Marina

That little blue sustenance, cheated on all sides,
brought low as water does, finding the common rut.
The river swells its bank.
The cello is mournful with a girl holding it tenderly open as
a chest.

Heart strung, laundry billowing, window watcher after the dark has fallen.

See me here as the dark has fallen, as things said mean nothing to anyone but
the time sting of clouds, thunder clapping of the gathering rain, the dunes
spreading errant sand over the road into the crab grass and fields.

I am done pretending to see you, your mouth with death’s curve and
someone else’s lips. I am no longer jealous. I grow poor too quickly to wait.
This heart cashed in by frauds, pulling lines from the hair of the fire.
Such is your scream, your kingdom, your place beyond the sun.

A mountain of ore, your dead Russian friends equally baffled, that you wore their
color, streamed for cool hearts in an army of heartless men, cowards,
convincers bartering with requirements, the reality of fire, distance and coal.

Not good enough. The world and its spent dream now in the hands of
the children’s children. Now thrown like used oil into the soil.
Such days, or better nights have their payback, years hence,
remembering a face, the ivy, the heat of napping and forgetting.

Don’t seduce the dark wings of night, those early dead,
those lady poets with sure feet and eyes for stars.
Like a friend, the wings are more certain.
The need more human, less austere.

The gable of the roof
protection for seedlings otherwise exposed to morning sun.
Hockey- the mind can rebound like the puck.

The need comes before something to say.
The hollowed-out thankfulness of years and experience uncatalogued.
No one seems able to bring the experience with the circle of the lamplight.
The sun on the other side of the world, the evaporating moisture from the dunes.

Sad dance music after hours, after most have left. The floors have splinters of dry wood…

Fragment on Marina Tsvetayeva

By Rolf Stavig