Novaya Zemlya

Lately, I’ve been thinking again about Novaya Zemlya—
that boomerang-shaped archipelago jutting from mainland Russia
like a plume from the hat of one of Chekhov’s Vankas
or a molted quill writing steel vessels trapped in ice
while radioactive reindeer scatter scarred mountains and planes.
I used to see it as a crooked finger rising out of the Arctic
beckoning me with the promise of two
bright bungalows in a prairie of red grass, one department store
in Belushya Guba selling robin’s egg blue bowlers
when dignified doctors insisted on black because
black is forever, like the Widow Unn and her thirty-two owls—
one stacked on top of the other as a breathing totem pole.
I imagined people from the north island Severny having nothing
to do with people from the south island Yuzhny
and if it weren’t for the Matochkin Strait between them
they’d have slaughtered each other years ago. My first story
was Thomas of Severny pining for Rita from Yuzhny.
A polar bear named Isaac carried their forbidden letters
back and forth on his four-sailed schooner. Isaac didn’t mind
playing pander, though there was nothing
Thomas or Rita could do except fast each morning.
Over time, both found themselves falling for Isaac, upholding
the grand fiction of their starving ardor
so he could continue from one to the other.
At seven, I received a Rand McNally map of the world
and was instantly drawn to places near the margins:
Svalbard dangling over Norway like a sprig of mistletoe—
New Zealand falling from Australia like an astronaut his shuttle—
and, of course, Novaya Zemlya, that Cezanne brush stroke, dash
of jaunty elegance, a scythe cutting water, an open
parenthesis, as if the Kara Sea began a dream that would not end.
Someday I’d live there in absolute splendor, separated
but close enough for weekend trips to Finland. I would build
my own house—a green, three-storey colonial
with white trim and a balcony facing Murmansk. I would
bed all winter with Jack the Husky, two puffins
named Walter and Anne, and that unnamed goat
from a page in Crusoe, before Crusoe could strangle it.
By suspending “now,” dismissing its facts,
there was a place I could live and belong in the world.
On March 03, 1984, I delivered a five-minute oral report
on the indigenous Nenets, those brown hunters
of foxes and seals who come and go
with the turning of weather. We had to pick an island cluster.
Jason chose Hawaii, Michael Indonesia, Jennifer
Galapagos, No one cared what anyone found.
On July 17, 1596, Dutch explorer William Berents said
you could talk to God in Novaya Zemlya, for He
would hide in such a place, withholding His secrets
from cities and men. Barents overwintered there
spooning heated cannonballs until he died
the following June. Michael covered civil war. Jennifer
rambled on about turtles. Years later, when I read
Kurt Vonnegut, I thought of her standing before us
in a plaid jumper sweating like a Slavic wrestler. O, the tears
we might have wept! But Jason sneezed
and made us laugh. “I did it for her,” he whispered
in my arms as I dreamed. “She couldn’t bear
another second.” On October 30, 1961, Khrushchev
ordered the detonation of Tsar Bomba, the largest
nuclear weapon in human history. 500 miles away
24 Soviet soldiers watched from a shore of the Arkhangelsk
Oblast, their stiff cocks standing at attention as a ball of fire
turned to cloud and tore at pleasure with rough strife.
IMDB says Novaya Zemlya is a bleak thriller.
Prisoners are spared state sanctioned death for the sake
of a social experiment. All goes horribly wrong
the way social experiments do at 74º N, which is why
instead of watching it, I began my own experiment
called Novaya Zemlya, but was neither suited nor inclined
to meet the architectonic challenges of novel writing.
I remember my terrific first sentence: “Here
there would be no marriage or football.”
But when I considered 2,500 people eking existence
in government bunkers, I felt something—
not quite guilt, closer to compassion—
and saw myself presiding over why-not weddings
and structuring game days for rudderless children.
Maybe, if I’d turned the novel upside down I could have
finished it, but I’m more of a poet. When I stand
this poem on its head, I remember my father
planting eight silver maples at the edge of our land.
He knows he is dying (eleven months the doctor says)
but keeps this morsel to himself. March rain. I shiver
beside him, wishing I hadn’t insisted on holding
his shovel each time he bends to mix peat with soil.
Three years after his exit, what he planted will be twice
as tall, branches extending so wide the trees will begin
to touch one another. They will never be silver.
When I tip this poem on its side, I am stepping
my name in snow, asking myself if someone
somewhere else is, too, wondering what I will do
now that I know I am and always will be lonely. I don’t
imagine I will cry, since loneliness is a nesting doll, a white
angel in a red devil and inside the angel
a tiny apple painted gold. Lately, I’ve been
thinking about rectangular suns, the high refraction
of light between atmospheric thermoclines,
of horizon warped as hourglass—in other words, Art.
The world needs more rectangular light, more
orange rivers, purple leaves, more
folded homes and pocket cliffs. More silver.
When I stand this poem on its feet it asks a riddle: How
do you find your way out of the forests of Novaya Zemlya?

[from Meditation Archipelago, Tiger Bark 2018]