(after a story by Yurii Kazakov)
Things have been going too well.
Must hold steady. Don´t
stare at the river-boat.
Arrival´s a precarious thing.
She comes. The river at home
is now a black crack in the ice,
the sea is weighed down with floes.
In summer there we speared bass.
When I left she said "Why?
Going south is going forever."
Now her White Sea voice
is rough and intimate again.
All night through at the fire.
All morning asleep. Then:
snow - winter has caught up,
the woods of oak and larch are bare.
At my window she waits
while I take the water-can.
White earth, blue air.
Bubbles scamper in the creaking ice.
How bright for a dead season!
Things have been going too well.
Up the soft path I strain
to hold the live and kicking water still.