I
Watching Black Sea sand draw away from your feet the lateness of faith—that teetering while slumped over a phone. That someone of the same hamlet knows little of it, of others of it. A menagerie of pottery shards and sheepskin. That a hermit is to others merely a country: a painting of a woman looking at the back of another woman’s head, her bonnet, her hair escaping.
II
The matriarch wore gloves duct-taped to her sleeves, a mask and sun hat, crying as she sprayed fungicide on her dogwood. Seeing van Gogh’s peasant boots, she would nod about exhaustion massaged then hardened. A one-room house made too dark by curtains. With a vinegar-soaked rag on my thumb, I scrub a corner no one sees. I arrange slivers of mulch at the wood’s edge. And the church’s five-acre crowd in the parking lot howls as if in celebration.
But my culture reveals itself beyond iconostas veiled in smoke, housing mystics at different ages embraced at the knees. Babka and cabbage. Language like a string of muffled bells. What an American might call cold or withholding. Beyond. That he thinks I have. That he has. What appears as a disease. Assuming to wither is divine gift.
III
The Lord’s servant keeps trying to convince me to return to the blessed wine. Unseen worlds inside one spoonful. How many countries inside this one. Walking down Cedar to Taylor, I listen for Carpathian grass hush, that green glow against ankle bones. A lost cat circling a streetlight’s pool in the asphalt. Crouched and hand out. Orbited. The night cool and humid as a mauve coffin. Over video conference, a baritone lulls parishioners out of this world.
IV
Before the word, Americans already had the concept overtakelessness. Overtakelessness of the invisible after the visible’s owned as donation. A Trypillian figurine perched in a Moscow penthouse. Inside a dream of recovery. I’d rather be someone, eternity being too long.
Remember Ruthenians (that exonym) dispersed like threads of cream in tea. The ninety-plus baba whose memory crumbles into a mariachi band. Old tin plates she licks. A red Crimea-shaped mole picked until it leaks in revolt. Then a fighter jet rips a cloud. A mail carrier tries to figure out who’s flying it. Who’s about to be hit. The overtakelessness of right before.
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