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Sod Hut Train and Horse Crossings Parsing the Ancestors Last night my father phoned from the wrong zone Saskatchewan mean time dementia standard from his wire-crossed line moonlight saving time Finnish meridian to tell me my brother loves me
‘Kuinka niin?’ I said to him in baby Finn: ‘How so?’
My brother only calls when news is bad dad’s on his death bed or Uncle Ed our mother’s gone and taken a stroke never just a trans-Atlantic chat
But if I can’t trust a man born in a sod hut his immigrant father built from blocks of turf cut from native grassland never measured never owned until homesteaders claimed it corner by corner who can I believe?
Earth walls absorbed my father’s first cry unmusical and raw his mother gave birth on a straw tick unforgiving as darning needles
My father never theorized or lied: I need his truth and call my brother’s answering machine
By some frail travelling coincidence we’re both assigned the same carriage, third-class, on a train that takes its time through all the shires west of London. A Hardy heroine might keep her eyes fixed on the buttons sewn to every cross in the upholstery. A Larkin chick would eye the corduroy nap on the gentleman’s knees an inch away from hers.
I thank the Wessex tribe who scored the biggest horse I’ve ever seen into a chalk hill sidling past this window: here’s my chance to ask my fellow passenger – his beard so trim, his eyes a clear, discerning grey – how a white horse can leap from myth to history.
Here on this blunted border between snow and snow she is crossing blind a crone clicks her teeth on the tracks
She remembers another crossing
a rope thick as a woman’s wrist cut through by salt scissor wind moonlight a midwife ship adrift
She tightens her belt
around the sharp stone of a wizened berry the withered grief of leaving home the train slows down stops for no reason
She hears through the steam
her daughters’ cries, “Maa maa” her body their only country she settles their heads on her empty womb the train pulses forward from darkness to darkness
(Note: maa = Finnish for ‘country, land’)
“A poet’s speech begins a great way off” – Marina Tsvetaeva
1. Marina’s words
Marina’s words shoot star-clusters into me occupy skies without amens bare emotions that bend horizons
Half-air & half-dark her images: muscles taut and strong enough to force buffaloes over cliffs I feel no push
toward intensities but ancestors chase me from exploded coal mines call me from black holes of Stalinistikia
My speech parts begin in Finnish forests where deadwood shifts & crackles in echoes that ricochet kaikki kaikut
The nouns and pronouns of my ancestors hook no articles to their necks hide their genders under hoods
her-less, him-less the-less, an-less they declare humans half-flesh half-wonder changeable as stories
told by northern lights clear as dirt-road parables deep in ruts of Russian mud stories that stick in Karelian throats thicken tongues of escapees
to places named by natives of new worlds Saskatchewan Kaministiquia overtaken by underdogs from old worlds
My scythe is sharp against the grain of politics my father taught me to wrap stooks with binder twine and unused noose-ropes
instead of joining crowds that bay for blood I learned to balance yokes on horses’ necks take over reins drive cars with stick-shifts
Marina’s a far cry from my mother but I tug at her comet-skirts latch onto syllables that squirt from buffalo-tit to snake-throat
2. Akhmatova’s shawl
I grasp Akhmatova’s shawl hungry for knowledge though not for bread demanding ‘Were you there? Can you tell me how my missing ancestor died?’ She says no
poetry can’t do that she is sorry the killed souls outnumber the first circle of stars she says all I can do is search the poles snatch glimpses
of possible facts in the timed shadows of eclipses until the sun of ignorance bursts from behind the moon smacks me face-on
She tells me to wear protective goggles but all I have is Kodak negatives snuck from a tin box that fail to stop the sun from burning retinas
She says I’ve arrived too late to catch the agit-prop train painted by futurists I’ve missed the Trans-Siberian Railway from New York to Vladivostok the Canadian Pacific mainline
from Montreal to Moosomin and over the Rockies through Kicking Horse Pass to Vancouver But all is not lost I tell her the Moscow to Okanagan track via Head-Smashed-In-
Buffalo-Jump runs straight through my head no tickets issued She assures me the Finland Station still floats on St Petersburg fens city of palaces built on swamps
3. Museums of confusion
I’m the one who mixes up cards from any deck at hand shuffles Russian clubs with French diamonds transforms one-eyed jacks into English bishops
Humpty-Dumpties queens or tarts I always get long wooden things mixed up hit balls with cribbage boards stick matches
as counters in canoe paddles pierced with holes can’t tell a millionaire’s poker chips from shavings that fly from a carpenter’s chisel or a barber’s razor
I’m the one who confuses languages and blood demands answers from desks and pews marital beds mug-shots of ancestors
since family women burned family letters I’m the one who altogether refuses Marx but has an ignorant soft spot for Trotsky
just because an old friend and mentor once lamented his ice-pick death in Mexico I’m the one who bought Lenin memorabilia
from a Tampere museum souvenir matches with mini-Lenins in multiple smug serenities smiling smiling from the safety flaps of hell
pencils made in China with misspellings of his surname in Cyrillics gum erasers that gradually reduce his head to rubber crumbs
(Note: kaikki kaikut = Finnish for ‘all echoes’)
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