More from André de Korvin on the next page.

I started to count the days.
Numbers mocked me as if
I was adding books and rivers.
I couldn't understand how years
were multiplied by so many losses.
When I reread my poems,
letters fell from their pages
and the remaining whiteness was
my own reflection.
I headed home
and memories turned streets to lava.
I then knew I had become
many strangers.

Writing poems about aging
facing blank pages at the River Café.
I write  time flows differently inside a poem.
and the page catches my reflection.
On the other side of the poem,
my father sits at his desk.
He jots down another stanza,
a rose blooms on the tip of his pen.
He looks up, his face
younger than mine.

One day, the river
rose from its bed
and went
walking through my poems.
I followed behind, and came
to the junction of many dreams,
didn't know which way to turn.
I thought then,
if only I could go sailing
from telephone pole to telephone pole,
I would reach out
and touch the world.

I would walk
streets with strange names:
Street of the Innocents,
Street of the Sleeping Pig,
Discharge Street.
For hours, I would watch trucks  
and listen
as they went over bridges
like bows
across
violin strings.

She left St. Petersburg
when she was fifteen.
Her parents bought her
a one way ticket to Berlin.
He walked from Kiev
through the frozen fields of Poland,
Cyrillic letters
raining where he went.
They met in a small library
where poetry stretched
wide on the shelves
wider than politics,
wider than philosophy,
wider than physics
and I was
already there
in the fireworks of their eyes.