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RUSSIAN DREAMS From my father I learned that to be part of the intelligentsia - he pronounced it with a hard g, not the soft sound in angels - meant that always in your house there must be room for friends. And they might stay all evening, long memorable evenings. At the table everyone talking at once, squares of cake, glasses of tea, laughter, endless argument. Not that my father was ever part of this - as I see him he stands to one side, an impresario who holds back a great curtain, introducing us to an exile's dreams of friendship-amplitude. LETTER TO TOLSTOY I keep getting involved in Russian history, implicated in its stories. Right now I have to know do you have one hero who commits adultery so that his life declines, nothing prospers, while his unlovely wife remains constant and he and the arrogant, daring, completely worthless woman he loves are pitched outside the circle? What if there is no returning, the woman being lost and no way out of the nineteenth century and he, beyond self-forgiveness, sees only wheels? I ask because I am advised to cut my losses. EARS OF WHEAT When the wind blows, the whole field turns and the wheat bends in one direction, long arrows of wheat - War seemed to come from the north, and with it the occupying army: I remember, I was little then, the officers liked our house. They were good to us, they gave us one room. I remember once I was very sick and one of the officers brought me an orange. It was the first orange I had ever seen - My mother's first war and nothing she saw after would bear that name - as if she were marked by one man, her original lover. Is it my war? What is my part in this? EXPLANATION OF WAR Now there should be nothing green, nothing alive. We're in a field that should not flower yet still a sun, still a moon, the stars as small slashes - I turn to my daughter but cannot explain this field, golden in a time of war. |
| © Copyright Sylvia Moss |
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