Why Couldn’t I Meet Vaptsarov This Spring?

Hey, child of your time,
who passed through the crossroads of the past,
let the two of us sit down now on this earth gone soft with spring
and listen to the sound of the stones
in that Japanese garden from a forgotten book.
Your wide-set, knitted brows
and your handsomely jug-handled ears make me laugh,
but cleanly, without mockery.
Didn’t you feel it?
Feel what?
Why, the breath of jazz from the flickering window!
Mm-hm. Winter is gone.
Gone too is the feeling of early dusk.
Gone are my sick dreams
and the aching in my legs.
And the urge to step back from the picture
just to see it more clearly.
What needless torments, child.
What heroic efforts to
smooth our thoughts into the image and likeness of
some ill-starred, unsuspecting Model.
Let the two of us sit down now on this earth gone soft with runnels
and, soaked right through, laugh at the memory of winter
as though it had never been.
Though for those who like it, this means nothing.
“…chain after chain is breaking”
I muttered under my breath, crossing the street
and coming toward you, without the faintest idea
why this day greeted me so noisily,
and this earth gone soft with fire.
But now that I’m drawing near
enough to lose a clear sense
of the wholeness of what I have to forget,
I think we were not fated to meet,
for which your long-ago death is not
excuse enough.

And let us not change our opinion of things
as any thinking person would.
That way we won’t trouble our narrow-chested
neighbours in life, and perhaps
we’ll even get their permission to sit a while
on the same earth gone soft with your blood
at the same hour of the days —
yours and mine.