Portrait
He often talks of mountains and itinerant
Youth, years of driving movie reels
Up empty roads, to peasants’ hamlets, where
They drank tuica, wore flower-embroidered shirts.
At painted monasteries the wooden toaca
Sounded first in the heads of rain-washed saints
Then rolled through haystacks down in the valleys
And narrow streets with smiling old men.
I know he left a harsh father, his carpenter shop—
The dogs took him as far as the last house of his village; then
Sadness and rented rooms, he talked with the blind wind,
Prayed for one smile in the blueness of his father’s eyes.
Then politics and prison, and I know there
He whistled through the visor in the door
In the bowels of the stone, the pitch of interrogation rooms.
Life of the Black Sea after that: the woman he loved
The children, roads lined with walnut trees – he drove us –
A cigarette in his hand.
And suddenly I see us fifteen years ago:
Helen Street, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Nights we all danced and wept with happiness and freedom,
Mom singing at the stove, brother and sister practising grammar,
The five of us like fingers to a hand. We saw America:
We repaired TVs discarded on the street,
Each of us had a TV in our room and movies
And dreams we planned
To bring through once we’d learned English.
His soul at sixty-nine is like the mild sun
On the window, warming up the house,
And America now is at war with all its dreams.
Youth, years of driving movie reels
Up empty roads, to peasants’ hamlets, where
They drank tuica, wore flower-embroidered shirts.
At painted monasteries the wooden toaca
Sounded first in the heads of rain-washed saints
Then rolled through haystacks down in the valleys
And narrow streets with smiling old men.
I know he left a harsh father, his carpenter shop—
The dogs took him as far as the last house of his village; then
Sadness and rented rooms, he talked with the blind wind,
Prayed for one smile in the blueness of his father’s eyes.
Then politics and prison, and I know there
He whistled through the visor in the door
In the bowels of the stone, the pitch of interrogation rooms.
Life of the Black Sea after that: the woman he loved
The children, roads lined with walnut trees – he drove us –
A cigarette in his hand.
And suddenly I see us fifteen years ago:
Helen Street, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Nights we all danced and wept with happiness and freedom,
Mom singing at the stove, brother and sister practising grammar,
The five of us like fingers to a hand. We saw America:
We repaired TVs discarded on the street,
Each of us had a TV in our room and movies
And dreams we planned
To bring through once we’d learned English.
His soul at sixty-nine is like the mild sun
On the window, warming up the house,
And America now is at war with all its dreams.
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