Raw: ingrown: unrest.
Indifferent to me
now, the location
of my wholly aloneness.
Stones that stumble me
home bag-heavy,
a housing as mine as anyone's
ward or fortress.
Indifferent to me also—veldtless
lion—the faces that mow
me down—the human clique
that will cast me
inevitably out: into
me, my
lonely motive, a polar
bear minus the ice.
Where I am unfit (and I refuse
to assume their sizes),
where I am lower than anyone,
the rung of my humanhood,
is indifferent to me, as are
the enticements
of my native tongue,
its lactose lure. What does it matter
in what language I am
mistaken by anyone? (Or the unmeetable
readers, mouthers of headlines,
rumor-mongers). They are at home
in the twentieth century,
but I am prior
to time, a log left in the axed
avenue of trees. Indistinguishable
now, the people—
their brand of sameness,
and most indifferent of all—
these names wrenched
from their nativity, the vital
dates erased. It seems
the soul is never
born in time, but only in place.
But my country so unmothered me
that the keenest spy
could eye me over and find
no native taint.
Houses maroon me. Temples empty.
My only refuge is in-
difference. But if, off the beaten,
there crept the red: original:
rowanberry. . . .
—translated from the Russian by Christina Davis
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