This life that I have built above her grave.
A midnight voice —
A shard of ice
That would not melt
And would not yield.
A brand, a scar that would not fade.
A whetstone keeping sharp the blade
That, poised to heed the sudden call,
Presses its edge against my soul.
The whistle of a faraway train
Blows and blows in the winter night,
Singing a wild song of speed and distance,
Of the relentless motion of a beam of light
Slicing through the darkness,
Of a darkness that you cannot outrun
Even at the speed of light.
Black sky.
Silver sliver.
Soft air.
Wind-shiver.
Sleeping banks.
Wakeful river.
Still rock.
Skipping stone.
By myself.
Not alone.
Our silences
Stack one inside another
Like matryoshka dolls.
Yesterday’s unsaid words
Fit into the hollows
Of today’s evasions.
And they, in turn,
Will fill tomorrow’s shell.
Day after day,
The lacquered face
Appears the same —
Round, rosy-cheeked
And smiling brightly.
Yet larger,
Each time larger
Than before.
It has no name, this enchanted land.
At the edge of pale water on the silver sand
My feet do not leave any traces.
The river current runs cold and deep.
On the mirrored surface white lilies sleep.
My eyes meet no reflection.
Eternal spring blooms on silent trees,
Amber honey is studded with golden bees.
I feel neither sting nor sweetness.
Bronze lions with eyes made of emerald glass
Rest with marble lambs in the sunlit grass.
I pass like a shadow between them
My family tree has been replanted
Too many times.
The bark is thick with scars
From all the truths professed, attacked, recanted,
The proclamations nailed to our limbs,
The warring symbols carved
Into our living hides.
Too many times
We have been broken jagged,
Swept by floods,
Then worn back down to smoothness
By the tides
Of moon-mad salt and blood.
Too many times, too many times.
Too many times.
St Petersburg, Russia
This is not nostalgia.
My home is here, not there.
It is just that I was born in that city.
My memory still flows
Through the river delta
Where the sky is mirrored
Within the slow streams.
There is no line that separates
Below from above —
All is one shimmering whole.
In the opalescent air of white nights
The bridges open
To let tall ships come in.
Tall ships —
The welded steel of my own time,
The ghostly planks and sailcloth
Of distant centuries —
Glide past the curving granite
Of the embankments.
The bridges raise
The fretwork of their railings.
