A wandering tree (poem-ish)
Category: Writing and Poetry

Was there a face in the whirling wood
or a knot in the wick of a weeping candle?
To whom did the words belong,  to the clinging bush,
or to the wind, its adversary?

When I leaped down the hill like mountain goat,
were the kinnikinnick berries full of eyes?
Did you sense me searching for you,
up-ending lichen-scarred rocks?

When my eyes closed, the leaves were green;
I awoke to autumn's flicker-dance.
Was it the thought of your shadow
that brought me back to breath?

That plunge into the snow-melt summit lake,
the flat-bottom smooth stones and burning gasp,
were they decreed, that my skin might unfold,
like a curl of birch bark, to caress your hand?

6:01 AM - 9 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

The problem with Rada
Current mood: quixotic
Category: Writing and Poetry

The couch submitted to Rada's weight with a only small squeak of protest. Rada slid back onto its cushions and raised her left leg, bent it at the knee and leaned on her right elbow.

The painting instructor glanced over at Rada and nodded. "That's fine for now, we'll try another position later," he said.

The students lifted their charcoal pencils, and commenced scratching and scribbling. All of the eyes in the room concentrated on the woman on the couch. Rada flowed into the idea of being a perfect example of the feminine form, and the subject of their sketches. It amused her, that her figure would be featured centrally in all of their notebooks, and perhaps even in some of their fantasies.

Behind half-closed eyelids, Rada peeped at the group of students, and decided that they were more naked than she. While they stared, she imagined their thoughts laid bare, and she sensed the power she had over them.

What had David said to her after class last winter, when they had stepped out into the dark and he had held her arm, ostensibly so that she would not slip on the ice-- he had tried to kiss her, gushing, "You are a goddess." A ripple of worry passed over Rada's chalk-white forehead. She laughed, and said, "Call me Domnitza." She let him squish his lips onto hers, but she did not register any sensation of response.

Back at the dorm, Rada stood in the kitchen and watched her room-mates eat. She enjoyed tormenting herself in this way. She noted the brutality of the can openers biting into the lids of tin cans, the sighs of the bottles and jars being opened. Worst of all were the plastic packages. It was necessary to witness more than one layer being forced to give up its secrets, each wrapper signifying terror nested within fear.

She draped her arm over the back of a chair and inspected her wrist, upon which a few red bumps had appeared. Wool. She must remember not to wear that sweater. She waited until one of her room-mates coaxed, "Eat, something, Rada, please eat!"

That was her cue to begin picking, delicately, at a plate of spinach, while her house-mates clucked sympathetically at her bony arms and told her to eat some more.

She tasted the chlorine in a sip of water. Did the others around the table know, she wondered, that a frog wouldn't be able to survive in this water.

Rada looked at the plush carpet, which stretched from wall to wall, and thought of the lawn outside as just a continuation of that uniformity, and then, further on, the asphalt, that asphyxiated the road beneath it, but allowed the riders of vehicles to pass over in comfort. 

The Road, she thought. It was time for her to move on, to attempt an escape from the tyranny of all of this comfort, which held her in its inexorable grip. Her response to the sensation of comfort, was to exaggerate her own fragility, and to present herself as a crystal ornament that could break at any moment.

She set the almost untouched plated of greens in the sink, and walked back to the bedroom. The suitcase was only half-way unpacked. She wondered if she should bring the wedding portrait of Conrad and herself, or if she should leave it for her room-mates. She decided that it would be amusing to compare the likeness of herself with the efforts of future art students, so she shoved it into the suitcase, scowling at Conrad's face as she did so.

Rada touched the tiny soap-stone sculpture of her own headless torso. She had sculpted it herself, from a photograph, the only one of her pieces of which she approved. One day, she wanted to re-create it, life size, in marble or bronze.

She sat on the floor, cross-legged, and ignored the grumbling of her stomach, thinking instead of her next destination. She could already see herself half-way across the country, sitting in another classroom, posing languidly, au naturale. Being bored by more young men who would paw at her, murmuring, "Domnitza."

Maybe what was really wrong with Rada, was that she had found no one she would die for, except her own self. She had not even been able to provoke anyone enough to kill her. The fire in her marrow, she mused, was futility, but she would let it burn until it extinguished itself. And even that  seemed to be taking a much longer time, and to be a more tedious process, than she had previously suspected.

Rada closed the suitcase, savoring the clank of each latch as it clicked shut.

8:20 AM - 25 Comments - 36 Kudos - Add Comment

How Baranovsky Saved St. Basil’s (prose)
Current mood: cerrated
Category: cerrated Writing and Poetry

Varya pointed at three bundles of fresh kindza (cilantro), dill, and parsley, tied neatly at the stems by black threads.

"Eti," she announced to the herb-seller, who squinted indifferently up at Varya from behind a wooden crate, and handed the woman a few rubles. She and I had just emerged from Taganskaya Station, and now our plan was to make a pot of fasting borsch.

When we returned to the apartment, I tried to imitate Varya's potato-peeling technique. I soon realized that my hostess could peel at a speed perhaps three times faster than my fumblings with the dull paring knife. Thin slices of onions and carrots already sizzled in the pan; Varya poured a kettle full of water into the mixture, and threw a handful of salt into the pot.

"Tomorrow I will take you to St. Basil's Cathedral," she said, scrubbing off a cutting board above the enameled sink. "Because I was educated as an architect, I know a story about that church that you may have never heard. During the time of Stalin, many Soviet architects considered it to be impractical, too whimsical, even an eyesore in the Kremlin, so they wanted to blow it up—which, after the revolution, was the fate of so many of the churches in this city, which used to be called 'golden-crowned', because of all of the gilded church domes..."

Purple juice flowed from the grater, Varya's fingers looked almost bloody from the beets she was grating.

"One of the architects, whose last name was Baranovsky, protested against the plans of the rest of the group, by locking himself up in the cathedral. 'If you destroy it,' he told them, 'then you must blow me up, too.' Somehow this delayed the planned demolition, and then a "word" came from higher authorities, to leave the cathedral alone. One of Baranovsky's pupils told me this story."

Varya dropped crushed garlic into the simmering pot, and then we finished off the soup with minced herbs. Though outside the autumn frosts had already begun, the air in the kitchen, at least, was infused with the scent of a garden at the height of summer.

12:46 AM - 14 Comments - 28 Kudos - Add Comment

Imprimatura (experimental poem)
Current mood: luminous
Category: Writing and Poetry

Imprimatura is the classical term for a semi transparent or transparent color layer used to create a toned ground for a painting. It literally means "what goes before first". Imprimatura acts as a harmonizing element for all upper color layers if they are laid according to the laws of the classical technique allowing the imprimatura to show through in certain places. 

It is conceived as a vision unseen.

It is a shadow swath of bright brush
across a canvas stretch,
lamp black and ochre
swept from pear-wood …

          a sketch obscured 
          by imprimatura

Linseed and oil of lavender, 

          patience feeds on faith,
          and lets it dry cross-wise

burnt umber
curlicues,

         errors excised by
         merciless knife-scrapings

leaner layer to fatter,

         a dark that is almost the
         death of hope

Dead grey penumbra,

        a film of mystery,
        breath of turpentine

stroke after smoothing
stroke of miniver,

         with persistence 
         flesh appears

a priming of Prussian blue,
madder-lake deep,
a touch of cinnabar
in the seventh wave,

let all of this light
be sealed by olifa;

          It is, finally, 
          recognition;

          Our eyes, pupils
          of reverence,

          meet in a moment of 
          Revelation ...

6:33 PM - 63 Comments - 72 Kudos - Add Comment

Folk Fusion, Playing at the Cosmos Hotel (prose)
Current mood: thankful
Category: Writing and Poetry

By the way, Happy Father's Day to all of the fathers out there ...
this blog post is unrelated, but just for fun, more of my reminiscing stuff ... love to you all ...

If you want to read a "real" Father's day blog, check out Elke's latest, it's extremely moving: Father's Day  .

Sometimes a translator gets emotionally involved
Current mood: awake
Category: Writing and Poetry

"They are watching from the clouds,
As you are bowing before the yoke of idiots,
Either you drink up and grieve,
Or you hunger in silence,
Or pray."

--Igor Tal'kov

It was Tanya's voice, of course, on the phone,
(who else would call at that hour
and blast the music of Tal'kov into the receiver)
and who else but I would understand …

"He got his green card, thanks for your help…"
That was her excuse for calling me
but what she really wanted to say
was: "I have been redeemed through this …"

I know her woman-self, her silent burden,
the ache that never leaves, the forbidden
mention of the ones who were lost, just like Tal'kov,
the men she could not save...

We indulged in a musical communion.
Igor, what is this hold you have over us,
this inexorable nostalgia that pulls us
and out of one self into another -- ?

Once I lived in another world,
waiting for a permanent resident card,
don't ask me about the price I paid,
I won't ask about the price you paid for yours.

"Tomorrow, I'll get on another train,
but I know for a fact that I'll return,
even after a hundred centuries,
to a country, not of fools, but of geniuses,
and having fought the battle,
I will arise and sing,
on the first birthday of a country
that has returned from the war."

I dedicate this ramble
to those who remember that song,
because what it means to all of us,
who lived and sang it, is not translatable.

Currently listening : Lirika. Igor Talkov [2CD] By Igor Talkov

12:06 PM - 28 Comments - 38 Kudos - Add Comment

When summer creeps up the mountains
Current mood: adventurous
Category: Writing and Poetry

like a bark beetle in a spruce glade --

it's a lazy float-plane dringle of a day,
sunny side up after gloom-drab,
it's a sit and gloat in the grass,
positioned as a barefoot spider stage,

a chance to count the soundscapes, assess
a simmering sensual hoard
of cheery-ee nesting trills,
staccato basketball bounces,
voracious vehicles on the prowl,
shoosh-shush of poplar leaves...

a share-the-noon with the first wild rose
and the fireweed buds
and the stringy swish of bluegrass,
eyes lost in emerald facets between
veins on the backside of a birch leaf,

there's no deserving this cacophony of bliss...
but when a red-black ant scurries across the page,
pen and fingers pause,
and yield
to oncoming
traffic.

this one is raspberry leaves and a telephone pole, but you get the idea ... : )

5:42 PM - 40 Comments - 48 Kudos - Add Comment

Mosaica Leningrada (long-ish- prose)
Current mood: thankful
Category: Writing and Poetry

Two hundred ninety eight, two hundred ninety nine, three hundred ... I lost count, but somehow clacking one foot up, the other down, we had reached the apex of a stone spiral, Vera and I. We'd survived the night train to Leningrad, by early morning she'd already marched me into the Russian Museum, and now we were passing through this mammoth monstrosity, Isaakovsky Sobor.

"Look," said Verochka, "See how the whole city unfolds around us." Clammy as the drab wind was that clung to my cheeks, the animation in Vera's eyes breathed life into my tired frame, and I sighed at the panoramic view of her native city. Click-click, duty-bound, the camera obeyed my touch. 

True to her side job as a museum guide, Vera had been thorough in her description of the construction of St. Isaac's. Whole pine forests had been hewn down, she said, coated with tar, then sunk into the Neva swamp to hold the massive porticos, the 114-ton red granite columns, the stone iconastases, the marble floors, the bas-reliefs, malachite masterpieces, and fantastical Westernized sculptures. Catherine the Great, obsessed with creating a memorial for Peter the Great, commissioned the 112 Corinthian columns which were set on the remains of hundreds of serfs who worked 15-hour days, hauling the stones, and fell, exhausted, from the scaffolding to their death. Even more died inhaling mercury fumes during the process of coating the dome with 100 kg of pure gold. Never had I seen such an assemblage of living stone shoved into the sky, framed by red-granite ribs. I was glad that my second trip on those stairs, involved a downward incline.

The gold letters mounted at the front of Kazansky Cathedral across the way announced: The Museum of Religion and Atheism. Snowdrifts had crept up onto its stone steps. "That place is closed," said Vera. Because she was very devout, she could not speak of the place without a shudder. We turned our backs on it and made our way down Nevsky Prospekt.

In her bird-like way, Vera flitted behind a wooden door, then beckoned. I looked up and saw row upon row of rickety board-scaffolding above our heads, outside another stone church, and followed her inside.

"Here is a special treat," she said. "Since I am an architect, the restorators have allowed us to come in here and watch them work. This place is called Spas na Krovi, The Savior on the Blood, because it was built where the emperor was assassinated."

The hunks of rock at Isaakovsky had dwarfed my puny comprehension. But in this church, which Vera said had been used as a warehouse for a long time under communism, my awe was on a different scale: the walls, floor to ceiling, were encrusted with mosaics full of thousands of precious and semiprecious stones. Giddied fantastical jewel-tones, swathed in canvas, all of the holes and chinks in the damaged images were being filled in and restored, bit by patient bit. I stood and watched a cavern-eyed young man, draped in a dark blue canvas work shirt, while he mixed putty and sorted a pile of colored stone chips. Vera whispered to him, and he turned and poured a few into her waiting hand. She gave them to me, and I fingered them. Blue: lapis. Red. Must be carnelian. Green. Malachite? I thanked him and zipped them into my purse.

(Above, the now-restored mosaics in the Church of the Savior on the Blood.)

We spent the night in Vera's uncle's apartment on the outskirts of Leningrad, or Piter, as the older residents preferred to call their city. Over a welcome cup of tea, the next morning, Dyadya Kolya showed off the tile mosaic he'd created in his kitchen. "Every day, coming home from work, I'd collect the bits of tiles thrown out onto the ground, then I put them all together," he said proudly. Sveta, his wife, stood in her apron in the door of the kitchen. She held out her arm, and out of the apron pocket popped a white rat, who scurred up onto her sholder and into her waiting hand. "Here he is, our little pet," she giggled.

I received my marching orders from Vera and we headed to a dark theater, where we watched a Fellini film with Russian subtitles. After the film, Vera announced that we were going to find the shrine of St. Xenia.

We walked up and down the road near the Smolensk cemetery. Vera asked several passersby, jabbing with her quick Petersburg intonation, about the whereabouts of St. Xenia's grave, and received several shrugs in answer. Then, an old woman told her to go along a long fence, and find the hole in the fence, then to walk through a field, and we would find it.

All around the globe, young girls sing akathists to St. Xenia, in hopes of finding their true love, or healing their broken hearts. Older women light candles to her in their sorrow. And here we were, in an officially atheistic country, where her shrine was a hidden thing, almost a forbidden subject.

We shoved through the hole in the fence, pushed our boots through the snow-covered field, and discovered that we were not the only ones who had been seeking the blessed Xenia's resting place. The grave of the fool-for-Christ's-sake was littered with dozens of bundles of red carnations, all odd-numbered for good luck. I wondered at the loneliness of Xenia, a broken-hearted widow wandering the streets in her husband's uniform, homeless and praying without ceasing for the salvation of her husband, who had died while he was intoxicated. How fiery her heart must have been, to keep her alive, in the biting Baltic winds. Shivering and stomping, I said a quick prayer.

The next day we found the apartment building where Vera had spent her childhood. Her apartment had apparently been turned into a restaurant, and again, in a city of shortages, she worked her magic, again we entered through a side door, and were served a fairy-tale dish: fresh trout, cooked in a clay pot, with a bread crust, and creamed mushrooms on the side. We bought pastries for Dyadya Kolya, and crammed ourselves onto one of the over-filled buses.

Once on the bus, I found that I literally could not move a finger. A cake dangled from my right hand, above my head. My left arm, where a purse hung, was squished into a post. From an unknown direction, an invisible hand had begun groping me. I searched frantically for the culprit, but not one of the faces around me betrayed a sign of emotion. Finally, the crowd burst out of the bus like a batch of popcorn, and I escaped. I didn't admit of my humiliation to Vera. Instead, I concentrated on the warmth of the tea, and the texture of the cakes in the shape of potatoes, and the pretty petit-fours, listened to tales of the Blockade during the war, and tried not to watch Vera break down while she talked with her uncle about her recently-deceased mother.

We returned to Moscow on the day train. Vera Gennadievna punched a hole in the armor of my youthful angst, by telling me that the light-blue quilted Chinese coat I'd bought at the Salvation Army, looked just like the typical uniform of most Soviet manual laborers. A wizened village woman in a white wool kerchief asked me curiously, "Where are you from?" "Alaska," I answered, to Vera's horror. "And what kind of sausage do they have in Alaska?" wondered the incorrigible babulya. I giggled, a little. Vera silenced our banter with a single, scathing, aristocratic glance.

The train lurched and clattered along its inland route. I opened my little blue bag and touched the rough-edged mosaic pieces, smiling at them as if they were my magic beans. If my aspiration in life was to be a holy fool, I thought, well, I have the second part down pat.

A few years later, when Vera and I, seemingly, had traded countries, and atheism was no longer the state "religion", I heard that the remains of Holy Seraphim of Sarov (which everyone had thought were lost) had been found in the basement of the Museum of Atheism and Religion, and then were taken by a ceremonial train to their original resting place, so that the people could come to his grave, because they remembered his words of comfort, spoken not so long before the Revolution:

"When I am dead, come to me at my grave, and the more often the better. Whatever is in your soul, whatever may have happened to you, come to me as when I was alive and kneeling on the ground, cast all your bitterness upon my grave. Tell me everything and I shall listen to you, and all the bitterness will fly away from you. And as you spoke to me when I was alive, do so now. For I am living and I shall be for ever."

It is difficult to put into words, what I saw and felt in those times in Russia, but for me, the process of restoration, of watching others discover and explore ideas beyond the party line, was amazingly exhilirating. Everyone who professed almost any kind of belief (other than in the communist party), for a brief flash, whether they called themselves Baptist, Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, Mormon, Artistes, or Nature-worshippers, felt a kinship with one another, an affinity, a fleeting solidarity... something that usually eludes us human beings.

Since that time, I have known those who call themselves believers and those who declare that they are atheists, but in the end,  it seems they share more commonality than differences, because they are all human ... They are people, whose lives are made up of fragments of this or that, sometimes given one label or another, but truly, in the end, all are composed of similarly bright elements, and for me, hold a mosaic-like beauty, even amidst their sorrows, that I feel compelled to observe and affirm.

A more current view of the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood, from the Neva. No more scaffolding ...

Currently listening : Time Machine / Mashina vremeni. Eto bylo tak davno... (2 CD) By Mashina vremeni

7:25 PM - 29 Comments - 36 Kudos - Add Comment

Thrimble (yes, it's a made-up word)
Current mood: anxious
Category: fractally agile : ) Writing and Poetry

A need to nurture

a moment, a        hush
between thrill        and        tremble --

think of sore feet
stumbling thirsty eyes
toward giddy heights

or that first small nudge
rippling below the surface
of a taut abdomen,
a sheltered immanence;

or of snow-blinded senses
tasting jadeite goddess succulence,
of sea-foam grasses, mustard-yellow buds,
crimson oriental papaver tufts,
biennial blue-eyes sprouting remembrance;

a slow song curling,
a hovering reawakening,
a stirring;

a chance meeting,
a burst of recognition,
a reckoning,
sharply sweet.

_________________

The story behind this one is that I was waiting for my son to finish his therapy, while I sat in the car with the little one napping, and I picked up a sketch pad and wrote the word, "thrimble", then wondered why I did that, and the rest of the poem came from that first word.

11:52 PM - 48 Comments - 52 Kudos - Add Comment

at the "beach", Alaskan style (a photo blog)
Current mood: awake
Category: Writing and Poetry

Walking towards the beach at low tide; the water is further away than it looks, and the current is influenced by the Matanuska and Knik Rivers, here.

Before everyone decided to throw off their shoes and socks and become one with the glacial silt ... though we couldn't let them go closer than about 30 feet to the water ...

The enthusiasm of a Three ...

Reminds me of celery but I don't know what the name of the plant is ...

A rivulet wending its way through the grass ...

The return trip (for those paddling).

My apologies to everyone whose blog I have neglected, or whose comments are unanswered ... I will try to mosey my way around to you.

Hooray for green and spring!

flame

9:50 AM - 46 Comments - 50 Kudos - Add Comment