POETRY

By Tatiana Retivov

There is a country where my voice

must hold its daily reckoning

and ques­tion this alle­giance to

the spirit of the cross­roads who

has scat­tered what remains

too hor­ri­ble for language

and placed a skull over a stump

to guard his wretched boundaries.

I know his ways so well for I have learned

the jargon of the jackdaws,

and in their hungry chat­ter­ing I’ve heard

how once so full of carrion they were

that rivers also overflowed,

and how the thirsty steppe so soaked with blood

had flow­ered in her first and final bloom.

So like another fallen empire, first

it shunned the Western hemisphere

then courted it, and court­ing failed to honor

the spirit of the cross­roads who

dis­hon­ored by his retinue

invoked the swan­like Obida

to clap her wings

and clap­ping thus decrease

rich times and let abun­dance sink.

Less fallow than divined, this land

when crossed by its own shadows

will wax so lyrical that I

am often ren­dered speechless.

And though still full of loathing for

its fork­tongued infidels,

I mean to res­ur­rect their Word,

to mount and harness it,

and beat it till it bleeds and yields

nothing but metaphor.

To know is to comply, to have survived

the spirit of the cross­roads’ wrath

is to be guilty only, and fittest not at all.

Accom­plice that I am I now lay bare

my burden, in hope that it will bend

the birches down with sorrow to the ground,

and that the steppe so arid once again

will let its grasses droop

until the boatmen scatter with their oars

in drops the sacred rivers of the land.

– T. Retivov, San Fran­cis­co, 1983

“Jargon of the jack­daws” is from Nabokov’s trans­la­tion of “The Lay of Igor’s Cam­paign: “Stilled is the trilling of nightin­gales; the jargon of jack­daws has woken.”

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 17.

Photo by Atsushi Tsubokura