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.
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