Now Is Tomorrow’s Yesterday

Genya Turovskaya

Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks
—William Carlos Williams

I was born
attentive toward the growth of grasses

We grew like grass through cracks in the concrete   my mother
once said
of her wartime childhood         sometimes
we were happy

I tightened the loose and careless knots of my devotion

The city kept changing
its name

And am I
ever eventual     as the anticipated aftermath      ever
the sickness
and the cure

When did I begin —

What word
began—

What war—

I tend my garden of turbines, my tornado farm

I wanted to marry
the ghost

the long held notes and rousing bars
of the hymn of the republic

But first the filial responsibilities
to keep the ancestors

fed and watered

I found them
nearly forgotten

where I had left them

licking the moisture condensing on the cavern walls

What names
do the animals have for us

I wondered

There is no comfort and there is no ease

Here we are winging the humid emptiness    the day’s endless shallow

It licks feebly at the shins and barely skims the knees with its chalky silt

I’m no good at autobiography       I wake up
and can’t remember what day it is or what city I am in

I’m too embarrassed to ask you to remind me

But I dream about the city    Did my nostalgia to return
to the singed and scrawled on city of my childhood destroy the city

Which is to say:     did my love
for the city as it was destroy
the city as it is

I dream the master tells me:   for poetry
you need meter, meaning 
and lust    

This sounds plausible enough     I am attentive
to the master
I write her dictum
in my small black notebook

But all the informal pronouns have been discarded    littering the streets

Held breath         and averted eyes

Trace elements

Handprints         on the trees

And the beloved evaporates—     dew
in the mountain meadow under a blazing alpine sun

The painter paints a horse—then cuts it in half

The human face—I know—was once a sanctuary

Remind me then:
What day it is    What city I am in

We grew like dandelion weed    clover    saxifrage
We were an indelible and ineluctable fact    We un-wove ourselves
from the black earth         blew westward
across the continent ​​    tossed with the flotsam     in the jet stream​​’s draft
We were      a wailing wind     its indelicate melody​
We were the snags in the weft of your syntax    We mispronounced
our own names     clustered raggedly
too unashamed of our indigence     too boisterous
​​              Someone said indignantly      You are not
an indigenous species    but an ineradicable ​    strain ​on the system ​​
You who have always courted your own        catastrophe        

Was it hurricane season      Was it the clawing rake
of wind and water against the work of industry
Was it a fallen tree     the frightened dog trailing its leash whimpering nearby
The aluminum YIELD     aluminum STOP     rattling and moaning
The ONE WAY arrow spinning like a weathervane
A shaky hand     calamitous     colloquy
Was it exhilaration     at a distance closing    between the mighty
and the All-Mighty     closing     but not entirely