Ilya Kaminsky reading Marina Tsvetaeva live at Bowdoin College, February 2, 2006. In each line’s strange syllable: she awakes as a gull, torn between heaven and earth. I accept her, stand with her face to face. –in this dream: she wears her dress like a sail, runs behind me, stopping when I stop. She laughs […]
Ilya Kaminsky answers audience questions about poetry following his reading at Bowdoin College, February 2, 2006.
Where days bend and straighten in a city that belongs to no nation but all the nations of wind, she spoke the speech of poplar trees— her ears trembling as she spoke, my Aunt Rose composed odes to barbershops, drugstores. Her soul walking on two feet, the soul or no soul, a child’s allowance, she […]
What is memory? what makes a body glow: an apple orchard in Moldova and the school is bombed— when the schools are bombed, sadness is forbidden —I write this now and I feel my body’s weight: the screaming girls, 347 voices in the story of a doctor saving them, his hands trapped under a wall, […]
In a soldier’s uniform, in wooden shoes, she danced at either end of day, my Aunt Rose. Her husband rescued a pregnant woman from the burning house—he heard laughter, each day’s own little artillery—in that fire he burnt his genitals. My Aunt Rose took other people’s children—she clicked her tongue as they cried and August […]
I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows— she rides a wild pony for my birthday, a white pony on the seventh floor. “And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!” the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks. At the center of my life: my mother dances, yes […]
We lived north of the future, days opened letters with a child’s signature, a raspberry, a page of sky. My grandmother threw tomatoes from her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket over my head. I painted my mother’s face. She understood loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans. The night undressed us […]