z novoho roku: poema.

rusalka.

a)

there is no time when
poems cannot exist.

even when the sky’s erased,
there is something, living
wordless –

even when the magpies perch
on the grey typewriters
of the horizon, tapping out
flurries, the ghosts
of snow –

even in the midst
of the drifting boreal
depression

she is still there, golden

with her hair of weeping birch
& the last sweet smoke rising
from black tea & a clove cigarette

she sings my grandmother’s songs
across the cacophony of traffic.

even through the airways
clogged with invisible sensationalism
the press playing games with empty prose
& the twisting semantics of omission

i hear her clearly down every
street & alleyway, echoes knocking
over the newspaper boxes, scrawled
with the chalkdust

of words seen etched in my dreams
last night, words tattooed in paint
over the brick skins of buildings,

i hear the reverberation
of things i have not yet written

stopping trucks in their tracks.

b)

want to see your heart-
beat? she asked.

wet leaves, slick as tongues
lapping a whisper
on the pavement, black
soak of the rain
singing, my footsteps
a pulse in my ears.

look,
under the cardiac trees
she pointed to a mountain
ash

spreading out
like arteries from an
upside-down atria,

branching out into
bunches of red blood-clots,

exploding berries
falling up into the autumn
sky --

do you see it?
do you see?

everything exists already,
she says,

& you are just the
interpreter, the renderer;

the lungs &
the voicebox,

a hope.


c)

поки не пізно – бийся головою об лід. – олег лисгега, пісня 551
[before it’s too late – knock your head against the ice. -- oleh lysheha, song 551.]

i know she wants to breathe
the air above

push her words into my lungs

& i want nothing but to
hear clearly

everything echoing from
under novembering earth –

long light lays supine
across the grasses

&

they say she’s a drowned soul
but i know she will not die

unless i do not keep speaking

keep breathing –

i will not fall heavy
under the frightening whiteness
of the snowless sky,
the almost-silence
that echoes in the skull,

because i trust she’s singing –

deep in the woods
the rusalka presses her face
to the frost-riddled filigree

her verses float like
bubbles under the surface,

soul flowing on beneath
the body,

warm breath melting thin holes
like whispers

as disembodied poetry
grows that one
indelible voice –

& we are both chipping, carving,
scrawling away
the ice –