4 a.m., May 3…….
Looking up from reading Wolf Willow
…the clock quietly ticking…
suddenly I’m not alone in the cool
lamplit room:
Stegner is sitting there in the squeaking rocker,
rocking slowly, by the cold wood stove.
He says nothing, just a wry smile,
a knowing look, deeper
than his starry Manitoba sky.
Facing each other in old worn chairs,
Beston and Borland muse about New England,
blue blizzards and lilacs, blowing
endless seasons across the ancient glacial hills;
how gold sunlight shimmers the steep sand,
the white sea birds, cold blue waters
sparkling, forever breaking, shaping
the outermost Cape.
At the black window, holding a red and silver
balalaika, Pasternak stands vigilant
in an embroidered peasant shirt, looking out
into tall bare birches, cold spring stars.
He turns to me with that perennial question
on his raw-boned Russian face, revealing
the deep pathos of shattered ideals,
of war, and loss.
Suddenly Akhmatova blows in from the night,
chilled, scented with passion and dried perfume,
broken loves like tender blossoms,
drops of blood on late spring snow ….
And over in the shadows sits
dark-eyed Jane Kenyon: her fingers resting
from gardening, from making luminescent words.
She puts down her half-empty glass of red wine
and crumbles old newspapers with split kindling.
Her voice is rich with flowers, and the sorrow
of killing frost, saying to the rest of us
“someone needs to build a fire”.
*
*
–Quilla
April Fourteenth, ‘Already the Apple Blooms’
*
*
*
*
A cloudy April Morning, reading Pasternak. Warm spring wind, just a few days and already, apple petals are fluttering down. The exquisite fragrance of the orchard blows away, like soft balalaika tunes. Another year’s display of blossoming fruit trees, is done. Hard late frost last night killed many blooms —all the apples not to be.
Open windows, wind-chimes jangle: raucous music fills the winter rooms with spring. A soft breeze tumbles the white petals across our shadowed paths almost un-noticed—like pieces of our private griefs the petals hurry, only to fade into the dark thawed ground. Water lifts, blows softly from the fountain, dries quickly on the garden stones.
This morning early I opened an old book of Russian poems—gift from a dear friend eighteen years ago. The pages smell like libraries in winter. Long-dead words come back to life, across the snowy steppes of imagination, calling to us on the wide tundra of time, in this pungent steam of black, morning tea.
Passioned words of love—like fallen lace dropped shameless to our ankles, to the floor. And words of war—our righteous partisan blood flows out like dreams, on muddy boots and ice. Meanwhile commanders in warm rooms excuse the waste of countless lives.
And for what worthy prize?–incomprehensible pain, and loss. Century after century justifying, we deny our deeper wounds, and needs. Still thinking that winning on our terms is always the most important thing.
But we sometimes wonder: what those millions (and we, as nations, as individuals) might have become, had they lived?
I look outside: a few grey deer walk out of the winter woods like hungry phantoms. Eyes watching, ears twitching furtively for the enemy, they chew the tender orchard leaves. They live one day at a time, eating only what they need.
*
*
–Quilla
Ruach 333, by Quilla 