Locals Do Say That In Ostrov They Do Have Their Own Chinese Wall Facing West* And Even My Memories There Somehow Bring A Chinese Out Of Me

When I visit Ostrov now

I can say with Yuan Mei:

“I was a pupil too there

forty years ago,

but no one knows me

when I go there today.

I walk alone…”

and even

my walk and its

solitude are not more

than long furrows

plowed unseen

by these very words

in the town, even if still

fragrant with a whiff

of the usual ozone mist

after rains or

in those mornings

that’re bringing in

their bushy clouds

unmooring, disarming

the square with its orbs

and the lined-up streets

with the terracotta facades

then gone out into white,

and whoever would enter

that scented haze may easily

as well get pregnant with a soul

and her mounting ore of silence.

*”The Chinese Wall” is a local somewhat derogatory nickname for a row of concrete apartment buildings constructed in the late 1970s just west off the Sorela heart of Ostrov, the size, height and brutalist conception of which directly and jarringly clashes with the architectonic unity and harmony of Ostrov’s Sorela.

My Childhood Ponds of Bor

Those little puddle-ponds

on the sloping hill

above the village

past the abandoned orchard

fill with solitude

like silence of music

catnapping in a fiddle

on the workshop wall

for so long now

that it would have disappeared

into its stone and the lime—

into a nearly unheard-of

world, unseen—unless one

would still be lucky to form

the air into sound and keys

of its knowing in a verse that flows.

Yet the water of the pond unrippled

among the rushes that lisp slowly

in the wind wetted by a recent rain

has been all these ages a wicket,

wicket door, branka, and a Heaven’s

turning point, and the vor or little raft

left there by some wingless boys

is from a flower which had fallen

down into the long ago forgotten

and unknown a husk, an empty shell

even though its radiance and pollen

and its placid scent may still hang around.

Like the pond and the heart—

when the two would meet

and become once more tied

in solitude or worldless reflection…