Through the large window at the end of the room
I can see, out in the April garden,
a sudden wind broadcasting the blossom,
from next door’s ancient pear tree, like snow flakes.
A female blackbird is collecting bedding
and struts of twigs and grass, and airlifting
them into the ivy that covers the fence.
On the CD player, between melody
and chords, a dead guitarist’s fingers
slide so poignantly across the strings and frets.
A black and white lithograph, fifty eighth
in a series of a hundred entitled
‘Berezy’, ‘Birches’, bought in Moscow’s
Izmailovsky Market – the May Putin
was first crowned – from the artist’s son, the father
fallen, like most of Russia on hard times, shows,
through a thicket, a tangle of leafless
birch trees, a stretch of water gleaming: beyond,
a low rise with a pale fence and a wooden
dacha small against an alabaster sky.
I write a couplet, in my head, that is
of such Arcadian perfection, of such
bucolic beauty, it stutters into
silence, like the light of fireflies in a jar.
By David Selzer