By Aleksey Calvin
My poetry is if ever,
A bit of mist crying through a cracked seed shell at the sidereal tangle of paths,
Where human noise reflects weather, airplanes passing far above,
As goosebumps trace deeper breathes on history’s child tomb Walls
Above the monotone surface of weakness, (writhes… who writhes?
If ever: the sleeper…. Who? Who is…. Your Keeper?)
You’re beating on a tedium's I merely passing time
Waiting for a new day, a knight
In paisley-patterned armors, tights, strong-voiced, harsh,
To climb out of the crystalline lake surface
Of a suddenly enchanted screen, choice mirrors pain, clichés, names, echoes seeing
Smashed charred eggshells wherefrom psyche sings a synchronicity
Marvelously forgotten
Since childhood's mythic brightest day, the dew, (find me, sing to me)
The song my great-grandma would sing me in the staticky darkness
Of our tiny room:
With aloe wings wavering
From the slight breeze
Swilted through a tad crack
In the tiny top window.
No matter the weather,
She is singing at the border
Of sleep;
It is late spring,
Or early autumn,
("Girly" autumn, as an expression echoes,
Loosely translated
From the cave mouth of a
timeless blanket...)
She sings poetry, yes, perhaps...
A bare melody,
Fragile as a waltz
Over a soft soviet-made midnight radio,
She sings after the last notes of "Let It Be" (to a Russian child mind "Lady Bee")
Die off...
The radio's off...
But she sings...
At our joint border of sleep...
As a cartoon songbird sings
To her starved young'uns at the eve of winter.
And that's all: a mere fact of a song
Scratched by adult eyes on a cigarette moment - - - - - - - - -
No words remain,
No meaning,
No recalled refrain,
No certainty of memory,
Just an image,
The darkness, and the warmth of a blanket...
And
A mere trace of melody within the fabric...
Along with sagging flesh each word into a tiny grave-plot falls and falls...
For earth is the blanket
Above so many lullabies...
Though even in that moment of song
Where the words were all,
On the border
Of sleep,
Evoking smoke-forms of azure-maned stallions
That carry the ones who sang to us
Off,
Into the night Through a tiny window...
Even in that moment of song,
That my great-grandma, shut-eyed,
Half-hummed, spectrally on, on, on...
My ears were calming waters
No clouds touched...
If there were words...
And there were.
They were
Birds too rare for a transatlantic voyage...
Just a gentle melody with its ever-young, graceful fingers
Stroking my shutting eyes
At the border
Of sleep,
So deep beneath the monotone surface of weakness
That no weather was of matter,
No, no, no matter...
No time, no pain, no light in this depth...
And deeper and deeper...
She sang and then sang,
Rarely did I hear her finish...
Mostly I listened,
Not thinking,
And then I slept. . .