Prologue

By Tatiana Retivov

There is a country where my voice

must hold its daily reckoning

and question this allegiance to

the spirit of the crossroads who

has scattered what remains

too horrible for language

and placed a skull over a stump

to guard his wretched boundaries.

I know his ways so well for I have learned

the jargon of the jackdaws,

and in their hungry chattering I’ve heard

how once so full of carrion they were

that rivers also overflowed,

and how the thirsty steppe so soaked with blood

had flowered in her first and final bloom.

So like another fallen empire, first

it shunned the Western hemisphere

then courted it, and courting failed to honor

the spirit of the crossroads who

dishonored by his retinue

invoked the swanlike Obida

to clap her wings

and clapping thus decrease

rich times and let abundance sink.

Less fallow than divined, this land

when crossed by its own shadows

will wax so lyrical that I

am often rendered speechless.

And though still full of loathing for

its forktongued infidels,

I mean to resurrect their Word,

to mount and harness it,

and beat it till it bleeds and yields

nothing but metaphor.

To know is to comply, to have survived

the spirit of the crossroads’ wrath

is to be guilty only, and fittest not at all.

Accomplice that I am I now lay bare

my burden, in hope that it will bend

the birches down with sorrow to the ground,

and that the steppe so arid once again

will let its grasses droop

until the boatmen scatter with their oars

in drops the sacred rivers of the land.

– T. Retivov, San Francisco, 1983

“Jargon of the jackdaws” is from Nabokov’s translation of “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign: “Stilled is the trilling of nightingales; the jargon of jackdaws has woken.”

This story originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 17.

Photo by Atsushi Tsubokura