corn at horses stampeding into the forest so thick,
no crow can fly? Milk spills into the river by faith alone.
The ram is riding the horse. Crows fall from the sky.
On the tavern walls, pine boughs whispered a warning:
Ivan, Ivan — Marichka is in the river waiting, asking, when?
The shaman raised the ritual axe, there were no witnesses.
He staggered to her — a red wound. Her hands answered him, come.
Milk & blood spills into the river. Wash his body beneath the mountain.
Bury him in the field with coins, an axe, & the clothes of his youth.
At the wake, bagpipes skirled, the floorboards shook —
men grappling with women's skirts under cover of darkness.
The fallow green field raises her moist hips to meet him.
Тіні забутих предків — based on the 1964 film
by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov
Ivan fed Marichka guelder-rose berries.
The deer witnessed their love in the rain.
They cannot marry. Their families—enemies so long—
they've forgotten why. He promised to return in autumn.
In the mud: a horseshoe, a cowbell, a ram's horn.
A vee of sheep, like blazing light, entered the circle.
But winter came early. Low wind under the doors & incessant rain.
Ivan, gazing at a bright star, slept fitfully on the grass.
Beskid, why don't you marry? the wind asked the mountain.
Because the green field will not have me, said the mountain.
Time melted into the boundless expanse
when she came through the birches to find him —
and fell from such a height, the birds were jealous.
The hunters brought a bear down from the mountains.
A constellation hanging from a trapezoid of birch boughs.
When Ivan returned, the mute could tell him nothing.
Marichka, so young and so drowned. Shadows everywhere.
Torches along the river at night—venial stars and eyes of fish.
He followed her downriver on a raft. What else was there to do?
To be buried among birches in the Carpathians by a lover,
who buried the child in you, required a special kind of music.
Grave-digging, he became fascinated with the texture of earth.
Tamed by his grief, the deer came to listen.
His mother held an invisible axe to her heart.
Slender candles in the church — bent tapers of life's roads.
Don't blow out the horse fire, it has to go out by itself.
It's shameful what love has done to him, the villagers cried.
They made up songs about his life. The icons knew suffering joy.
The villagers gave him a burning crown of thorns, a lamb for warmth,
but temptation arrived in the shape of a woman on a white horse
who cast a shoe. As he bent to the pony, she lifted her red skirt.
His eyes, slow as a summer river, rose to her face, where east meets west.
She offered him an apple. Why not? he shrugged.
Harnessed together like common oxen, they began a new life.
But he broke her coral beads, thinking of Marichka,
another broken necklace, one summer among birches.
Yarrow and aster fell before his scythe; he cannot love his wife.
His thirst, so great he kissed the mirror of the river
where Marichka slept. The deer came to lick salt from her grave.
Even the wind knew something of her name.
So they blew away spirits of the dead — insistent candles.
The pine burst into flame, the shaman and the woman conspired,
their lips seeking another kind of secret. Sleeping with geomancy,
& wanting a child, she stood naked in his circle of sycamores.
Signs of earlier fires. Trinal jealousy. A nest of hoodies, young crows.
Who throws corn at horses stampeding into the forest so thick,
no crow can fly? Milk spills into the river by faith alone.
The ram is riding the horse. Crows fall from the sky.
On the tavern walls, pine boughs whispered a warning:
Ivan, Ivan — Marichka is in the river waiting, asking, when?
The shaman raised the ritual axe, there were no witnesses.
He staggered to her — a red wound. Her hands answered him, come.
Milk & blood spills into the river. Wash his body beneath the mountain.
Bury him in the field with coins, an axe, & the clothes of his youth.
At the wake, bagpipes skirled, the floorboards shook —
men grappling with women's skirts under cover of darkness.
The fallow green field raises her moist hips to meet him.
9/22/1989
Thursday, September 21, 1989
Wednesday, September 20, 1989
Monday, September 18, 1989
TALKING LEAVES
TALKING LEAVES
Trabaja el mar en mi silencio.
—Pablo Neruda
We watch the sky for clues.
Birds proclaim unchartered territories.
A certain slant of sunlight grows wings.
Keepers of the circle, we sit on a blanket,
listen to translations of wind in the sycamores;
palisades summer grass cicada song
and pass the drum. Someone hands me a piece of paper.
The source of my freedom is what I fear most.
Bluejays argue, scissor-sharp, which direction to fly.
Words fall from the mouths of bees,
deer hooves rattle—first breath or final inspiration?
It no longer matters what we believe in. It happens anyway.
Watermelon rind on the blanket—not the marriage blanket
where he undid me with promises under the stars of Chiapas
only to bury a child's eyes beneath the stones of Tikal.
From inside the drum of my heart I howled
under the solstice moon rising over Mt. St. Helena
and from deep canyons coyotes answered. What more do I want?
I wear trophies of where we've been:
Baja, Peru, the Galapagos. An equator of pain visible
to the naked eye takes on the green form of air above the pond.
I struggle for balance, drawn to obsession like fire to air,
and learn first-hand the meaning of words: betrayal, abandonment, she.
She stalks up the path; a pathetic fish skewered to her stick.
Taking my man wasn't enough, she had to kill the sunfish too;
not to eat it but to prove some senseless notion to herself—
because it was alive, an irridescent trophy. A bauble.
Its carnal colors bleed into the sky; drab corpse forgotten.
He will comfort her, call her a brave hunter.
They will build shining deceptions; whatever it takes.
Mirate, I hiss at her. Look at yourself.
The cardinal rule of the hunter: eat what you kill.
He devoured me clean down to gleaming bone.
The poets cloak me with feathers and shake the gourd;
they say the Tarot gave her Death mounted on a white horse.
I dream the medicine man uncovers a word on the photo—
heiau, and he asks me for silver coins to bury it with.
For the grandfathers, for your vision, he says.
On a yarrow stick, an "i," the letter of death
becomes a plumed serpent, Quetzocoatl.
He smudges me with wild tobacco smoke and sage,
kisses me, says, you will find what you seek.
I remember how it felt on the outside:
this circle becomes a source of acceptance.
I am the drum, I learn the drumsong.
We are standing on ceremonial ground.
A wobbly prayer lifts up, takes flight
across the valley. Heiau he way,
he noni noni ne he, heiau he way.
Oh!
9/18/89
Trabaja el mar en mi silencio.
—Pablo Neruda
We watch the sky for clues.
Birds proclaim unchartered territories.
A certain slant of sunlight grows wings.
Keepers of the circle, we sit on a blanket,
listen to translations of wind in the sycamores;
palisades summer grass cicada song
and pass the drum. Someone hands me a piece of paper.
The source of my freedom is what I fear most.
Bluejays argue, scissor-sharp, which direction to fly.
Words fall from the mouths of bees,
deer hooves rattle—first breath or final inspiration?
It no longer matters what we believe in. It happens anyway.
Watermelon rind on the blanket—not the marriage blanket
where he undid me with promises under the stars of Chiapas
only to bury a child's eyes beneath the stones of Tikal.
From inside the drum of my heart I howled
under the solstice moon rising over Mt. St. Helena
and from deep canyons coyotes answered. What more do I want?
I wear trophies of where we've been:
Baja, Peru, the Galapagos. An equator of pain visible
to the naked eye takes on the green form of air above the pond.
I struggle for balance, drawn to obsession like fire to air,
and learn first-hand the meaning of words: betrayal, abandonment, she.
She stalks up the path; a pathetic fish skewered to her stick.
Taking my man wasn't enough, she had to kill the sunfish too;
not to eat it but to prove some senseless notion to herself—
because it was alive, an irridescent trophy. A bauble.
Its carnal colors bleed into the sky; drab corpse forgotten.
He will comfort her, call her a brave hunter.
They will build shining deceptions; whatever it takes.
Mirate, I hiss at her. Look at yourself.
The cardinal rule of the hunter: eat what you kill.
He devoured me clean down to gleaming bone.
The poets cloak me with feathers and shake the gourd;
they say the Tarot gave her Death mounted on a white horse.
I dream the medicine man uncovers a word on the photo—
heiau, and he asks me for silver coins to bury it with.
For the grandfathers, for your vision, he says.
On a yarrow stick, an "i," the letter of death
becomes a plumed serpent, Quetzocoatl.
He smudges me with wild tobacco smoke and sage,
kisses me, says, you will find what you seek.
I remember how it felt on the outside:
this circle becomes a source of acceptance.
I am the drum, I learn the drumsong.
We are standing on ceremonial ground.
A wobbly prayer lifts up, takes flight
across the valley. Heiau he way,
he noni noni ne he, heiau he way.
Oh!
9/18/89
EURASIA IN YOUR EYES
EURASIA IN YOUR EYES
Searching for true east, a marriage,
I rub bergamot between my breasts
and the quiet rage of Eurasia arises
in you but Easter slipped from my legs
like a saber in all its crimson misery.
Where have you been all my life? we ask.
Blame this mating on the aroma of asters,
a midnight river teasing us,
or your mother's birthday vodka.
The idea undoes us like trousers,
(I hand them to you like a dutiful wife,
pants, I say, grabbing your cock,
your breast, so like a girl's, you answer)
and feathered with the august details
of a continent or two in the way,
there is time enough for remorse.
The child within cannot forget the mystery
of Siberian tigers who roam the mist
between the taiga and the tundra,
the extinction of the world in their settling tracks.
Our eyes measure the barometer of true east
and Tatar ponies from the steppes
plunder our dreams.
plunder our dreams.
A morgue in the place of memory,
was it Poland or Armenia?
The even meter of soldier's feet urges
and arouses (ergot on rye, rarest of serums)
the idea of homeland.
The Ukrainian mortuary of Bibi Yar.
The Ukrainian mortuary of Bibi Yar.
Is it better to kill a son like Taras Bulba?
Sorry tears are of little use to the iris then.
What beast beats the tambour making us merry?
What year begat this tribe of dancing bears
under starry mirages of usury and augery?
Is it better to marry mid-winter in a yurt
beneath meteor showers when the magi comes?
Maybe tremors have little to do with the magus
who is restorer of rumors and of greater truths.
The irate grebes and murres
master the river and the marsh
with indifferent but equal tongues.
9/18/89
Thursday, August 31, 1989
Thursday, August 17, 1989
ECLIPSE OVER KIEV, 8/17/89
ECLIPSE OVER KIEV, 8/17/89 *
Where the darkness of the silent caves
Is lovelier than the royal halls.
Your tongue will lead you to Kiev, someone says.
The golden domes and crosses of Sofiski Sobor
have conversed with the stars for a millennia.
Gutted Uspensky Sobor, a reminder of faith and betrayal.
The tower sank then sprang out of the earth in a single night.
In Pecherskaya Lavra, beneath cobbled streets,
mummified monks sleep in the Near and Far Caves.
Candles in the dark. We carry the moon underground.
After a week of rain, the cornice of the main post office
gave up the fight with gravity and slipped off--
the way my grandmother did, talking of hedgehogs
loose in the living room again. A premonition of darkness
I don't understand. Eleven people killed. Withered roses
and gladioli strung up against the pale fence.
At the ruins of the Golden Gate, a crowd gathers
to remember the place where they died.
We run alongside the Kiev-Moscow train saying goodbye.
I send messages home, I'm staying on. Kopeks in my pocket.
Sasha and Jessica are in love. She is leaving with the other students.
This train weaves a thread across the green steppes to San Francisco.
Sasha and I hold hands and walk back to the waiting bus.
When he cries, I tell him this is how friendship begins
between our two countries, when people fall in love.
He says, I will be a statue of Buddha with candles in each hand,
will you take me back to the States with you, then?
I tell him, I will roll you up in a fine persian carpet.
Grisha wants to know how to spell courage. A capitalist at heart,
he dreams of becoming president of Chrysler Corporation.
He asks, what is a four letter word for people without courage?
I don't know. I hear the rain, common thief of the night.
Leaving Kiev under a red moon, the bus driver admonishes
it is unlucky to whistle indoors, it brings bad luck.
My friend makes me tea from the wild grasses of the Caucuses.
It's a Russian tradition to talk about life and politics
in the kitchen late at night, he says, we are victims of historyó
first to suffer before nations give up their borders. He says
I am a man who is dreamless. But I saw it beginning in his eyes.
I tell him he is my lips and ears, he makes no comment.
None is necessary. I'm not too sure where home is.
I find a bear's tooth buried in the river bank
the color of the eclipse moon in the dark pocket of night,
and cannot shake the fallen cornices of Kiev from my mind,
dreaming of home, a nameless disaster, white walls with oak borders.
I adjust two snakes around his neck, then pin on the crushed red rose.
The endless Ukraine. I am between worlds listening to languages
I don't understand. Even the ground is quaking.
* Written exactly two months before the San Francisco earthquake.
1992 First Leaves
1990 Poetry USA, fall issue
Where the darkness of the silent caves
Is lovelier than the royal halls.
Your tongue will lead you to Kiev, someone says.
The golden domes and crosses of Sofiski Sobor
have conversed with the stars for a millennia.
Gutted Uspensky Sobor, a reminder of faith and betrayal.
The tower sank then sprang out of the earth in a single night.
In Pecherskaya Lavra, beneath cobbled streets,
mummified monks sleep in the Near and Far Caves.
Candles in the dark. We carry the moon underground.
After a week of rain, the cornice of the main post office
gave up the fight with gravity and slipped off--
the way my grandmother did, talking of hedgehogs
loose in the living room again. A premonition of darkness
I don't understand. Eleven people killed. Withered roses
and gladioli strung up against the pale fence.
At the ruins of the Golden Gate, a crowd gathers
to remember the place where they died.
We run alongside the Kiev-Moscow train saying goodbye.
I send messages home, I'm staying on. Kopeks in my pocket.
Sasha and Jessica are in love. She is leaving with the other students.
This train weaves a thread across the green steppes to San Francisco.
Sasha and I hold hands and walk back to the waiting bus.
When he cries, I tell him this is how friendship begins
between our two countries, when people fall in love.
He says, I will be a statue of Buddha with candles in each hand,
will you take me back to the States with you, then?
I tell him, I will roll you up in a fine persian carpet.
Grisha wants to know how to spell courage. A capitalist at heart,
he dreams of becoming president of Chrysler Corporation.
He asks, what is a four letter word for people without courage?
I don't know. I hear the rain, common thief of the night.
Leaving Kiev under a red moon, the bus driver admonishes
it is unlucky to whistle indoors, it brings bad luck.
My friend makes me tea from the wild grasses of the Caucuses.
It's a Russian tradition to talk about life and politics
in the kitchen late at night, he says, we are victims of historyó
first to suffer before nations give up their borders. He says
I am a man who is dreamless. But I saw it beginning in his eyes.
I tell him he is my lips and ears, he makes no comment.
None is necessary. I'm not too sure where home is.
I find a bear's tooth buried in the river bank
the color of the eclipse moon in the dark pocket of night,
and cannot shake the fallen cornices of Kiev from my mind,
dreaming of home, a nameless disaster, white walls with oak borders.
I adjust two snakes around his neck, then pin on the crushed red rose.
The endless Ukraine. I am between worlds listening to languages
I don't understand. Even the ground is quaking.
* Written exactly two months before the San Francisco earthquake.
1992 First Leaves
1990 Poetry USA, fall issue
Thursday, August 10, 1989
ROAD TO UMAN
ROAD TO UMAN
I'm back in the USSR
listening to the Beatles sing,
Money Can't Buy Me Love.
White geese surround the red car in the rain.
Wild chickory blooms by the roadside
gravemarkers, marigolds, a child dead.
Casual flocks of pigeons, grace notes on the wires.
An old woman who sells apples from a bucket
waiting for two Sundays to come together,
contemplates the ground outside her yard.
Why are the chickens here in such a hurry?
Driving anywhere in the Ukraine
it's always the same landscape.
Agrarian and modern worlds collide.
At every battle site, Soviet tanks,
grim reminders of the war; any war.
Perhaps it's best this way
precisely because it continues to remind us
everything is a matter of degree.
We talk about what is possible in life
and of the Cold War, asking each other
what was it all about anyway?
Stalin has been dead a long time.
Written on the soles of my shoes:
Make peace not war, make love not war.
Every step I take is a prayer wheel.
Storks continue to build nests on thatched roofs.
8/10/89
I'm back in the USSR
listening to the Beatles sing,
Money Can't Buy Me Love.
White geese surround the red car in the rain.
Wild chickory blooms by the roadside
gravemarkers, marigolds, a child dead.
Casual flocks of pigeons, grace notes on the wires.
An old woman who sells apples from a bucket
waiting for two Sundays to come together,
contemplates the ground outside her yard.
Why are the chickens here in such a hurry?
Driving anywhere in the Ukraine
it's always the same landscape.
Agrarian and modern worlds collide.
At every battle site, Soviet tanks,
grim reminders of the war; any war.
Perhaps it's best this way
precisely because it continues to remind us
everything is a matter of degree.
We talk about what is possible in life
and of the Cold War, asking each other
what was it all about anyway?
Stalin has been dead a long time.
Written on the soles of my shoes:
Make peace not war, make love not war.
Every step I take is a prayer wheel.
Storks continue to build nests on thatched roofs.
8/10/89
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