Versts: Версты
“It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.”—Schiller
I
Love leaps over the wall between us, like two birds in flight over the distance,
Grew into a dream both of us had long-ago packed liked repaired socks into our shoulder bags,
Ruminative and interrogating one another as we grew, both, up and separated by land and time.
I learned to sew on the long trip where I lost myself for two years in Asia,
Sewed both cloth and sorrow while Mama awaited my return in Jerusalem.
While you mapped out your aging anger and grief like broken bones from fallen fight,
Bones kept in a jaw in the garden because they could not be buried but bruised from the sunlight.
One night, as a child, I listened to you bark at me in the drunken night and shadows:
‘Leap out into the wide raft of things, conjure the living from the fallen dead and wicked—waving.
Bewilder yourself and cast off the clothespins."
The rusted pomegranate stains on my pants, the dandruff of time left on your shoulders,
the children I brought into this world, fearful.
Would they carry more of you Papa than of me, the gum, gulp, the gapped beacon:
The arbour aired all up in a ball of twine and feather.
And so I fled you and myself for the false mysteries of travel,
The stroke and strap of Motion and I bulleted.
I ran until I finally found myself exhausted, dirt washed and waiting
In the interminable terminal of refuge: Aeroport de Paris-
Charles de Gaulle, expecting
the thief of sleep to gamboling toward me and so
Amid that clacker and murmuring of broken syllables and trapped syntax,
I closed my eyes and my children, quickly, slipped their home and swam toward me in a
dream:
Click.
II
I dreamed that I reeled my child into my arms and pulsed his thirsty mouth against my cow-licked breast
Bowed my arms around his clavicle and sured up his papyrus spine,
Whispered to him,
As if milkweed settled upon the skeleton-stem of a green root,
Some lost story of the calligraphy of maps and torn curtains
And I rose, red as a Chrysanthemum, into the air, spinning,
My heart a coda aloft and going,
That fulsome pitch and panting pating
The spin of a hymn, tendering my dream wings, watery and wavering and
then
Slowly, inexorably, his voice appeared and I opened my eyes.
The dream was gone. My son was gone and I was no longer floral.
And there he stood:
And I was bewildered.
How could I have known he would arrive, I had not wanted nor expected him
To meet me in this place and at this time and of this wielding—
Haunted mendicant or haunting pursuer.
The shock of what we know yet never anticipate but can never deny.
His instructions lingered: “ Son, it IS me.:”
At first angered, then confused, then drifting toward some green distance, I blossomed neither field or story or his humid words, in that cold airport.
Name it fear.
Name it Versts.
Name it love
III
When I got up, he spoke to me simply, exhausted and aged,
“I’ve come to hold you Son. Not, to look for you or after you but to see
Because I miss your anger and rebellion.
I miss your argumentative heart dipped in the ink of our Russian night.
I miss your compassion and the scent of your refusal, after all you are my son.
I flew across the world to greet you in this over-romanticized city, where they celebrate the lights more than the true shadows.
Im the scent Saint Petersburg, we are Гопник.
Not poet on the boulevards, nor noble, nor madman.
Give me a vodka and your voice, a broken dream and your mothers anger over these expensive poets and and clean scarfs of this city of Lights.
I have traveled versts to smell your story again. You are my son.
I need to hear your drunken voice before I leap again away.
We are separate but give me that.
Later, we drank in a cafe candled by old men and the smell licked of burnt leather
And the Дача’s garden still long on his breath.
The shadows of the cafe, the old French men’s voices reminded me of how old he actually was,
How much he had given up, and the splattered loss.
Grief ages, Love veins, light and dark the garden of our undoing.
Then he asked me to carry his bag toward the metro as he needed to head to a different airport.
I held him and he tucked in just a moment or two too long,
My heart skipped a beat and I forgot, in the instant
Forgot to say, люблю Bас
And in the cavernous space of the underground stairs, heard only
Bас.
And we tributaried into different directions, down different steps and stories,
As I stood waiting for my train to return to the airport, I counted the scratches on my worn shoes
As lines in my father’s palms, as the engraves on the walls of a prisoners cell
And I thought:
How could he have met me? How could have he known?—that terminal at that precise time.
He had not known I was flying to Paris from India to thread up the journey and return to Jerusalem.
But then, just then in that moment, I looked up, across the opposing platform, and there he stood, ghost, delirium, imagination, my father
A stuck bird, a man for whom getting on the train seem a life’s journey and so far away.
And yet, he stood, wordless, wordless and he waved
bye or was it hello or was it both.
And he vanished in the train and into the hungry mouth of the subway tunnel.
He was gone and I was still there standing.
Love knows no algebra nor accuracy nor true stillness
and we survive
The leap and the broken now.
We bend toward the home of our ripening, bruised heart.
We bend toward home.
He was gone,
Mama was waiting.
And I was there and would always be there, even moving
And to this day I have remained, Песок,
Of you.
On that platform, dreaming and missing your voice
I am and forever will always be
Of you.
For: David Dector. This poem is based on a true life meeting, in where he met his father in Paris after returning from a 14 month trip through Asia. Most of the poem, I imagined.
For: Robert Anthony Black and Dima Black, my father and son, men alike.
