by Laurie Block
Yaroslavl, Odessa, Lvov Vitebsk Vitebsk Vitebsk You were at home in that impossible place until a cold shoulder shrugged you off the blond and burning steppes like crumbs off a carpet, like dust. This is old hat, this is why the train stopped in the middle of a mapmaker's paradise where land was cheap and freshly divided into meridians and sections and quarters. A sanctuary of straight lines, a good place for the fearful, everything coming at you in rows, distant but imminent. It could happen out here, you could run the general store or a dairy farm into the ground, you could buy a seat in the synagogue or a tenement in the city. The toast just might come true, health and wealth on the prevailing wind. The great enemy was not wind or cold, or even silence, but contemplation, thoughts that fell like stones into the well of winter stillness, shattering the skin of ice. All the horizon asked of fences and trees and coops, it also asked of you: keep to the trail, stand until you fall. O generations. O slack-assed ingratitude, your children speak the Queen's English but never learned the song that sealed your lips, that tore out your tongue by the roots like thistle or purple vetch or the tree in the middle of the road allowance where god's golden cathedral was built from reverent wheat. Who in the world do you think you are? You come to break the land, extracting earth's stubborn story like a tooth gone bad. Windflower, beard tongue buffalo grass and seneca, the ancient and ever green replaced with husbandry and furrows, fields that lie still as your wife and let you fill them. Indifference passes for forgiveness. Far from any shining sea you discover you can drown in just about anything you choose. Clinging to real estate and anger, the old man died with 5 grim languages between his teeth. Your father hardly said boo. You, you're a weed, you're bent on repentance like an old ocean liner your working on the crossing, you're turning around slow.