for the poet Osip Mandelstam
I don't know why white apples in the frost
seem suddenly to sob;
reading Mandelstam three in the morning,
I dreamt of God
in an in-between time; or try to rhyme
Him with something else, deeply felt
but it's too cold
where after decades throw the arced lights’ brine
as if they know
this Neva is not mine.
and who am I
to make my petitions here
on the other side of the world, the room I fear
assorted people will not believe
I do love Russian poetry;
where the moon is made of glass,
will it shatter at last? will I
the milk bright pieces hold
I ask like a child from a hand towel embroidered
folk tale not my own
God knows I’m bound up in the story though
I won't turn and become salt...if that’s your worry
“it's not your past”, a thin murmuring grows,
how do you know I plead to no one heeding me
what words came to me in a midnight hour
and laid down their shields
or that the blanched petals fleet so lingeringly by me
on this heavy darkness, sown
as an antique honey scarcely bottled.
I don't know why
white apples in the frost...
make me cry unto the light vexed distances:
sheared seraphim may guard the long scars
lightly felt now, the buzz of
summer flies; soul freedom's reedy tunes so
lemon starred, no longer die, deep as
Christmas hymns to the infant Jesus should be.
one candle grown lilac in a perpetual Spring
precariously I perch among worlds and
So.
they sigh, it's you again and
won't even let me in
for the ball dress, being less than Cinderella.
packing one useless shoe
I’ll look within
wandering down Mandelstam Avenue,
a quarter brimmed with wonders and
remote viewing as through a screen of ancient snows.
things, being foreign, suddenly parted
on a mysterious stage, oh Star, my star
where I, unaccountably, not knowing where You are
but in a blinding Grace,
have all the parts by heart.
mary angela douglas 10 september 2016;3 january 2019
