“You block out everything, even the sun at its highest, hold all the stars in your hand!  If only through some wide open door, I could blow like the wind to where you are . . .”

            -from “Poems for Akmatova” by Marina Tsvetaeva

My wings are broken I can’t move.  Waiting for the moon if there is a moon in this world of disappearing.  Reading the poet Tsvetaeva, thinking how strange it is that like her the most intense and valued relationships have taken place at a distance, through letters.  Weeping at her words and picture on the cover of a Penguin paperback.  As if her poetry wasn’t enough to split a heart wide open, she lost a daughter to famine, a husband to the gulag, her last breath a self-inflicted whimper crushed by rope in Yelabuga, even though she loved life more than anyone in the world.

“I have been consumed by the daily round . . . I have no time to think . . . I have only ever been myself in my notebooks and on solitary roads.”

            -Marina Tsvetaeva writing to Pasternak

Ethnic and racial minorities have been persecuted since we climbed down from trees.  Add to that very long list artists, especially Russian poets, who’ve seen their fair share of butchery.  I’m white as butcher paper, so I never thought of myself as a minority until as an artist and political minority I began to experience veiled prejudicial behavior from those I can only describe as “ugly Americans”.  It’s amazing how much of myself I have to hide just to earn a living, where in the United States the very perception of reality is economic.

The moon just popped up above a treeless mountain illuminating a stand of Russian thistle flashing their purple eyelashes.  These are the same invasive weeds thriving in Oklahoma for the last hundred years after hitching a ride in sacks of wheat seed brought by immigrants from the steppes of Russia.  Next to the thistle are tumbleweeds that don’t tumble across the highway like they do in west Texas. 

Six months is a long time in a place like this even though I will always love it.  There is the moon and a spectacularly bright asteroid as friends which helps. This morning I realized my essential melancholy is equal to my great energies, obviously rare in these overly extroverted times. 

I think about America a lot even though I’d have to dig through earth’s core to find it.  This morning I thought long and hard about a single word to describe America finally settling on “constipated,” not just for obvious reasons but the pervasive numbness and sense of dread that we feel without knowing the exact source.       

I spend Friday mornings with my attorney friend, a grandmother, tending a shabby rose garden in front of a mosque with a blue dome.  It’s funny because she wears baggy athletic shorts and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off.  But she equipoises this with lipstick the color of the crimson roses.  One time she was on hands and knees aerating the soil under a rosebush and the lipstick fell out of her pocket.  I picked it up, asking, “Is this for me?” after which she blushed then smiled.       

I bought an Afghan rug for a friend whom once wandered Siberia during the Cold War as a teacher.  She was a young woman back then and a Jew.  Growing up I was afraid to have my picture taken and still am, which reminds me of this when I feel timid about the world:

“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

            -Georgia O’Keefe

7/12/18
Afghanistan