As I’m reading Tsvetayeva’s essays,
“Art in the Light of Conscience,”
stunning- “Art, a series of answers
to which there are no questions” –
a tiny insect I don’t recognize
is making its way across my table.
It has lovely transparent wings
but for some reason they drag behind
as it treks the expanse of formica,
and descends into a crack.
“To each answer before it evaporates,
our question”: composed in Paris
during the difficult years of exile.
But which of her years weren’t?
This at least was before the husband,
a spy, an assassin, went back,
then she, too, with her son,
to the Soviet madhouse, back.
“This being outgalloped by answers
is inspiration.” Outgalloped!
Still lugging its filigreed train,
the insect emerges: fragile, distracted,
it can’t even trace a straight line
but it circumnavigates the table.
Does it know it’s back where it began?
Still, it perseveres, pushing
courageously on, one inch, another.
“Art.. a kind of physical world
of the spiritual… A spiritual world
of the physical… almost flesh.”
One daughter, dying, at three,
of hunger, the other daughter,
that gift of a sugar-cube,
in her mouth, drenched in blood…
“A poet is an answer… not to the blow,
but a quivering of the air.”
The years of wandering,
the weary return, husband betrayed,
arrested, daughter in a camp…
“The soul is our capacity for pain.”
When I breathe across it,
the bug squats, quakes, finally flies.
And couldn’t she have flown again,
again have been flown? Couldnt she,
noose in her hand, have proclaimed,
“I am Tsvetayeva,” and then not?
No, no time now for “then not.”
But “Above poet, more than poet…”
she’d already said it, already sung it:
Air finished. Firmament now.”
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