The Yellow Cab
No sir, you confuse me with someone else.
It wasn’t I in
the yellow cab
I never sat with you in the back seat.
It wasn’t snowing either, I’m sure of that
no snowflakes fell on my hair.
In fact I have no hair.
You’ve never kissed me, I would have remembered of it.
But even if you kissed me, it wasn’t I you kissed.
Neither did the driver turn back his head.
Silently he crossed the lake to the edge
and from time to time he dipped
the oar in the black surrounding waters.
Theta
…and I said,
he is a hero, too, since he endured
human pain and
he loved the fragrance
of the night flower
which didn’t know of holidays
the sick man and I are comrades,
since we both experienced
the heroism of a twenty-four-hour duty
I practiced my religion
on the future catastrophe and
in the longing for the past
during which we endured pain
we, the youths with acne
and a light beard on our cheeks
us, who, one day,
will be called dreamers
and I said,
let them call me a foolish dreamer
let them name me crazy
let the joys of wealth be untouched
and let their glory be inglorious
I practiced my religion
on the perfection of human wholeness and
I hymned eternity with odes
Iota
I crafted iambuses about the cock
Excerpt
She took the elevator down one floor, intending to ask the dezhurnaya the location of Chopyk’s room but for some reason, that floor was unguarded. It took another 20 minutes of getting lost in a maze of hallways, returning to the lobby, inquiring and returning to Chopyk’s floor, only to find that he was not in his room. She rode the elevator back to her own floor, and the doors opened on a pleasant domestic scene.
The dezhurnaya no longer sat alone. On two straight-backed chairs sat a young man and a woman with her arms around a gangly child of about ten who pointed her toes, first right, then left, pressing her sandals into the worn carpet. The man looked up eagerly when the elevator doors opened. She caught his eye for a second, took in the freckle-faced child and petite mother who sat in the shadows, then sped on up the hall. But she could feel the young eyes boring into the back of her head.
“Attention! devushka, woman,” shouted the dezhurnaya. “You have guests.”
Even before Jennifer turned to face the family, it was a moment of knowing, a sense that already on this first night in Moscow profound changes would take place, and this was only the first of them. She stared. Yes, the man did look familiar in a comfortable way. The woman—his wife?—was a stranger. The child was awkward and cute at the same time. The man walked toward her, smiling, his arms outstretched in greeting. He struggled with her name in thickly accented speech.
“Do I know …?” she began and stopped.
“Mikhail Alexandrovich Abram,” he said, grasping her hand. The woman tossed a mane of glossy black hair and approached smiling. “And this is my wife, Marta, and my daughter Nadya.” The child stood knock-kneed, bowed slightly and touched the red Young Pioneer scarf tied around her neck.
“We are your family.”
Jennifer was thunderstruck. “But I have no family here…” she finally responded. She didn’t want to appear rude but she was quite sure that her mother…but then there was a lot she didn’t know about her mother’s background.
“Yes, you do. You are shocked,” Mikhail continued. “I beg your forgiveness for our sudden arrival. May we enter?” He indicated the hotel room.
“Certainly. Go in.”
Excerpt
…the hall where Karen and the crew were putting the finishing touches on
the exhibit. He was led to the Speaker’s office where Michael was sitting
on a desk, his feet dangling, telling stories to the staff of his adventures
in the Arctic.
John led Ken into his office and a photographer arrived to immortalize
the occasion. He posed Ken and John in front of the Karsh portrait of
Winston Churchill and for the next hour shot Ken with various members
of Parliament. Jean Chrétien, leader of the opposition, offered his congratulations,
as did Joe Clark, who was standing in for Brian Mulroney
who was otherwise engaged.
In the hall at the foot of the stairs people stood or sat shoulder to
shoulder. Not an inch of space remained.
I had the most amazing feeling. It was a feeling I have never had before
or since. It was a feeling that I was standing at a point in the universe where
for some minutes and seconds reality was different. This was the magical
moment I had been seeking my whole life. Usually, I had foreseen important
moments in great detail. But this one – this was different. This one had
somehow manufactured itself. It was not the vision I had had in my head.
John Fraser stood on the podium and spoke. “Almost fifty years ago
a young boy sat at the feet of his tutor – an old Portuguese fisherman –
and heard tales of whaling in the Canadian North. These tales were so
wonderful that the boy vowed some day to see Canada for himself and to
clarify his mental pictures of the land.”
“In his late teens, circumstance found the boy and his family living
on Canada’s West Coast and several years later he set out on his boyhood
dream to see the great Canadian North. For five years, he walked
from one end of this great land to the other, travelling with families of
Inuit as they pursued their nomadic lifestyle. Often he was alone, walking
endlessly – experiencing first-hand Canada’s Arctic North, all the while
sketching thousands of miniature drawings of what he saw.”
“Toward the end of his journey, like a great mirage in the desert, he saw
a giant of a man standing on the distant horizon. It was a stone Inukshuk,
an Inuit guide to hunting and fishing grounds. Try as he might for the
next twenty years, his efforts to portray the splendour of this vast and
spectacular landscape resulted in dissatisfaction and personal frustration.
Finally, he realized that only a painting which was larger than any ever
painted could properly depict the unseen spectacle which he felt compelled
to bring to the rest of the world.”
“The result of five years of trekking and twenty years of painting was
completed on June 21, 1991, the longest day of the year. It is the largest
original oil on canvas portrait in the world, measuring one hundred and
fifty-two feet long by twelve feet high.”
ANEMONE
A boulder on the hill
alone can see
the creek that flows
before it sings its song.
The anemone that blooms
rooted firmly on the rock
attempts to grasp
the meaning of the song
and down it bends to hear,
leaving its rocky anchor
to know what song is sung
by that fast-flowing creek?
It sings of an embrace
that waits with open arms
to hold a lover ardently
at night on a golden shore.
If only, said the flower,
that embrace were mine,
and leaning further down
to touch the rapid current
as it leaned enough to see
the water in its speed
stripped it of its petals
and down the stream it went.
Now without petals
the stem stands in loneliness.
Ah, why, ah, why did that anemone
deserted its anchor in the rock?
Response
In the tempest’s wrath
I longed for
a glimmer of hope
in the heat of July
I seek the tanned
smooth body of the woman
and the north wind said
find your path
in your ancestor’s footsteps
lean and reverently lift
the marble over their gravesite
to feel their warmth and
I asked the southwest wind
where is my sunshine
and it said,
it hides
in your heart
Rick looked disconsolately through the second-storey classroom
window at sheets of freezing rain, the weathered fence of the Pennsylvania
Railroad coal yard and the blackened struts of the steel bridge that
shuddered ever so slightly when a train passed over it, then back at Sister
Assunta who was preaching, again, about The Immortal Soul as she paced
back and forth in front of the blackboard behind her desk, slapping the
pointer against her palm like a riding crop.
“Pagans!” she was saying, “You were all born pagans and you must
be taught to fear (her pointer hissed and snapped loudly against the desk
blotter) the power of Almighty God.”
Silence. Some of them lowered their heads to avoid her stare. But
Rick was puzzled. That kind old man who lived forever in the sky was
merciful and just. He was love itself.
Why should anyone be afraid of him?
He raised his hand. Forty-two pairs of eyes swung toward the front of the
room, afraid for him, but excited by the drama that might be about to
unfold. Sister Assunta merely glared and went on pacing, her voice hoarse
with a nearly demonic fierceness. Rick took his arm carefully out of the air.
“Daily, you neglect your immortal souls. They may already
be lost
to eternal damnation.” She stopped precisely behind her desk chair, her
florid minutely wrinkled skin drawn into a tight smile.
Rick tried to look inside himself. There wasn’t much light. After
a while he became concerned. Where was his immortal soul, anyway, why
couldn’t he find it? Then something
round and flat like a communion
wafer came into focus. It was tilted, like the head of a snare drum, and it
was so clean it glowed. He began to understand. When you did bad stuff,
soot fell on it out of the dark, then, if you confessed and said five Hail Marys,
five our fathers, and an act of contrition, an invisible power swept
it clean again. And immediately, almost automatically, his pubescent mind
reached for what he knew to be forbidden.
The kids called her The Beauty Queen. Her dad owned the bar and
grill at the corner of Monmouth and Fifth. She spent a lot of time with
her followers in the extra lot next to her house her grandparents
had made
into a large garden surrounded
by hedges, and dotted with trees. When
she came out for a walk, all the guys stopped what they were doing and
watched her tight pedal pushers, her graceful careless moves…
Expectation
What are they waiting for in the morning, with the vertical,
snow-white, square, big planes, fully lit again this spring?
What does the child wait for by the window with his slaughtered
doll? Or the old man leaning on his walking stick in front of
the glass balcony door, above the noise, the city, the garbage
collector, the banks, the flower shop? That unrepentant
old man who enlarges, in the space, the hand of the woman
who spreads her laundry on the opposite terrace, which enlarges
the wet, red and white striped bed sheet so it covers two-thirds
of the city, thus trying to forget that passkey of the burglar, not
the passkey at all, the second key they presented to him
in front of the other, one for each, there by his door that still
smelled oil paint, and he didn’t consider complaining or
to ask.
In his pocket, he held tightly the bag with the nails, considering
The pictures he had to hang in the big empty house.
Night
The night is a door only the blind can see.
Darkness makes the animals hear better,
and he staggered not from being drunk.
But from his futile effort to climb up
to the tower we had once lost.
Excerpt
“Yes, Mother, but I’m only going away for a while; do not forget
that.”
Maria smiled and added, “Of course, my boy, you will return.
But remember, you must write home frequently, so we can find out
how your studies are going.”
“You guys think as if I am going to forget completely where I
come from. Don’t worry yourselves with that.”
His father cut in, “Son, you are an adult, but I want you to be
very careful in the foreign country you are headed; we, your mother
and father, uncle and auntie, or friends, will not be there. There are
a lot of dangers over there, and you might get into a lot of trouble.
Have your eyes and ears open, be careful in a foreign place. You are
responsible for yourself.”
The old man’s voice became hoarse. Hermes looked at his dad
with surprise in his eyes: tears flowed freely down the old man’s
cheeks. Yet this time, George Dragakis didn’t even care to hide his
feelings from the rest of the family. Hermes went to his father and
gave him a big hug.
“Do not worry. I know where I’m going, and I know what I’m
there for. My only concern is to finish my schooling and return home
to find you all. Do not worry. Nothing will distract me from my goal.”
Hermes’s voice had so much certainty as it was heard that all those
present felt positively about his voyage.
“What about Magda, my boy?” his aunt asked.
“Magdalene and I are going to be in touch, and I hope to see her
when I come back. She told me she might even come and visit me in
Vancouver next summer. I look forward to that, really. I like this girl
a lot.”
His mother and father heard these words and felt a bit relieved,
although they’d prefer if he didn’t go away at all.
George got up to go to the bathroom, and Hermes could
hear the old man blowing his nose. Then Hermes went to the bar
and poured a drink for himself. He asked if anybody would like to
have one, but they all declined.
