OK, I'd like to read about--
half the poems I'll be reading will be from this book,
and half the poems will be new.
First poem is called Ukrainian Pastoral.
And when I was a kid, there was always
lots of photographs around the house.
My father was an avid amateur photographer.
My grandfather, my great grandfather
and all my great uncles were professional portrait
photographers.
And there was one photograph, a beautiful pastoral photograph
of a woman standing on a hillside
and a man rowing in a boat towards the shore.
And those were pictures of my grandparents,
when they were fairly young.
I don't even know if they were married yet at the time.
The photograph was taken in Russia.
The poem's called Ukrainian Pastoral.
On a wooded hillside by a river, a woman
pauses to catch her breath.
Leans against the silver birch.
What she sees, we can't know for her eyes are shut.
She is stocky, young.
Her calves glisten in sunlight.
When she opens her eyes to admit us,
the Earth is a maypole around which she sweeps a clearing.
Upon the water, a small boat is making its way toward shore.
A man rowing, his muscular shoulders
propelling him through mist.
Perhaps he envisions the shape on the hillside,
who might be a wife or a sweetheart waiting,
but his back is to us.
Perhaps he shuts his eyes to hear the river's pulse.
When I enter the parlor, I think you've
been reading the book on your lap, but your eyes are shut.
I remove my old coat.
I see a parakeet preening in its cage.
And the salad of onion and cucumber sat on a table,
by evasive yellow iris.
Was it something you heard, my foot
on the walk, that woke you?
Or does light convert us into people, husband and wife?
The one reading, the other entering an arch
as he does each day of his life.
On the wall, a woman partially hidden
by trees and a man gliding over water,
about whom we can invent a story or better say nothing and wait.