A Simple Flame

Still dreamt of, still missed,
especially on raw, rainy mornings, your face shifts
into anonymous schoolgirl faces, a punishment,
since sometimes you condescend to smile,
since at the corners of the smile there is forgiveness.

Besieged by sisters, you were a prize
of which they were too proud, circled
by the thorn thicket of their accusation,
what grave deep wrong, what wound have you brought, Anna?

The rain season comes with its load.
The half-year has travelled far. Its back hurts.
It drizzles wearily.

In that hair I could walk through the wheatfields of Russia,
your arms were downed and ripening pears,
for you became, in fact, another country,

you are Anna of the wheatfield and the weir,
you are Anna of the solid winter rain,
Anna of the smoky platform and the cold train,
in that war of absence, Anna of the steaming stations,

gone from the marsh edge,
from the drizzled shallows
puckering with gooseflesh,
Anna of the first green poems that startingly hardened.

of the mellowing breasts now,
Anna of the lurching, long flamingoes
of the harsh salt lingering in the thimble
of the bather's smile,

Anna of the darkened house, among the reeking shell cases,
lifting my hand and swearing us to her breast,
unbearably clear-eyed.

You are all Annas, enduring all goodbyes,
within the cynical station of your body,
Christie, Karenina, big-boned and passive,

that I found life within some novel's leaves
more real than you, already chosen
as his doomed heroine. You knew, you knew.

II
Who were you, then?
The golden partisan of my young Revolution,
my braided, practical, seasoned commissar,

your back, bent at its tasks, in the blue kitchen,
or hanging flags of laundry, feeding the farm's chicken,
against a fantasy of birches,

poplars, or whatever.
As if a pen's eye could catch that virginal litheness,
as if shade and sunlight leoparding the blank page
could be so literal,

foreign as snow,
far away as first love,
my Akhmatova!

Twenty years later, in the odour of burnt shells,
you can remind me of "A Visit to the Pasternaks,"
so that you are suddenly the word "wheat,"

falling on the ear, against the frozen silence of a weir,
again you are bending
over a cabbage garden, tending
a snowdrift of rabbits,
or pulling down the clouds from the thrumming clotheslines.

If dreams are signs,
then something died this minute,
its breath blown from a different life,

from a dream of snow, from paper
to white paper flying, gulls and herons
following this plough. And now,

you are suddenly old, white-haired,
like the herons, the turned page. Anna, I wake
to the knowledge that things sunder
from themselves, like peeling bark,

to the emptiness
of a bright silence shining after thunder.

III
"Any island would drive you crazy,"
I knew you'd grow tired
of all that iconography of the sea

like the young wind, a bride
riffling daylong the oceans catalogue
of shells and algae

everything, this flock
of white, novitiate herons
I saw in the grass of a grey parish church,

like nurses, or young nuns after the communion,
their sharp eyes sought me out
as yours once, only.

And you were heron-like,
a water-haunter,
you grew bored with your island,

till, finally, you took off,
without a cry,
a novice in your nurse's uniform,

years later I imagined you
walking through trees to some gray hospital,
serene communicant
but never "lonely,"

like the wind, never to be married,
your faith like folded linen, a nun's, a nurse's,
why should you read this now?

No woman should read verses
twenty years late. You go about your calling, candle-like,
carrying yourself down a dark aisle

of wounded, married to the sick,
knowing one husband, pain,
only with the heron-flock, the rain,

the stone church, I remembered...
Besides, the slender, virginal New Year's
just married, like a birch
to a few crystal tears,

and like a birch bent at the register
who cannot, for a light's flash, change her name,
she still writes '65 for '66;

so, watching the tacit
ministering herons, each at its
work among the dead, the stone church, the stones,

I made this in your honor, when
vows and affections failing
your soul leapt like a heron sailing from the salt, island grass

into another heaven.