The Sunday Before Easter
Askold Melnyczuk

Dreadful it is
how here and there
endlessly God disperses
whatever lives.
-Holderlin

I

I prayed each twilight with the crickets
as a boy to another boy, rapt
in his mother’s blue-gowned arms:

Otche Nash.

Concentration is prayer;
poetry the private psalm.

Sunday before Easter,
before dawn revives
the city with its debonair
starlings, startled by weather

to wooing, behind
my desk, from where
in the window I can see your double
I pray the only way I can.

I tell you my stories
because they are mysteries.

II

because
the little god who dwells within,
reflecting God, creating
worlds with names, remembers.

My country, formerly the sun,
became the oil-slicked water;

sapped pine barrens and barren
suburbia;

the “Venice of New Jersey”
since it flooded every year;

at times mountains
and ignitable, polluted air

feel familiar
as the silk of your bed,
the blue-gold silk of your breasts.

III

Lviv, Peremyshl, Berchtesgaden:
there God flared in
his latest conflagration, disguised
or agonized
green;

booted, buckled,
moustache trim, chin
shaved clean as an apple,

proud of himself,
his shining discipline,
the moral courage to shelve
tobacco, moonlight, women.

He puffed himself especially
on his talent for division,
like that evolutionary
wonder, the amoeba;

for rising early, spitting
in his own glum sun,
showering in splinters
of ice-water without wincing,

marching in unison
with himself, raising legs
muscled as if modeled by Rodin.

And he was proud
of his spired libraries
outstripping Alexandria

where the dead speak and the living are silent.

He often visited museums
ransomed by lions,
accompanied by an interpreter
from the far city of Babel.

God torched houses.
He castrated boys, inspired
women burning for food
to murder their husbands.

He turned his people back to light.

I saw none of this.
But I remember.

IV

I remember and rehearse it
for you, whose perfect breasts
still cannot balance
the scales of justice.

These fairy tales mother
lent me for lullabies.
What once delivered me to sleep
now keeps me up

long after the emaciated hands
of the clock unclasp
and splay to quarter-cross
and the cat, and you, snore.

I tell you because
I come from a country
which no longer exists

and my name will not give me away.

V

Because it happens again
at a different address:
the Lord himself lashes
himself.