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Silk Yellow and heavy, one last ray poured . Into a fresh bouquet of dahlias. And hardened there. Anna Akhmatova I chose the flowers quickly the day I came to see you home from hospital, your baby on your breast, and I waited downstairs until I was asked for. I didn’t wish to see you like that, wearied, torn, your clothes disarrayed as though a storm swept through and you—and this—remained. Arriving in the room, I saw from a distant door I once had called my own, you there in the corner far away and small. I thought to see, when my eyes sharpened in the window light shutting out all I couldn’t take, the father, lounging in silk. He slept on in the next room and you were as you were. For you waiting in my arms as if I carried the cut-down, tendered blooms across a rain swell or a wave washed ashore from wherever the unwanted go or come back from, the vivid, foolish, clown-faced daisies, the coarse, lumescent, faintly ghoulish metallic petals of the eucalyptus. Camp Under the cloud pierced moon through bare woods along a frozen stream, cold as I am and heartsick for my lost ones, aware that I had saved myself from going out like a flame in the burning chill of the cold snow falling conscious of the stiff guns and warm uniforms with my thin frame whittled down to driftwood and knowing I had betrayed more than one was shoved and did stumble cast no shadow finding that the time had come to worship servile, triumphant death It is the flu I waken from the sheets soaked fever broken alone like a wish you can’t take back Steppe You remember loving people — uncles who were fathers’ friends, an aunt who came each day with bread and cookies, walking her crooked step past the bakery. You were her brother’s child and your mother his widow. That step of hers in black shoes. A bird like woman, her knobbed hands and black eyes, her hair still black, how brightly she loved you, in place of your father, so you wouldn’t know he was gone. You can love someone this way when you don’t expect anything in return. Don’t call it a virtue though. Grief powers it the way a generating station lights a town in the remote cold. The Snow Now they’re collecting the snow we awaited so expectantly and for which we have only one word. Here we do not say snow before nightfall, wet snow of rush hour, snow like new dimes or snakes on a dry highway, snow like cake rising on the branch, unforgivable spring snow burning magnolia blossoms, shivering in the throat of a crocus, snow that hurts the eyes, that makes you want to turn away, snow that falls on the tongue of the ocean, snow that squeaks, snow that whispers, that no longer stirs the limbs of lovers, snow of parting falling on two, one lonely and one in love with snow, crazy snow circling around like a father who can’t find his child, that makes the night too bright to sleep; inconsolable snow that falls upon a widow’s veil and melts as she walks from the garden of stone, snow that makes the night a negative, snow on her already purchased plot, snow in the grove of flameless cedars. One kind of snow to be dispensed with the day after. |
| © Copyright Steven Schreiner |
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