After a scene by Gaito Gazdanov
Years later, on a train
racing out of that doomed country,
he’ll remember how Claire, the foreigner,
his first love, walked slowly toward him
in a yellow fur coat, snow falling,
her eyes wide open.
Hello Claire, he said, I haven’t seen you in a long time.
And she gazed at him: I was busy,
I was getting married,
which he heard but didn’t understand,
and then she said Repeat after me
in French (he did not speak it well):
“Claire n’était plus vierge.”
Claire was no longer a virgin.
Picture it: black train rattling the landscape,
a soldier beside him coughing in the dark.
He hardly hears the hanging corpses
clinking their frozen sleeves.
But those words – they wheel like wild scraps
as burned leaves kick across the field.
And the border nears, and the burning hellcurtain
of that country
lowers behind him forever
as the sun breaks over the dark trees
like a horn entrance in Mahler,
blue and red jags tearing the snow.
Behind the sky is another one,
and someone is pulling the paper down.