The Ice Road

He’s late on the ice road over the Lena to Baikal,
with his Zlin transit, yet windscreen ice is still thick,
and the air in this unheated cab is freezing his nostrils.
Timber strapped hard, brakes screech like Baba,
and he’s s missing Nina. Radio seeps dot static.
No signal bars on his mob. White horizon endless.
Trucking mates being fleeced at border police.
 
He has to drive on. Baba woke, pleaded
from the stove bed for kasha just as he left.
Nina faltered, fixed her gaze on him, nodded.
He’s s been paid nothing yet for last month’s s trip.
The piano axed. Burnt well. Nina has fretted,
insisted on repeating ‘s even permafrost melts’s .
He’s s hooked by the kaleidoscope in her iris;
 
his heart’s s locked in her torn velvet skin.
She has to slip out for dropped paper, tickets,
cardboard, even in zastrugi. That’s s how it is.
Good months she earns a pittance of kopeks.
Nina. Her face flushed as she kneels, pokes
horsehair into the maw of that pot-belly stove,
determines to trick heat into Baba’s s bones.
 
Godforsaken transit’s s failing, like Baba’s s ribcage:
a handful of dry sticks. Now what? Loose gear.
Weak connection. This engine is hard to get.
Walkie talkie dead as road-kill spillage.
He should have left sooner. What’s s that, that
clunk? His crazed split-screen window clears,
fogs, clears again: how is a bear on his timber?
 
Thank god it’s s gone. His tyres lock and slide.
There’s s a current rippling under honeycomb ice.
Sunset purple shadows the ridge at the edge.
He’s s alone with an overdue, uneven load
on a never-ending, darkening melt-ice road.
First star. Transmission failure: no cab lights.
A pulse of pale mauve: aurora borealis
 
flares in seen-a-ghost sky. Cab door swings:
fingers grapple. He’s s face down in wet snow.
A from nowhere wolf howls, then nothing.
Veined green bud in an ice bleb. Nina.
River Lena a white metre beneath him.
 

Valerie Bridge

published in Tears in the Fence, Issue 69, September 2019

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Tramlines ARKANGEL OBLAST 1999-2006

What if you can catch the last tram, number 5, 4 axles, lines laid on ice
glide through a white night over the unreal Kuznochevsky Bridge.
 
Perhaps stay-awake, dance-and-drink all-summer lightness doesn’t exist,
six month winters minus 30 are not normal, and pavements hold fast.
 
Maybe the suspension of lines 3 and 5, the 6 rouble private enterprise grab,
the consequent hunger strike, was a fix, and suspect red clouds
 
do not lower arctic skies, and old-style northern housing is not tilting
as much as wooden poles almost staking rails at unmapped intervals.
 
Surmise  a black-shawled woman and a young child in a too-short red jacket,
mocked by pole-cats, do not daily search for kindling, or keep the line clear.
 
Maybe trolley-buses, trams, passengers, like pedestrians, do not impede
supposed access to Arkhangelsk Vokzal. Suppose intrepid unpaid workers
 
at Petersburg Tram Mechanical Factory, as in so-called unfunded rebuilding
of Kanal Prospekt, do not in any reality squabble over superseded, undone timetables.
 
Let’s propose the child gets regular kasha, babooshka keeps family documents safe,
grows potatoes and wild garlic on ransacked dachas, draws on a cherry-wood pipe.
 
If Peter the Great never vexed St. Michael’s traders in loaves and fishes,
maybe nebulous gases are not noxious, and stars, bears, leached permafrost,
 
do not form in a Saami’s crystallized breath. Perhaps on the River Dvina,
Arkangel Oblast, glacial ice does indeed melt, taking with it bent tramlines.
 
If at some time the babooshka breaks up their piano for firewood,
the grandchild thaws her toes, keeps her school books from gap-toothed flames,
 
this child may become adult, might drive an electric tram, cautiously,
and some evening play Peter and the Wolf and mazurkas on a Steinway.
 
Perhaps the Grandmother will not be transported, indicted for theft,
ordered to build a road that she will some-when walk on, barefoot;
 
as if her calloused, blue-veined thin-skinned feet may one white night
dance near parallel lines back over fractured ice to Arkangel Oblast.
 
What if any of this happens, outside this text, and with alarming fluidity
ice reforms, and hauls a grandmother and grandchild back from their destiny.
 

Valerie Bridge

published in Tears in the Fence, Issue 69, September 2019

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Signatures required in triplicate

A nightingale pines in these overgrown woods
along the disused railway line, where no-one trespasses.
The hush of midsummer close, yet escapes us.
 
We are stowaways, stuck in night-time cattle wagons or carriages
on side lines and branch lines, clutching ambiguous promises,
lost cancelled or invalid tickets, less than valid passports.
 
Sometime we existed in smudged patronymics in Latvia’s old ledgers,
in barbed wire ant ciphers in old German or Russian, yet no reference
to what happened to us. The cattle-train supposed to cancel us.
 
Turn pages quickly: light flicks, leap-frogs our cast-off names,
exposes myriad expired entries, a blotched thicket of lost identities,
son of, brother of, eldest son sent off to war, almost expunged.
 
There’s a smear, a vinegar or lemon stain on some pages,
our words dissolved even as you signed in triplicate.
The ledger clerk eyes the clock, wants her records back.
 
She hasn’t noticed our absence: we have arrived in the present.
Our eyes hurt to see your cars, planes, television, telephones,
so we stare with furtive caution, and unwanted adrenalin.
 
We are itinerants, once pinned down in ant words in ledgers;
free. We have bulbous noses, pock-marked skin, deep-set eyes,
bad teeth, broken images of lost families; had such dreams.
 
This train accepts us, yet change crashes on a scale so beyond us:
we have no substance. You inhabit a cacophonous universe.
Our identities evaporate. Grasp at one warm spring evening
 
darkening a platform. A guard indicated a shadowed girl
queuing to be chosen, so slight she was, and no-one waving.
Mengel’s henchman waiting. Steam blotted her out.
 
Ant words once noted she made it back from the camps.
Cornflowers blur at the end of that line, now rusted over:
a nightingale in the woods flickered her back to us.
 

Valerie Bridge

published in Tears in the Fence, Issue 69, September 2019

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in search of time before

let’s go hear voices down dusty alleyways
where ‘have you the time’ is asked by girls in red skirts
and replies echo long in cracked pavings
                                                                 come let footsteps clang on outside stairways
                                                                 before sunset from across town districts
                                                                 to outdo onion sellers on bicycles
come see the tired lame at ease with themselves
as they raise pastis and double espressos and
the Marseillaise trickles over windowsills
                                                                 some recall promises made under gunfire
                                                                 another hides Mona under his unmade bed
                                                                 smiles at an old lame dog down by the Seine
in dusk stilled to be reborn in empty streets
three in doorways offer Gauloises and talk
of fresh young men washed in Eau de Cologne
                                                                 so they will walk pitted cobblestones
                                                                 to reclaim what maybe time was in stairwells
                                                                 so might have been is left to silhouette
them enter the wayward other streets
into inner rooms as if they still matter
as their lips resist the taste of other
                                                                 ‘oh my god what was the point tell me that’
                                                                 yet their soft hands maybe reach out to brush
                                                                 against inner elbow skin, exclaim ‘yes’
as in a basement window a mannequin
abandoned lolls against a cold pane
 

Valerie Bridge

published in Tears in the Fence, Issue 78, August 2023

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