Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Bart, Vyatcheslav
Master of Fine Arts - MFA
University of British Columbia
Do Suns Dream of Hummingbird Looms is a book of lyric poetry, exploring loss and the possibility of renewal. A personal story of the loss of home and immigration is nestled inside a narrative of love and imagination. Genres within genres explore spaces within spaces in a number of different settings, including a town in Kazakhstan, a town in Canada, a village in Japan, and a fantastical city on another planet. The collection attempts to hold an intricate cosmos of human and more than human life from the perspective of a Russian-Jewish immigrant. A complex woven structure is part of a poetic building of “the ark” – a recurring symbol, an inclusive liminal space of metaphor. The core of the thesis is made up of several long sequences of lyric fragments. This core of longer sequences is framed by two shorter sequences. These are sealed by a single visual assemblage poem, a crescendo of formal and thematic features. Two interconnected photographs form the outermost frame. Braiding is a key formal feature and theme. The poems enact different forms of braiding individually and as series. The opening photograph is intricately matched with the closing photograph. The shorter framing sequence which starts the collection is matched with the shorter framing sequence at the end. The longer, core serial poems are pairs of braided sequences. In the first, a series of prose poems set in the author’s Soviet hometown in Kazakhstan, with an emphasis on the image of the ship and imaginary journeys, is braided with a series in verse, addressed to Beatrice and set in an ethereal, kaleidoscopic landscape of metaphors for the beloved. In the second, a series of poems in prose are set in the same hometown, with an emphasis on family life, domestic violence, the criminal world, and a child’s experience in a small town undergoing the collapse of the USSR. These prose poems are braided with a series of poems in verse, set in a fantastical urban landscape called Beatrice.
DO SUNS DREAM OF HUMMINGBIRD LOOMSby Vyatcheslav Bart A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS OF FINE ARTS in The College of Graduate Studies (Creative Writing) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) April 2025 © Vyatcheslav Bart, 2025The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: Do Suns Dream of Hummingbird Looms submitted by Vyatcheslav Bart in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Fine Arts. Matthew Rader, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies __________________________________________________________________________ Supervisor Francisco Peña, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies ______________________________________________________________________________ Supervisory Committee Member Harold Rhenisch______________________________________________________________________________ Supervisory Committee Member Jodey Castricano, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies ______________________________________________________________________________ University Examiner iiAbstractDo Suns Dream of Hummingbird Looms is a book of lyric poetry, exploring loss and the possibility of renewal. A personal story of the loss of home and immigration is nestled inside a narrative of love and imagination. Genres within genres explore spaces within spaces in a number of different settings, including a town in Kazakhstan, a town in Canada, a village in Japan, and a fantastical city on another planet. The collection attempts to hold an intricate cosmos of human and more than human life from the perspective of a Russian-Jewish immigrant. A complex woven structure is part of a poetic building of “the ark” – a recurring symbol, an inclusive liminal space of metaphor. The core of the thesis is made up of several long sequences of lyric fragments. This core of longer sequences is framed by two shorter sequences. These are sealed by a single visual assemblage poem, a crescendo of formal and thematic features. Two interconnected photographs form the outermost frame. Braiding is a key formal feature and theme. The poems enact different forms of braiding individually and as series. The opening photograph is intricately matched with the closing photograph. The shorter framing sequence which starts the collection is matched with the shorter framing sequence at the end. The longer, core serial poems are pairs of braided sequences. In the first, a series of prose poems set in the author’s Soviet hometown in Kazakhstan, with an emphasis on the image of the ship and imaginary journeys, is braided with a series in verse, addressed to Beatrice and set in an ethereal, kaleidoscopic landscape of metaphors for the beloved. In the second, a series of poems in prose are set in the same hometown, with an emphasis on family life, domestic violence, the criminal world, and a child’s experience in a small town undergoing the collapse of the USSR. These prose poems are braided with a series of poems in verse, set in a fantastical urban landscape called Beatrice. iiiLay SummaryDo Suns Dream of Hummingbird Looms is a book of poetry in verse and prose, exploring loss and the possibility of renewal. A personal story of the loss of home and immigration is nestled inside a narrative of love and imagination. Genres within genres explore spaces within spaces in a number of different settings, including a town in Kazakhstan, a town in Canada, a village in Japan, and a fantastical city on another planet. All of it possibly dreamed by a dragon curled around the core of the sun. Or so a Russian-Jewish boy imagines as he travels in space and time on an enormous ark named Beatrice. Or perhaps it is the ark that is imagining the boy. ivPrefaceGenerative AI was not used for the research, drafting or any other aspect of this thesis.vTable of ContentsAbstract.....................................................................................................................................................iiiLay Summary............................................................................................................................................ivPreface........................................................................................................................................................vTable of Contents......................................................................................................................................viAcknowledgements..................................................................................................................................viiTo Beatrice –...........................................................................................................................................viiiIntroduction...............................................................................................................................................ixI. In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Notes Toward Building A Nesting Ark......................ixDo Suns Dream of Hummingbird Looms..................................................................................................1McDougall Creek, 2023.............................................................................................................................3“Meanwhile, the Utsu pass behind her”.....................................................................................................4Where is the way out, I asked the soldiers and stony faces answered there isn’t any................................5And if you say, let there be light, and there is no light?.............................................................................6“And if you say, let there be a place for the light to call home”................................................................7“The first time I felt addressed by my home was after I lost it”................................................................8“Somewhere in a delta of the river of time”..............................................................................................9“In the blank piece of sky, I found the promise of another place”...........................................................10“The sun”..................................................................................................................................................11“The enormous ship is its own cosmos”..................................................................................................12“Hey, Beatrice”........................................................................................................................................13“You go outside and its summer air”.......................................................................................................14“Hey Beatrice, miracle”...........................................................................................................................15“Those other windows”............................................................................................................................16“Alyona-Beatrice”....................................................................................................................................17“Beatrice city”..........................................................................................................................................35“Ice to the song of nerpas underneath”....................................................................................................83“There was no water, no light, no gas to cook on”..................................................................................84“When I look at a Ponderosa pine”..........................................................................................................85“And if I told you”...................................................................................................................................86“If I say – everything is poetry”...............................................................................................................87“But if I said”...........................................................................................................................................88“Watching a match burn”.........................................................................................................................89“Darkness is story time”..........................................................................................................................90“When I first came here”..........................................................................................................................91“To come back from the snow to laundry drying in the living room”.....................................................93Owl, Owl..................................................................................................................................................94 Wood Lake, December 2024...................................................................................................................95Bibliography.............................................................................................................................................96viAcknowledgementsThis work is inspired by accounts of miracles in the Hebrew Bible. Everything that has happened to me since my arrival is a miracle and I owe it to a deity with many names. None of this would have happened without Nancy Holmes: two paths diverged in a wood and your response made all the difference. Matthew Rader’s ability at reading poems and people leaves me in awe. I hope I can one day put as much heart and care into the art of making others better as Matt and Nancy. I owe Harold Rhenisch – a troll, soul pruner and Vernon anomaly – a series of profound encounters with trees, ice and kindness. Conversations with Francisco Peña on poetry in the Hebrew Bible, memory and mysticism, contributed to the visionary quality of my experiences. Sharon Thesen’s art of being numerous, in poetry and life, has been a source of sustenance and inspiration. Paul Nelson’s mind-altering generosity and stimulating readings helped take first steps in Cascadia. I would like to thank Shawn Serfas for his kind attention. Samuel Roy-Bois for rich and rewarding coursework and for his sensitivity, Tania Willard for teaching to think differently about sites and citations, Patrick Lundeen and Michael V. Smith for warmth and support, Andreas Rutkauskas, Denise Kenney, and Erin Scott for exposures to their expertise and for adding new dimensions to my work. I am grateful to Karis Shearer for new opportunities and directions for creativity. I would like to thank Mayu Takasaki for the patience and support in the endeavour of learning Japanese, help with translation, invention and creation in a wonderful new language. Wanda Lock, thank you for your time with butterflies. This assemblage would not have been possible without the support of fellow students in the poetic polis: Miriam Cummings, thank you for your large, warm presence across disciplines; Tosh Sherkat, for communism next Christmas; Amy Wang, for still being here, and Christine McPhee, for choosing poetry. Troy – for coffee and graffiti at minus 30. Negar – for kintsugi. Victoria – for Spem in alium. Bibek – for everything. For the deity’s other names, please see my poems.vii To Beatrice – what I didn’t say then, let me say now. viiiIntroductionI. In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Notes Toward Building A Nesting ArkIn my father’s house are many mansions John 14:2In the Hebrew Bible, the ark is a floating cosmos of lifeforms, a nomad home in a time of global catastrophe. The words of Jesus in John 14 refer to an inclusive spiritual space. The subject of my thesis is the ark as a space of “many mansions.” I was born in the Siberian, Russian-speaking part of Soviet Kazakhstan, into an atheist ethos of sharing an earthly Jerusalem in a land eternal that was already unravelling. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and following the loss of my home, poetry became my movable house of many mansions. This is a series of notes toward the building of an ark. 1. Doorways“Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood,” writes Dante Alighieri in the opening lines of Inferno (1.1-2). By the light of “the planet that leads men aright” (1.18) he encounters a variety of beasts, and a poet who leads him through hell. Among other things, Dante sees a forest of humanoid trees (Canto 13). My thesis opens with an image taken at McDougall Creek, after the fire of 2023: a hole in the ground left by a tree that had been consumed by fire in its entirety. A vaguely human-shaped outline, with a network of empty tunnels where the roots were, forming an eerie underworld of charred earth. ixSince losing my home, I have been haunted by phantoms, recurrent nightmares, feelings of loss, images of lost limbs and skin, feelings of grief and emptiness, an assemblage of feelings I sometimes describe as “white darkness.” The thesis is an attempt to find a way out of this rootless wasteland, to transform the white darkness. 2. In search of a promised landIsrael, the country we moved to from post-soviet Kazakhstan, did not resolve the loss, but became a phase of the trauma. A sense of belonging elsewhere haunted me. Aspects of the original identity persisted, complicated by competing identities: Russian (as opposed to Soviet), Kazakhstani, Israeli, Jewish non-Israeli, Eastern European, Western European, North American. The loss of a community in Kazakhstan was replaced by a sense of growing up with and at once apart from the new community in Israel, friends and family, the State itself. This prolonged an unresolved attachment to a place which no longer existed, made more acute by the inability to go where a vital part of me belonged, or establishing a life, home and renewed identity in Israel, resulting in an extended crisis of creative identity, and a painful decision to abandon my Russian language in favour of English, when my creativity depended on my mother tongue, and when I felt that creativity was my only refuge. The word holocaust originally denoted a burnt offering consumed by fire in its entirety, derived from the Greek “holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God.”1 Possibly because of a sense of loss, I have an inclination to accumulate and assemble, collect and recollect images and meanings, layers of sense and sensation, braiding composite narratives, worlds interwoven, fleeting meetings in a fluid medium for re-membering home. Among other things, the image from McDougall Creek is a metaphor for my Russian language. 3. Land of fire, land of light1 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "What Is the Origin of the Term Holocaust?". Encyclopedia Britannica, 25 Jan. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/story/what-is-the-origin-of-the-term-holocaust. Accessed 18 February 2025.xMetaphors have been a key way of moving through a dark wood the roots of which have been consumed by fire. The McDougall Creek photograph is followed by three poems linking the theme of light, land and loss. The poems echo biblical language and pose lyrical questions, which seem to have no answer: And if you say, let there be a place for the light to call home, and a lambent path leading past a grove of ponderosas, and a heart to delight in the shimmer of pine needles, the morning before first snow...and there is no home for the light, and there is pain where the shimmer should be?And yet they are answered, in verse. Who is asking and who is giving the answers in the ark? An ethereal lyric presence, the speaking voice in these first poems is not yet concretely defined.And sometimes trees,their calligraphy, light reflected off mosaics of fallen leaves, reflected off mosaics and gathered by the dome of a templenever built, an icon of light, byzantine mist, to wander in and be transfigured.Whoever the speakers are, they suggest poetry as a form of knowing and being – being at once here and elsewhere. They suggest that a question can be answered poetically, and that answers may lie elsewhere, in a world beyond. The motif of wings and metamorphosis starts here – change and metaphors, the possibility of creation where none seems possible:And if you say, let there be light, and there is no light?When I describe a link that in a line of empty bottles multiplies in every lucid fault of glass, a jar of nutshells,xia dying bee between the bottom of an upside-down glass and the merciless palm it had stung, the glassand palmso real for that pollen-laden death, do I describe a bee sting – or the tip of a wing –another – or that same –flamebehind a swaying,incensed landscape?4. In the beginningsThe opening words of the Hebrew Bible are traditionally interpreted as “In the beginning.” However, commentators note the absence in the original Hebrew of a definite article (ה – the). The more ambiguous construction of the original – תי Nשִׁא Qרֵ Sבְּ – “in beginning,” suggests possibilities: that this is not the ultimate beginning of everything, that something of the world had already been created, by forces never fixed in record or law. That we are witnessing one of several beginnings, taking place simultaneously, or which may yet take place in a future time. That one beginning may be followed by multiple events, each its own beginning. That the origin – and fate – of this world, a world, the world as multiple beginnings, is not sealed, open to metamorphosis.The world of my thesis has multiple beginnings. We enter through an image. Not a word, but a three-dimensional ideogram. At once a beginning and an end – a motif explored throughout. This image is followed by samples of languages, Hebrew and Japanese. One of the Japanese characters – – 間 has the related meanings of gate, a gap, and a space which binds. The Hebrew is Ezekiel 37:1: .תוֹמ XצָZעֲ ה Xא Qלֵ Sמ ,אי Nה Sוְ ;ה Xעֲ Sקְ Nבְּ _ה ךְוֹת Sבְּ י Nנִ Qחֵי Nנִ Sי _וְ ,ה Xוְה Sי _חֵוּרֵ Sבְ י Nנִ Qא Nצָוֹיּ _וְ ,ה Xוְה Sי-ד_י ,י _לֵ Xעֲ ה Xת Sי XהThe hand of the LORD was upon me, and He took me out by the wind of the LORD and set me down in the valley, and it was filled with bones.xiiIn the beginning was the word, or a word, one of many possibilities for creation. As we progress further into the forest of beginnings and possibilities, we encounter a human figure, slight, round faced, curious eyes twinkling behind large glasses. A damselfly. Perhaps a guide.5. The color of ash The next poem – the next beginning – has the contemporary Japanese painter, Kyoko Nakamura, travelling through a different valley, visited by visions of her own: multiple moons, messenger birds, inspiration for a hanging nihonga scroll. Meanwhile, the Utsu pass behind her, descending into the valley toward Mariko in the growing dusk, Kyoko remembers how once, crossing a rice field, she looked up and saw an egret with a branch in its beak, passing low overhead, the flutter of leaves, she turned around to see the bird flap once, glide downward toward a grove, and disappear, and now something meshes in the two landscapes, hill and plain, the legend of the many moons of Mariko, an alien landscape, and she knows what the messenger birds in her painting will be carrying [...]Traditional Japanese pigments are made of animal glue, bones, shells, and ash. Perhaps scorched earth can be moulded, ground, applied to a canvas. 6. In the beginnings, I made the endsThese beginnings – doors within doors, nested mansions – have counterparts in the multiple endings of the thesis. The end of things are a motif in many of the poems. The world never stops ending where I am. Eastern Europe has been a place of extraordinary violence for centuries. Eastern Orthodox religion is eschatological. My imagination is prone to imagining the worst. Time and the world seem to be always ending. Sergei Fudel was an Eastern-Orthodox soviet dissident known for the idea of a monasticism practised “in the world” – in a lay setting, in the officially and often violently atheist Soviet Union: “Monasticism in the world [...] is the affirmation of the narrow path of the Gospel for all, not only for a small group of people sheltered by the walls of a monastery. It is an effort to live the xiiiChristian life fully in the very swirl of daily concerns. In this sense it is a return to early Christianity. “Monasticism in the world” was not invented, it was brought into existence by the conditions of church history. Drawing to its end, history rediscovers its beginnings. (43)To build a hermitage without walls. In the Christian imagination, the monastery, the heavenly city of Jerusalem, and the ark are instances of the same space, different rooms of a house of “many mansions.” There is no consensus on how a space like that might be achieved “in the world.” The combination of opposites, beginnings and endings, prose and verse, serve in the thesis as the foundation of a movable hermitage, an ark, a nomad home of many mansions. 7. Invisible countryIn the short story “The Cherry Stone,” the soviet nonconformist, an author of highly poetic prose, Yuri Olesha, describes a place his isolated, monastic character calls “an invisible country”: I travelled through an invisible country. [...] I was making a double journey but only one-half of it was visible. The passers-by could see a man crossing a deserted green common. [...] He could see his shadow going before him, sprawling over the ground; the shadow had long, pale legs. I crossed the common and all of a sudden the shadow climbed a brick wall and lost its head. This the passers-by did not see, only I saw it. I entered a corridor between two buildings. The corridor was infinitely lofty and shadowy. The ground here was rotten and gave like garden soil under foot. A wild, forlorn looking dog ran towards me, sidling against the wall. We passed each other. Then I glanced round. Far behind me the threshold was bright. For a moment the dog formed a dark protuberance in the brightness. Then it ran off across the common, and only then I saw that it was a rusty-colored animal. (148)Accessible through a combination of “attention and imagination,” it is a space of observation, the contemplation of minute detail, its sheer being, of the poetic mind itself in the act of noticing the world’s ever-unfolding beginnings, “in direct opposition to society and the established order,” beyond the reach of vigilant authorities and citizens loyal to “the plan.” Not unlike Dante, making his way through a series of strange visions, the character seems to be looking for a way out of the dark wood of soviet utilitarianism. The story culminates in the planting of an imaginary tree, a phantom cherry orchard, a garden of attention and imagination, of memory, and of love for a Beatrice named Natasha: xivDear Natasha, I forgot the principal thing: the Plan. I acted without consulting the Plan. In five years' time a huge concrete works will have risen on this deserted spot where now you can see nothing but useless walls and ditches. My sister Imagination is an imprudent creature. They will begin to lay the foundations in the spring time and then what will become of my poor silly little cherry stone? Yes, for a tree planted in your honour will blossom there in the Invisible Country some day. (156-157)My thesis attempts to chart a similar narrow path toward a phantom tree, a counterpart to the opening image at McDougall Creek, an ending, which is also a beginning. The ark is a moving hanging garden. 8. A narrow road to the interiorOne of the elements of the Eastern Orthodox monastic tradition is hesychasm – the seeking of inner stillness. In this contemplative prayer, a mantra is repeated – any short variant of Jesus Christ, have mercy on me – so that words give way to a wordless presence and “the mind descends into the heart.” A quiet rhythmic presence takes residence in the body, an echo of another world. In my poem “Let there be a land where lands meet,” the heart takes a further step and “goes out toward the world”: Somewhere in a delta of the river of time Let there be a land where lands meet A frontier of rhymes and miraclesFor us to pursue happiness thereWhere the mind descends into the heartand the heart goes out toward the worldAnd the soul comes out to meet the heartI suggest an alternative idea for the soul, located not in the body alone, but at a prayerful confluence of the heart and the world. In the poem, the contours of an invisible land reveal themselves, over a river, on a blade of grass:Over a river at sunsetScaled like the wings of a butterflypatterned like a peacock spidershaking and shimmeringas it dances on a blade of grassxvFrom the outer edges of beginnings that are endings, and endings that are beginnings, we are making our way, by the light of “the planet that leads men aright,” toward the interior of the ark. We begin to hear the inner rhythm. 9. Braiding LandscapesOlesha was a soviet contemporary and counterpart of the emigre Vladimir Nabokov. Born in the same year, with a background in the writings of 19th century Russian Symbolists, they shared the ethos of attention and imagination which grants access to a special elsewhere, where prose and poetry, realism and fantasy, form a composite whole. What Nabokov adds to this complex braiding, in baroque late novels like Ada or Ardor, is an eccentric meshing of genres and cultures, a preoccupation with memory and time, in a story about an alternate universe where Russia, France, the US, and Canada are a single continent and country, with three official languages. My thesis uses several ways to create a lyrical landscape of braided sequences. The opening photograph is intricately linked to the closing one. The three opening poems have a corresponding coda in a short sequence at the end. The core of the thesis – its interior – is two pairs of serial poems, each pair braided, a segment from one on one page, followed by a segment from another on the next page. Echoes and correspondences, winged images and metaphors fleeting between worlds, bind the sequences. The alternating use of verse and prose helps distinguish the two sequences for the reader. It is another way in which the poems mesh different realms – prose and verse – alluding to a similar blurring of formal boundaries in the Hebrew Bible, where verse is not always distinguished visually on the page, but can be apprehended through rhythm internal to it, a nested construction. Parallel worlds are made porous and linked this way, forming a continuum. 10. The Beatrice-Alyona ContinuumxviThe short poem invoking “a land where lands meet” is part of the first braided sequence. The image of the ark is introduced here. Reflecting on the loss of home, the adult speaker remembers that as a child he would imagine the building his family lived in was a giant, multi-story, labyrinthine ship: The first time I felt addressed by my home was after I lost it. Now that it no longer exists, it speaks to me from a mist of spacetime over a snowy peak of heartbreak. I used to stare for hours at the blank rectangle of clear sky in the window seen from the floor of our living room, imagining the house as an enormous ship of many stories, carrying me across oceans. The farther away I was from home, the stronger the link became, the larger and more intimate my nonexistent place of birth, the more expansive the locus of loss, my love, vulnerability, the care I tend to take with things and others, the courage to care, as well as the fear and pain.He names the ship Alyona, after his first love. The sequence that follows is a series of imagined journeys in space and time, resembling Genesis, reflecting the child-speaker’s wide-ranging interests in history, physics and astronomy, culminating in a memory of a first romantic episode. Part of the motif of beginning-endings, the romantic encounter is at the same time a parting, prompted by the speaker’s imminent departure in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union: We are here because I’m leaving. The lady bug spreads its wings but stays. The filmy glimmer of the wings. You whisper to it, blow a kiss, to make it fly, burst into an embarrassed smile, swivel round, point – Firebugs! – and run. I follow, sliding down into a clump of nettles.Braided with this sequence is another serial poem, addressed to Beatrice, an allusion to Dante, the real-life prototype of the eponymous character in Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy.Hey, Beatrice!Intricate electron,humming eternity of the heart.Your eyes,the mistof water falling,the nibbling of rainbow feathers,with a slender beak,sparring with a swallowtail over sunflowerson gabriel-golden afternoons.xvii11. Love and TransportA key inspiration for the language of this braided sequences is The Song of Songs. The ancient text braids two voices, two lovers, who are now together, now apart. A striking feature of this biblical text is the use of metaphors, comparisons which can appear at once striking and outlandish to the modern reader. A possible reading is that the lovers are coping with separation by seeing the other in the landscapes around them. The absent object of love dwells poetically in the objects around them, in what they see and know, creating a landscape of metaphors: a land where sheep and does, doves and hills, rivers and towers all stand metaphorically for the beloved.One of the tendencies of my imagination, is my tendency to see my lost home in things. This experience has been heightened here, many features of the landscape, shapes, sounds, smells and colors, the qualities of light and air themselves, reminding me of my hometown. 12. The body of metaphorRather than attempting accurate or plausible portrayals of each other as recognizable human bodies, the speakers of The Song of Songs are instead evoking a landscape where any object can be charged with a special metaphoric presence. In The Bible and Poetry, Michael Edwards suggests that this language is meant to evoke a kind of invigorated sense of a world alive with love, divinely-inspired, wonder, at the world, and at “something else,” another world:By being, let us say, exaggerated, the figures in the Song of Songs, along with the extreme work on the words’ sonorities, highlight this virtue of poetry, and succeed in entirely transfiguring the world, in order to make the outline of a new earth appear [...] an exhilaration of figures that jostle one another and branch off, the poem illustrates perfectly the joy of poetry, this ardor and joyfulness of spirit that naturally excites poets, and sings the world that the figures transform (116).xviiiThe first braided sequence in my thesis is a landscape where the various creatures and entities evoked – hummingbirds and electrons, lakes and lichen, bears and glaciers – are charged with mercurial metaphoric energy. They are metaphors for each other and everything is a metaphor for the beloved – both Beatrice and Alyona at once, one a metaphor for the other, and both a metaphor for something else, a universe, the cosmos of the ark. 13. The medium of metaphorMetaphor is the animating medium of the world of this sequence, a source of transport between being and worlds. Commenting on the philosophy of time in his novel Ada or Ardor, Nabokov says that “time is really a fluid medium for the cultivation of metaphors” (Strong Opinions p.122). Ada or Ardor is Nabokov’s improvisation on the ancient theme of the Song of Songs: two lovers, two voices, a metaphorically charged style that is brilliantly outlandish, meant to evoke a cosmic experience, and a sense of an outside, a something or somewhere – or someone – else containing all of that extravaganza. Time is a key theme, but so is love, and when Nabokov names one, he also means the other, an entanglement of the two, denoted by the word ardor – Ardor is Ada is lovetime, a braided space, a fluid continuum of time, passion and imagination along which souls in the story travel across bodies and universes. 14. The Beatrice-Kokshetau ContinuumThe next braided sequence in my thesis weaves together two worlds. One is set in my childhood hometown, in soviet Kazakhstan, around the time of the collapse of the USSR:I remember the sound. A factory, a construction site. He would take me places he worked. There would be an office in a trailer in the middle of a huge puddle or gas spill, reached over planks, over bricks. He would slide open a panel, reveal a secret back room. Boxes, TVs, VHS players, carpets, chandeliers, furniture. An ark he was building as the soviet one was sinking. xixThe other is set in a fantastical city on another planet. Beatrice has undergone a metamorphosis and become a dreamlike landscape referred to as Beatrice, while the beloved is now addressed as “stranger”:Hey, strangerRemember Beatrice?The ice cold mist around gold ice peaksin the mornings?The silent ringingof sunlit bellsas you described it.I remember the sound. It is a love story, a variation on the previous Beatrice sequence, with a similar metaphor-driven logic: Padding about nakedwith the seagulls, the windows of the bedroomopen, your studioseagull sunny. The globe barin the kitchenette – sliding back a hemisphere, the sun revelling in the tinkling glass. In the light rooma wanderer butterfly, quietly lostin the blaze. Love again binds two separate worlds. Images echo across the divide: motifs of light and fire, butterflies and birds, dreams and imaginary journeys, secret doors and compartments, spaces opening xxonto other spaces – and adding up to a further construction of the ark, its “many mansions” and a cosmos of lifeforms, human and more than human. The child speaker of the hometown sequence is linked to an adult self in the fantastical city. The setting in this second braided sequence is more concrete – two cities, two planets. The body of the ark – a floating hermitage, a metaphor for metaphors – is revealing ever more of its dimensions. 15. The shape of memoryThese two long serial braids culminate in a single assemblage poem. Using multiple languages – English, Hebrew, and Japanese – it is worded and shaped visually to echo the motifs of the thesis: stars and ice crystals, angels and butterflies, ideograms and hieroglyphs, hearts and minds...The poem is another instance of braiding. The setting is again double: lake Baikal in Siberia (the broader region I am from – Siberian Central Asia) and the location of Genesis 18, the plains of Mamre, where Abraham sees three messenger figures, a braided entity standing for a single one. When performing the poem in public with others, I translate the Hebrew as I read:And God showed Himself to him, at the oaks of Mamre the front of the tent three figures and he raised his eyes, and he saw, there they wereThe speaker of the poem is a plural “we.” The description of the lake is visionary in tone, but it is at the same time realistic in detail – lake Baikal does look this way under some conditions in winter. xxiA refrain refers to the calls of nerpas – the species of seal unique to the lake. The animal seals and the “seal of the dragon” from the eschatological Book of Revelations are meant to be a subtle reference to each other. Visually, the poem resembles a seal, a binding emblem, an image appearing also in the Song of Songs 8:6, a metaphor for the body of the beloved: “Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave.”A third location is the ark. Around it the icy sea unfolds, but it would be simplistic to imagine a physical object in the middle of the frozen lake. Rather, it is the metaphoric medium binding the real icy landscape of Siberia and the mythic desert of Genesis. Real and mythic landscapes, human and more than human realities, are again braided in a crescendo. 16. The child who is not a child is bornAmong the speakers of the “we” are both the younger boy, on his imaginary ship, and the older speaker remembering this, at the end of the thesis. The subsequent coda of poems seals this Möbius strip of voices and landscapes. The child of the hometown sequences exists on a continuum with the adult, now based in Kelowna, BC. Between them, they contain the chorus of voices encountered in the serial sequences. And they are in turn contained by the framing poems of the Japanese painter and her messenger birds, paired at the end of the thesis with the great grey owl. The opening image from McDougall Creek is paired with a closing photograph from Wood Lake. The smoking lake surface was observed during the coldest day of 2023. xxiiThe image of a tree branch against the shimmering surface of a smoking lake resembles a burning bush. Fire again, but a different one. Because of my tendency to impose the pattern of lost things on what’s in front of me, I also see the white and black trunk of a birch, a phantom tree, rooted in light and shadow above the water, a white darkness reshaped as home and hermitage. A hanging garden named Beatrice.In one of the poems toward the end of the thesis, I quote from the end of Dante’s Divine Comedy:Dante has this line:“bound by love into one single volume.”I tried to fold the world,with all its vanities,into a song of songs. Back in my hometown - a kind of restin movementaway from home.The space this gives youto have the things you cannot have.Ideogrammatic in its own way, dark over the bright, the shimmer around a delta of black veins is evocative of the wings of an insect – a butterfly or ladybug. An older speaker remembering his younger self imagining the nested riddle of a floating cosmos wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. 17. A Floating Garden of Metaphors – The Ark as RealityThe Hebrew Bible is a portable library compiled in exile for the purpose of sustaining an identity in crisis. A highly varied assemblage of texts, it contains histories of war and exile, supernatural accounts and prophecy, philosophical pessimism and ecstatic love, framed by narratives of xxiiicreation and redemption. The styles are just as varied, with verse often nested within prose, to form what James L. Kugel calls “a continuum of styles”:“[...] the highly structured ornamented style of biblical poetry at its most formal slides imperceptibly into something far less regular [...] and that style in turn slides into what we call prose. There are not two ways of writing in biblical Hebrew but a continuum of styles [...].” (The Great Poems of the Bible, 25) To speak of two distinctive and exclusive ways of writing in the Hebrew Bible – “prose” that is distinct from “poetry” – would be misleading, says Kugel: “Biblical Israelites had no terms corresponding to these, and there is no indication that they thought of their sacred writings as falling under one of these two general headings” (25). The biblical Israelite mindset is still with us and has been highly influential. Writers like Michel de Montaigne and Gustave Flaubert blurred distinctions between prose and poetry and French literature is often credited with inventing the prose poem. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is a highly poetic layering of symbols and styles influenced by Shakespeare and the Bible. Bruno Schulz’s densely-wrought depictions of small-town life mix fiction, essay and prose poetry forms, likewise influenced by Jewish biblical traditions. Yuri Olesha’s and Nabokov’s writings are rich in prose poetry, allude to the Bible, and are indebted to the highly poetic prose of the earlier Russian Symbolists, like Andrei Bely, who were in turn influenced by baroque 18th century authors like the itinerant poet-philosopher Hryhory Skovoroda, a biblical exegete who saw his native Russian-Ukrainian Sloboda land as a biblical space where everything was alive with mystical symbolism. This form of poetic thinking, and in particular the mystical understanding of metaphoric language as revealing of intertwined realities, survived in late soviet poets like Arkadii xxivDragomoschenko, whose work is very much a fluid “continuum of styles,” blending verse and prose, poetic and essay forms, and whose metaphoric explorations focused on a specific object, like his poem “Nasturtium as Reality,” are in many ways a variation on the lovers’ metaphoric litanies for each other in the Song of Songs. This tradition has shaped my interest in multifarious, polyphonic constructions of verse and prose suitable to my inclination to re-collect and re-member a layered reality where metaphor is home. xxvDo Suns Dream of Hummingbird Looms1This is where birds make their nest, the stork has her home in fir trees. — Psalm 104Once more I compare the poem to an Egyptian boat of the dead. In this boat, everything is equipped for life; nothing is forgotten. — Osip Mandelstam, “About the Nature of the Word” 2 間 2 詩 3 時 4McDougall Creek, 2023.תוֹמ XצָZעֲ ה Xא Qלֵ Sמ ,אי Nה Sוְ ;ה Xעֲ Sקְ Nבְּ _ה ךְוֹת Sבְּ י Nנִ Qחֵי Nנִ Sי _וְ ,ה Xוְה Sי _חֵוּרֵ Sבְ י Nנִ Qא Nצָוֹיּ _וְ ,ה Xוְה Sי-ד_י ,י _לֵ Xעֲ ה Xת Sי XהThe hand of the LORD was upon me, and the LORD carried me out in a spirit, and set me down in the midst of the valley, and it was full of bones. (Ezekiel 37:1) 2 Gap; gate; space that binds people3 poetry4 time3“Meanwhile, the Utsu pass behind her”Meanwhile, the Utsu pass behind her, descending into the valley toward Mariko in the growing dusk, Kyoko remembers how once, crossing a rice field, she looked up and saw an egret with a branch in its beak, passing low overhead, the flutter of leaves, she turned around to see the bird flap once, glide downward toward a grove, and disappear, and now something meshes in the two landscapes, hill and plain, the legend of the many moons of Mariko, an alien landscape, and she knows what the messenger birds in her painting will be carrying, and following the path round the side of a hill in the direction of Chojiya, followed by moons over hilltops, feeling grateful, to the clear air in a dip formed for a moment by two hilltops, already moving apart, she can see herself kneeling over the scroll with a brush, more brushes between the fingers of the other hand, dyes in the bowls, forgetting the weight of her body as she colors in the moons.4Where is the way out, I asked the soldiers and stony faces answered there isn’t any. And sometimes a dead leaf brushes your shoulder like a hand, and you look around, but there is no one there. 5And if you say, let there be light, and there is no light?When I describe a link that in a line of empty bottles multiplies in every lucid fault of glass, a jar of nutshells,a dying bee between the bottom of an upside-down glass and the merciless palm it had stung, the glassand palmso real for that pollen-laden death, do I describe a bee sting – or the tip of a wing –another – or that same –flamebehind a swaying,incensed landscape? 6“And if you say, let there be a place for the light to call home”And if you say, let there be a place for the light to call home, and a lambent path leading past a grove of ponderosas, and a heart to delight in the shimmer of pine needles, the morning before first snow...and there is no home for the light, and there is pain where the shimmer should be?And sometimes trees,their calligraphy, light reflected off mosaics of fallen leaves, reflected off mosaics and gathered by the dome of a templenever built, an icon of light, byzantine mist, to wander in and be transfigured.7“The first time I felt addressed by my home was after I lost it”The first time I felt addressed by my home was after I lost it. Now that it no longer exists, it speaks to me from a mist of spacetime over a snowy peak of heartbreak. I used to stare for hours at the blank rectangle of clear sky in the window seen from the floor of our living room, imagining the house as an enormous ship of many stories, carrying me across oceans. I would lie on my back on the floor, listening. The farther away I was from home, the stronger the link became, the larger and more intimate my nonexistent place of birth, the more expansive the locus of loss, my love, vulnerability, the care I tend to take with things and others, the courage to care, as well as the fear and pain.8“Somewhere in a delta of the river of time” Somewhere in a delta of the river of time Let there be a land where lands meet A frontier of rhymes and miraclesFor us to pursue happiness thereWhere the mind descends into the heartand the heart goes out toward the worldAnd the soul comes out to meet the heartOver a river at sunsetScaled like the wings of a butterflypatterned like a peacock spidershaking and shimmeringas it dances on a blade of grass9“In the blank piece of sky, I found the promise of another place”In the blank piece of sky, I found the promise of another place. The familiar room, its drafty windows, the peeling wallpaper, the small radio high up on the wall, straddled by a devil, one horn missing, a single stringy leg round the tuning knob, the chipped old writing desk with the green lamp, the bear-and-tree-stump lamp above the bed, the piano, the record player on the piano, over which you climb onto the lacquered wardrobe, my cave, right under the cracking ceiling, where a family of mosquitoes is hoarding rubies of blood, where the big plush toys are, forgotten records, the wounded bear you love to wrestle with, mid flight from the top to the threadbare rug, the light bulb on its bare stalk, trembling with the fall of The Caveman, my brother looking up from the book – all foreign land now, somewhere not here. The groan of wood, the creak of tackle. Salt in the air, salt on your lips. The sound of crimson sails. 10“The sun”The sun comes bursting through the mist, a mare of light, galloping, coronae flaring in the solar wind - it carries in its heartthe dust motes of the world,light yearsin sadonyx eyes.I’m weathering a storm of butterfliesnamed Beatrice. 11“The enormous ship is its own cosmos”The enormous ship is its own cosmos. It has many doors. Ours is 51. The Kamertsel family live behind this one. The Iskanderovs behind the one opposite. A family of redheads – mom, dad, a lonely, timid boy – on the floor above us, by the green ladder leading to the roof. The enormous beanstalk of a green garbage chute connecting everything, opening dank maws, tempting with their dark drop down to a flooded underworld.12“Hey, Beatrice”Hey, Beatrice, miracle of mimicry, I think there is a poem inside this poem that wants to get out of the home chosen for it and be its own happy thing dancing with the falling leaves, more free more happy more me, a murmuring Autumn Leaf butterfly, Doleschallia Bisaltide, 84 to 88 mm, one wing in India, the other in Australia, seeking shelter to overwinter in the nooks and leaf litter, the duff and crannies, the autumn light and litterfall of a fall-golden heart.13“You go outside and its summer air”You go outside and its summer air, or leaves in a puddle, snow on a low fence around a snow mound where a lawn once was, long ago. A sky the color of anything you can imagine. Seagull music. Salt in the air, salt on your lips. The groan and creak of a body on its way elsewhere. The taut silence of crimson sails, favourable wind. 14“Hey Beatrice, miracle”Hey Beatrice, miracle of symmetry,a poem inside this poemwants to beout and beits own thingmurmuringto the falling leaves, more free more happy more mea Fatal Metalmark, CalephelisNemesis, 20 to 25 mm, one wing in Phoenix, the other in Pegasus, seekingshelter to overwinterin the nooks and leaf litter,needles and water glitter, light and litterfall of a fall-golden heart. 15“Those other windows”Those other windows, somehow, the ship as well, shipmates you haven’t met yet, foreign companions of the way. You watch the light, its mote-filled metamorphoses. How is all this possible? Who made this? A floating labyrinth, hanging gardens, where is its port of origin? You start by giving it a name. 16“Alyona-Beatrice”Hey, Beatrice!Intricate electron,humming eternity of the heart.Your eyes,the mistof water falling,the nibbling of rainbow feathers,with a slender beak,sparring with a swallowtail over sunflowerson gabriel-golden afternoons.Forever days.Whale-white and dolphin-bluedays and every shade and hue along the spectrum and between – beyond us.17Alyona says, Lets go, I want to show you the orchards.18Beatrice, let double tongues leave the safety of hummingbird skulls,uncoil,kissinghot nectar on the wing.And let the amaranth be full again. The sky a black magenta,let your sunripen to acceptance,your lightlay its headin the water’s lap – make its waythrough inner passages back hometo you.19You see hummingbirds. How they spin the sun. The tiny hooks of their feathers at work in intricate flight. Light-years-old yarn. Telling some of the oldest stories. Giving an old star a new twist. Suiting the solar to light bodies around columbines, nasturtiums, hanging trumpets. Spindling weird whirrings around nectars offered by flower bodies. Their flower sight. Meshes of light and shadow with no name.20Lush undergrowth,radiant sumac, virgin shore – comewith the holy fire,joy in a gyreand every toneand overtone along the scale –between –beyond us.Look up, Beatrice:a black bear is divingfor salmon at duskfor you.And moss,unrooted,blossomsunder an old spruce,inside a hollow oak,gently prying open rock.Impossibly.Like nothing else.Lichen on a branch,in winter,out of reachof poets’ lips.Silencein a field of fireweed –Beatrice, listen! Ice-dams are breaking.Lakes are losing themselves in the music of loosening ties,winding new waysinto pacificexiles.21You are at once here and there with the atomic orbitals, strange fields of standing flower waves. Fires, burning in time only. Tangled probabilities of attraction. Characters in a language the meaning of which you make up as you go in a serial dream. Look at the busy darlings! you want to say. You want to say, Hey, Electron, stay here a moment, what’s the rush to be in more than one place at once? You want to scoop one in your palms, a large drop of fairy fire. If you drink one, which way will your time spin?22Soon,there will be nothing left.But thiscommunity of sounds,the love calls of boreal soulsover once our home.Thanks, Beatrice,for the frost on the forest floor,holdingthe sleeping bodiesof butterflies – shoresholding the bodiesof seas – with such perfect careimpossible, tender, madness. 23In a cave, you see people huddle around a fire. Somebody is cooking, somebody is getting cooked. You hold your hands out to the flame, press the palms against your cheeks, look at each other. It’s good to be in a cave, laughing, when the cold outside is dry and humorless, going about the business of being biting and bitter, crisp and clear on who is in charge, the windswept hard snow clearly not going anywhere, and there are tracks in the snow, and the stars have become little pellets, petty demons, hovering, scared and skittish, against the dark. But inside the dark twin of the fire is dancing – it is dancing against the walls of the cave. You wave to your own dark twin. You press a hot palm against the dancing stone. It’s you and the mountain. That feeling, like almost saying something, and seeing it in the other’s eyes. 24For the dreamof a planetcaressed by a sun.The delicate balancingof butterfly light. Ferns unfolding in fern time.Trailing raspberry,creeping dogwood,devil’s club and Russian sage.Living soil and crushed dreams.25You are in Egypt, drawing a kingfisher next to a fire to say what you haven’t found a name for yet. Hunger? Love? You think you want to say, Let the sun be our only love, the ones we love – our only sun. You look up at the adults worshipping and the sun kisses the inside of your eyes. Golden ghosts follow your eyes around the temple. Freckles over the face of the god’s beloved, you think. It is a temple the size of a city, built to drown in the sun, bells pealing the light. You say what you say. You can’t draw, but you do anyway, many little flowers on long stalks reaching from the sun’s body toward mom, toward dad, toward a timid, lonely boy. 26Twin fawns,awake,awake and knowing,for the first time knowing,they are awake,at dawn,together,apart,when the light is first born and the first bird blesses it.27The sun is a star. It is braided flux, a churning anatomy, magnetized light. Fluid archways becoming coronal showers. Sails filled with an ecology of fire, you’ve reached your port of call – the city of the sun. Electrons stripped of their atoms, electrons free-roaming nesting oceans of lightning. The riddle of the sun’s core. Fifth state of matter. A dragon wrapped around an enigma of light, super-charged, sleeping, restless, not asleep at all, pretending to sleep, unable to sleep next to a freckled treasure, but still dreaming, sporadically, rhapsodically dreaming. You learn from your brother that the sun will one day die. You see the throes of its red agony in a book. The Earth in the freezing shadow of a blind giant. Howling in silence, pristine snow in total dark. 28For the grief, Beatrice,that has no words for it and for the words for it.The inside passagesto open sea.The licking of raindrops off winter branches for the wild love of it.The velvet antlers of spring.The taste of wildflowers. Seeing you,seeing usin the bloomingwakeof a valley fire.Thank you,for Timeand Space –a universefor feelings.Beatrice,this loss is wortheternity.29The groan of ice, the creak of tackle, a movable city in the dark, bodies on parallel journeys elsewhere. 30The way the air feelslike home here,sunlightunfolds from the hearton mornings of hope,mornings of despair,mornings of hope, mornings of despair.How the trees are thereno matter what –chilling in boreal air,stretching their limbsbefore a slow walk through life. The texture of matte skin,the smell of buds and resin,leaves, dirt and dust. I’ve never had this before.I’ve lost this twice before.I remember everything here:maple pinesand ponderosa birches, blacktop in the rainoutside building 89,nightlights diffracted by a black holein our placeon 8th of March St. The burningsouls of the deaddancing.Leaves in the air,leaves underfoot –rustlingfor me and you.I remember you –loving you,leaving you.31We follow a pair of pipelines, meandering between fields of apple trees. Bright, hot dragon forms, gleaming arcs of tinfoil, burning against palms, knees, shins, as I climb up to balance above you in the sun. I sit down on the scorching surface, lean forward to kiss the crown of your head, hot raven hair, the smell of soap and summer. You are older than me. I feel a stranger to myself, awake in a dream that is, for once, not a nightmare. You let a golden ladybug climb onto your ring finger, bring it up to my face. The sun is in your eyes. I’m thinking of the fire in front of the monument in the central square, the dragon coils around the trees around us, the gleam in the red barbariska candy clicking against your teeth, sweet breath. There is blood where you bite your nails. We are here because I’m leaving. The lady bug spreads its wings but stays. The shimmer of the wings. You whisper to it, a rhyme, blow a kiss, to make it fly, burst into an embarrassed smile, swivel round, point – Firebugs! – and run. I follow, sliding down into a clump of nettles.32Beatrice,first snowon December first.The biteof winter air.My firstand finalsnow –I have never forgotten. Distant lightsin the middle of nowhere. My Dad at the wheel.A family in a car.The music of a family walking,silently, home,over snow. Perfect music.Perfect snow.Falling, melting, fallinganyway, againand again,in love with the fall.Multipleone hearts,multipleone tongues,on their nightly journeyhomebeyond home.What need is there for wordswhen we can dreamin rootsand sapand soil,as we move softly here,entwinedwith time,made free to stopand turn33toward each other in the sun.Say nothing, Beatrice –a flower or flame you have plantedhere,in the heartland,speaksthe language of infinity.In winter light,under a sky so low,they can hear our hearts snow softly over the surface of the world.The world held by snow,the dreamy hollow,the holding place of snow.The lake of winterin the wake of loss.Losscondensing to travelwith timeto where all loss ends –Thank you!Thank you all, Beatrice,my loss,my home –this sun, the strange songof its long night.34“Beatrice city”Hey, strangerRemember Beatrice?The ice cold mist around gold ice peaksin the mornings?The silent ringingof sunlit bellsas you described it.I remember the sound. 35Once my dad brought home four or five new TVs, one smaller than the other, stacked them all up, so they formed a tower, turned them all on, proud. The babble of it. 36The lighthouse you lived in. Your wooden patiooverlooking the by. A small garden on one side, a wall fountain on the other - a face reflectedin the window of the bathhouse,laughing. Padding about nakedwith the seagulls, the windows of the bedroomopen, your studioseagull sunny. The globe barin the kitchenette – sliding back a hemisphere, the sun revelling in the tinkling glass. In the light rooma wanderer butterfly, quietly lostin the blaze. 37I remember the sound. A factory, a construction site. He would take me places he worked. There would be an office in a trailer in the middle of a huge puddle or gas spill, reached over planks, over bricks. He would slide open a panel, reveal a secret back room. Boxes, TVs, VHS players, carpets, chandeliers, furniture. An ark he was building as the soviet one was sinking. 38You’d say, Look! The river Euphratesdreamed as a butterflyby the lighthouse. The coronal archesalong Tigris Avereflected in the glassof the high-rise pyramids. We walked slowlyalong trails so thingswould have time to tell usif they were a kissor a hug. Pines imagined as white birches. A mayflyon your wrist. Not dreamed, I’d think,It is.The word unspoken. We were so closeto everything.I want to feelthat fuzz againagainst my tongue.39I would wander in and out of the labyrinth, where a dragon’s body used to be, wrapped round the hoard, imagining the dragon’s dreams, until he finally took me somewhere else, for more office routine. Sometimes he would leave me alone for hours and would be surprised to find me in tears. 40A navel of snow and ice,a pillar of lightand waterin a cave, pinesfollowing water, waterin the air – air,a cloud becomingcrystals forminga ringof snow and iceWatching the trafficon the Cascadesbridgesweaving in and out of the fallingwaterbetween the glass towersof the bayTimeAirBlue distanceEverything was endingHow we held backfrom saying something stupid41I remember the sound. Dad brought home, by friends, or family, or police, too drunk to walk. Sometimes he would be drunk and violent. We would respond with violence. So he would stop wracking the place. So he would leave mom alone. 42How the ark was thereone day.The airborne architecture of hummingbird light. Watching the lakebend around itwatching you sleepthe ice dam liftedby the rising waterbehind freckled eyelidsthe dreamy murmurof shale fansI think it was that day you got the beddelivered, finally. You took your grandma’s quilt out of the creaky wardrobe. 43I remember the sound. Grandma striding down the hall to the storage room. Grandma striding back up the hall with an axe in her hand. There is an axe in grandma’s hand. There is an axe over my father’s head. We had one for some reason, on the 5th floor of a residential complex in a city with nothing else to cut down, except drunk fathers, and once a year, a Christmas tree. 44The joke was Noah made itthat drunk old foolThe lake was freezingthat nightNorth was my favouriteof the directions on the compasson your backI think it was that timeyou put your handon my cheek.Your question,and my answer.Your salty thumbbetween my lips. On terraces below your windowscascades of Gold Leafbutterfliesstartled by a stray fawninto a clouda softly patteringstorm45He would be the one to bring it. The green-rustling, scaled, fragrant dragon body dragged hissing through the door, down the hall, through grandma's bedroom, and onto the balcony, needles carpeting the floor behind us, Siberian cold in the room, the beast filling the balcony, spilling over the edges. 46Rememberthe messages I left youon tablets of fore wingand hind wing. I didn’t always have timeto read them. But if you wanderfrom the airborne living room, along a rowof burning houses, to a corner of your studio,they are all in the drawer there,behind an imageof a house moving over water. 47Later, the ritual of setting it up in the corner of the living room, decorating it with glass globes and icicles, a shrine for gift giving, a big red star on top. Our cats loved trying to reach it, at night, toys tinkling, raining down. 48How a momentwas sometimes everything. How we let ourselves gofor the first timetogether. Bees drowningin sugar water. How there was always more than could besaid. The feathered humof winged bodiesin a maple tree. 49I remember the sound. They would bring home bags of money, pile them up on the kitchen table and spend the night counting. I would put on a mask, pretending to be a fox, slinking along the wall, sneaking up behind them, curl up under the flimsy table, perking my ears. Cigarette smoke. Smelly feet. A toe peeking through a hole. The rustle of bills, the litany of numbers. The stuff of dreams. 50I guessthis is goodbye,Beatrice, Fogo Jasper. I want to see againthe lilac dawns of Sundaland. Let there bea minute more. Tell meabout icebergs. The heaveand groan, the nomad fireof roaming ice. Eyeslooking upat eyeslooking down. How we bobbed,nameless,at homein the waves. 51After mother divorced him, he moved a few floors down. The murky stairwell scared me. That day, I had been slow and quiet going down. I heard dad’s door open, peeked down between flights, to observe a strange man emerge out of the apartment, crew cut, huge muscles, cocking a handgun, a makeshift bundle over his shoulder, a bouquet of gun muzzles. He left the stairwell. I climbed a garbage chute to watch the man disappear out of sight through a tiny window before daring to go out. 52A thing as simpleas a sunlit bedroom. A newborn monarchdrying its wings. How we asked each otherabout the order of things. Where the grumpy cat mugwent in the cupboard. How two togetherformed a third. Sun 日 and temple寺equalled time時53After the divorce, he moved a few floors below us. The murky stairwell scared me, and I had been slow and quiet going down. I heard dad’s door open, peeked down between flights, to observe a strange man emerge out of the apartment, crew cut, huge muscles, cocking a handgun, a makeshift bundle over his shoulder, a bouquet of gun muzzles. Was I lucky he didn’t see me? No one gave a damn about anything those days. No one gave a damn about human life either. The man left the stairwell. I climbed a garbage chute to watch him disappear out of sight through a tiny window before daring to go out. 54A voiceor love – a dooror ardour. Sometimes we called them angels. Memory itself. What it was like to forget. Time foldingaround us. White rainbows.55At one point, before the divorce, someone tried to kill him. He went into hiding on one of his family's dachas. We were taken to see him in secret, surrounded by his family in a house surrounded by dogs and private gardens. Purple strangulation marks had blossomed on each side of his neck. What happened to the man who tried to strangle him? My asthma came up for the first time there. I was advised to learn playing a trumpet or else I would “run out of breath” half way through making love to a woman. I was around 9. Mom had no money for musical instruments. 56I remember, how you shookyour headin disbeliefat me. Moonbow Ghost.We questioned questioning itself. Held handsin prayerin the humid dark. Hey, Memory,I’ve been wonderingabout you. Your burning ministryof frost. The hot flashof summer. How we spent timeinventing our own language. Measuringthe metaphoric valenceof flesh. Listening with our wings. 57I remember at least two other dachas. Patches of lonely sunlight in empty rooms; dark rooms cramped with stuff, stacked boxes, piled tiles, rolled up rugs, bundled mysteries, dusty furniture. Dead spaces. Empty, silent evenings of strangers on strange land. Hedgehogs and house spirits making noises in dark nooks.58Listen,Cicada Lemon. Glaciersinscribing themselves onto tablets of stone. The singingof lightand ice. The slowfloodof light-bearing ice. Beatrice, light yearsin an arkof arctic blue – I guessthis is goodbye. Hey,Arctic Blue, I’vebeen thinking about you. The spotless mansionsof your frozen sun. Valleys risingunder a chill touch. How we waitedfor something - time? - in a room, in a rain. 59I remember the sound. Cracking open fresh pods of green pees. Picking strawberries from bushes taller than me. Sliding down the hot concrete bank of a canal to poke the shrivelled mummy of a frog at the bottom. Climbing a Russian stove standing, charred, in the middle of a field. Climbing a rusty water tank to fill a plastic bottle to pour down a hole in the ground to watch a pair of hairy front legs emerge shaking out of the bubbling dirt, the rest of the tarantula following, into a glass jar, to be preserved in alcohol.60A spaceof voices.Your face,lit upat the soviet march. Your headon my shoulderat the Russian opera. The sound of footstepsin the garden.We gazed through windows into a starryoutside.61Scooping bees off flowers into matchboxes, letting the velvety abdomen peek through a narrow opening, tying a string, and setting them free, till we got tired, or they died. I once forgot I had a grasshopper in a matchbox. It died trying to scratch its way out of a paper coffin with the image of a sputnik on it. 62You showed me lakes,how to swimin summertime. An osprey clutching a silver bodyoverhead.The flood in usthat one day will make it possible to time a kiss again. The wings of butterfliesin a plastic box. A tabby’s earsnext to a sparrow’s skullfrom your mother’s garden. A glass jarholding keysto everything. 63I remember the sound. Poplar leaves fluttering. Fluff covered whole streets, football courts, car parks, sprawling kindergartens, amphitheatres, the shores of lake Kopa, the banks of river Chaglinka, ungraspable, alive, receding in rainbow waves with each sandaled Siberian-summer step. 64I was going to tell youhow forests think. Show youwhat it’s like to kissleaning against a tree. To soughhigh up in the air. Have rootsto drink withand sharewhat you drink. Let me show youat leastall the treesthat have burned down. What it’s likeundergroundwhere the roots used to be. 65I remember the sound. Striking a match, stolen from the kitchen, and watching fire spread up and down the street, around our feet, around garages, under cars, over cars, under flapping laundry, cyclists surprised by curtains of flame, cats and pigeons in panicked flight, dancing around airborne eddies of fire dancing around us in the sun. 66Beatrice,I’ve been dreamingabout you. How nothing was itself. Crater lakesand alpine firs. Hoofs on the patioat night.A deer nuzzling at ashes.A deer by the side of the road,reaching up for a branchin the chill of a morning. Her young in the brushby the German house.We thought we lost each other. Time eddiedwithin timeuncreated.Light-yarnscouldn’t hold. Worlds openedto encounter. We thought we lost each other. And we did. 67In his new place, he had a bearskin rug, bear head and bear paws, huge clattering claws, slayed heroically, time after time, by The Barbarian. He had a fancy wall-sized chestnut cabinet. Empty. Except for a mock-gold clock under a glass dome on one of the shelves, mechanism exposed, pendulum undulating. 68Listen,Cicada Cyan, Beatrice, how’s everything?Tell me, in a minute,about colours. How they were everywhere. A sunlit cavein a covein late summer. Lucent greenover white sand.Liquid malachite. Firefly light. Go, live loveward,Firefly. Over the pondin ponderosa, mayfliesare spawningnew vehicles for extinct suns.For you. Pine and heather.Darners dartingin and out of lace lichen.Sweet aphidsgorged with light.69I liked folding myself into the new-smelling wooden compartments and shutting the magnetized doors, waiting for the darkness to come alive around me. Boundaries dissolved. There was no body. Nobody. The motes of galaxies. An ark of darkness. 70Live homeward, Beatrice. Variable star.Stellar flare.Independent light. The nacre of ancient shellson hot cypress slopes. The dance of iridescenceon a swallowtail’s wing. Tell me, Nacre Echo, how colour was a function of time. Scaled and featheredtime. Wing-within-wingconcentric time. Lily of the valleytime and timeagain. Irisof the wavesbetween us. The deep green howls of owls.The Gibeon opal of starthroats.Shaking and shimmeringon a buttercup. Say, Beatrice,if there was timeonce, might there bea next time?71I remember the sound. Sliding a tape out of its jacket. Pushing up the front flap of the player, peering in, pushing in the tape, the slight resistance, then the inner mechanism pulling you in. Watching, rewatching. Anything and everything. Strange new worlds. Marlboro men, mutant turtles, xenomorphs, Dolph Lundgren, demon clowns, wild orchids. Fascinating, alien. Loot hastily bagged, illegally smuggled, pirate-dubbed. Listening to a scene that has ended watching the next scene unfold. 72Let there be a minute more. Let polar light unfurl over Mission Creek. Lakes bendin time withtectonic flow. Take meover interior mountains. Tell me the timein the upper suncaveof the ark. I guess it is goodbye, Jacamar Jasper. Till next time.Beatrice, see you, in a minute, by the pillar of light. We will say nothing. Just be there. On the horizon. 73I remember the sound. Rewinding a VHS tape. After hours of inhabiting other dimensions, it was strange to see again the same old world outside the window, familiar faces, friends unaware I was watching, not knowing I had this other place, criminal access to infinite dreamworlds. 74We will say nothing. You will reach upfrom the sandto kiss me. We will learnto tell timein the absence of shadows.I will show youhow to place sea shellson shelvesacross the cornersof dreams. How an egg shelllives next to an emptied glass. A windowsill. A garden. Late spring, in Prague.There will be many of us here. We will be the only ones here. We will forget the differencebetween the insideand the outsideof light. Show me, Beatrice,the trees that make you happy. Russian olives. Birches and Jack Pinesaround alkaline ponds. 75What a typical way of being Russian. Dad, you fucking idiot, I have no reason to love you, do I? 76Show me, Parhelion Fire, your clouded gold. My homein frost smoke. A subtle greenflutter, aspenor poplar. Haloedwith pain - the shadow of time. A voiceor love – a door or ardor. Sometimes we called them fireflies. 77We don’t talk about you. You never said anything of substance to us. A double silence, violent material abundance. A rich inheritance of recurrent nightmares. A layered, labyrinthine hell where I can’t always tell reality from dream. 78Tell me, in a minute,about sound. My stepsas I climbthe stairs of a slidein the playgroundto kiss youfor the first timegoodbye. Goodbye, Beatrice,Kazakh Green. Take me over the blue mountains of Kokshetau. Here,in the sunvex, of the upper suncave, a dragon lies dreamingof ice. 79That was your attempt to find a way out of the nightmare of our existence. I haven’t found mine either. In your silence, nesting in all things, my movement away from you, centre outward, an endless spiral odyssey, because even when time itself ends, it starts anew on the other side, with the cry of a child, and there you are again. Can you hear that sound? Hold my hand.80Not long before we left, grandma gathered us – mother, brother, and I – in the living room and recited from memory a poem in Russian which had the refrain Kto my, my Evreii – Who are we, we are Jews. This was new. Was she talking about all of us here? What mysterious thing called Jewishness did we all have in common that was only expressible in poetry? The axe doesn’t have to come down, grandma. This isn’t a Russian novel. It’s my nightmare. Let the blade describe it’s own way to the ark.81Cyan echoesof pulses lapping.The fluidspiraluncoilingof ice. Ocean-shaped ice light. The lucid musicof scales. A glaciershaping the Monashees. The singing of iceand lightThere. Skies open onto otherskies. Timeonto othertimes.The quiet afteris immense. Beatrice, listen:I’ve had this feelingfor days. I thinkI hear the stars. 82“Ice to the song of nerpas underneath”83“There was no water, no light, no gas to cook on”There was no water, no light, no gas to cook on. Mice climbed up hollow walls from the basements to the top floors looking for crumbs. Water froze in the pumps and we would creep back to the complaints of empty buckets over groaning snow through a city plunged into darkness to brave the freezing dark of a stairwell inhabited by ghosts and addicts. 84“When I look at a Ponderosa pine”When I look at a Ponderosa pine, I see a white birch, smoke over Wood Lake last December, impossible things in the smoke, the first days of being here, the last days of being here, two lakes that are one lake that is a third lake, my home lake, lake Kopa, where a mermaid is supposed to dwell, Beatrice, after Gluck’s mother, a tail of ponderosa-red scales, a voice that is two voices braided, every word in English born out of all the Russian that has ever been written and which I never wrote. 85“And if I told you”And if I told youwe are writing a bookof booksand our imaginationsare particlesof something else,forever beginning. And that every written pagemultiplies pagesthat can be, those writing themand those reading them. Heresand elsewheres, nowsand nevers, invisible timeswe think only wecan see. How would we homethe heartbeat of all this labourof love. 86“If I say – everything is poetry”If I say – everything is poetry: Jesse and I, that chairacross from usin Pulp Fiction, the sheenof a late afternoon,time,light on aluminum, musicin the hazeof this Black Lodgeof books and coffee –would this be trueto the tension between all things, a hanging garden of silent ardor, loveuncreated, waitingto be spoken, three of us talking about meter and the demonAsmodeus?87“But if I said”But if I said, You and I, this chair, that light, time, everything here, are metaphorsfor each otheras something else, Something else, you would say, and I would say, Nasturtiumsas reality, thenthere would be somethingthere. Thisis where love goeswhen it dies. 88“Watching a match burn”Watching a match burn. The flame driving a drop of gold. Pain building in the fingertips, bursting into its own flame. There is a deep-blue saucer in our home. We grope our way into the kitchen. Another match is given life, sputtering light, a tulip cloud, the little dance of death the wood does, as light is passed onto another form, winking in wax pooling at the wick’s base, overflowing, a glow unspoken in the candle’s body, in the blue saucer, mirror lake, the bob and wiggle of twin flames, breathing heat, blue, gold and orange, orange, white and blue, as if around nothing. 89“Darkness is story time”Darkness is story time. Mother sets up the projector, hangs up the sheet against the wall over the stove. I choose the longest stories in the box. Film rolls in my palm, their delicious weight. The amber of their unspoken worlds unrolled against the candlelight. A spool is loaded, a screw is cranked to fold the dream into the dream machine to make it real. Motes in the ray of light. I put my hand in front of it. I put my face in front of it. I stick out my tongue. Draped in story. The taste of light. The unbearable bright source of it, the white hot ark of magic. 90“When I first came here”When I first came here,I said I wanted to knowas much about this place as I could. What’s what.The names of everything,The landscape.So much reminded me of home. You said,see where the trees aregathered in a wedge,that’s where the water travelsdown. That is Black Mountain. Thisis a Ponderosa pine. I said,I think the mindand the worldare namesfor something else,which has no name. I want to write about that, I said. I’ve used a few names since.To the degree they stand for real people,places, pain,they lie. I thinkthey are a blueprint, though,for something else. Dante has this line:“the universal form, the fusion of all things.”I tried to fold the world,with all its vanities,into a song of songs. Back in my hometown - 91a kind of restin movementaway from home.The space this gives youto have the things you cannot have.The lifeof everythingthat isn’there. You made this possible. 92“To come back from the snow to laundry drying in the living room”To come back from the snow to laundry drying in the living room. The glow and smell of fresh wet fabric. Spiral heaters. Mom, sleeves rolled up, arms glowing. My brother somewhere in there, reading, gluing planes, crafting a crossbow, in wait for me, a sibling Minotaur. The secret life of feet in woollen socks. A few clean sheets and nothing is the same. Icebergs. Baleen whales. Tents in a desert. I step inside one. Into milky light. A presence. A voice. Asking where I am. We look and listen. Here. We know. What in this world you call a hug.93Owl, OwlIt’s all hearing – its even white hum east and west.Soft falling snow, sounding at dawn. The ponderous quiet and the scaled barktheir long deep sleep. The checkered plumage of snow-laden pines,seem meant to rhyme.Orbs of yellow opal, brittle rattling of mirror feather symmetries.A bare tree’s set deep into a facial disk frozen bones. Weakly trickling river gather inwardquickly growing ice. Intricately crafted feathers water under powdered overthe awakening taiga.Still on its low perch. the snow below is veined to scan the soundscape.Under the even surface, The round head rotates with tunnels intermittently lit. The trunk of the oak the tunnels as far asin the yellow grass. It’s owl thought follows darkling fallenthought tunnels go.A tiny heart beating distinct in the dusk, of the rotting trunk.Pattering raindrops, inside the humid hollow under overcast sky. The curtain of amber light it spreads both wings –slowly contracts. The great gray owl is ready: dividing the oak groveit sees both suns.94 間 5 詩 6 時 7 Wood Lake, December 2024The lady bug spreads its wings but stays. The filmy glimmer of the wings. You whisper to it: God’s little cow, go back to heaven, where your little darlings are snacking on candy!Божья коровка, улети на небо, там твои детки кушают конфетки!5 Gap; gate; space that binds people6 poetry7 time95Bibliography Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Charles S. Singleton. Routledge and Kegan Paul:London, 1971.Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation With Commentary. W. W. Norton & Company:London, 2019.Edwards, Michael. The Bible and Poetry. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. New York Review of Books:New York, 2023. Fudel, Sergei. Light In The Darkness. Translated by Sophie Koulomzin. St Vladimir’s Seminary Press,1989. Nabokov, Vladimir. Ada or Ardor. Penguin Books: London, 2000.Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. Penguin Books: London, 1989.Olesha, Yuri. “The Cherry Stone.” Envy, and other works. Translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew.Anchor Books: New York, 1967.Osip, Mandelstam. “On the Nature of the Word.” Osip Mandelstam: Selected Essays. Translated bySidney Monas. University of Texas Press: Austin, 1977.96
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Creative Writing
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Rader, Matt, 1978-
Do suns dream of hummingbird looms
Text