KNOT Magazine
Fall Issue 2022
Oriana Ivy
ALDEBARAN
The only philosophical
question left,
a French writer said,
is whether to kill yourself.
But that is the question of youth.
In my twenties, I could never look
from a high window or a roof
and not feel a gathering leap.
Middle age asks two questions:
How much time left? and
How to spend what wakefulness
remains? Now I look
out the window, and the deep
magnolia gives two answers:
the morning light
glistening in the crown,
and the wreath of shadows.
And the layered wind
does not rustle To be or not to be –
Each leaf silvers Hamlet’s
forgotten reply: Let be.
It’s too late to renounce
the privilege of surprise;
centuries, it seems,
since my father told me
not to worry about the universe.
“That’s Aldebaran,”
he pointed to an amber star.
When the universe shall ask
the final question,
I’ll point: Aldebaran.
Great light seen only in the dark.
DUSHKA
Dushka, my Soul, when I go
you will go, so don’t be proud of
not being made of ordinary stardust.
People say it will feel just as it did
before being born. But Dushka,
before I was born — open any
history book — it was murder.
Dushka, do you remember
the red streetcars in Warsaw?
And the chestnuts rioting in bloom
in front of the Polytechnic?
We took Wawelska Street,
the long way home so we could pass
the small park of the first kiss
under the green heaven
of dark-leaved chestnut trees —
Yes, Dushka, I know
it was New Year’s Eve,
snow on my eyelashes,
silence on the bare branches.
For thirty years now I’ve lived
with a Norfolk pine. People say
it should be cut down,
its roots threaten the house,
the sidewalk. But one morning
on its tip I saw
a mockingbird sing his imitation
of a car alarm, so how could I cut down
my thousand-green-fingered pine?
A neighbor said, “In another thirty years
it will be the tallest tree in town.”
I said in thirty years
I don’t think I will be alive.
I’m taking the mockingbird
with me.
BACKSTITCH
In this pine village it’s so slow
that I permit myself to sew –
a patient stitch that imitates
the over-and-over
of a sewing machine.
What luxury, my hand my own
sewing machine, dipping back
before going forward —
stitching the moment that has passed
to the moment that is passing now.
It’s backstitch, a friend explains.
Thirty years I’ve worked that stitch
without knowing its name.
I learned to sew in a language
far away and long ago —
silence and I in a slow race
to see who’ll say it first:
in sun-flood of a California summer
stitching to where the past and now
fall together in seamless snow.
GRAY CITY
I am walking in gray Warsaw,
in the swan parks, in the streets,
past pale angels in cathedrals,
wild archangels in the clouds –
but there are no leaves.
Not one chestnut leaf is left,
crimson, crimped by frost.
And the ivy called wild wine
is spread leafless on the walls
like a crown of thorns.
Not even a ghost leaf
to reach to me its small hand,
then fall slowly into grace.
Leafless sidewalks, leafless sky –
losing Warsaw for the final time.
Gone, the cloud-dream of returning,
looking out of my old window
on my poplars greening, passing
silver rumors of the wind –
and then golden lies. But the girl
who knew them smiles.
The gray city in me weeps not
cold November rain, but tender
eggs from centuries of stone.
“Pigeons,” I coo. “My pigeons.”
EURYDICE DANCES
“Shall we dance?” I ask
and all my names and selves
gather into the single
bouquet of my body.
I place my weight on one side,
to spare my injured, my heroic
knee — it’s even more
passionate that way,
my one-knee tango,
dancing on scar tissue.
I hold the night in my arms,
its rhythmic planets and stars,
in this house across
the tango of the eucalyptus grove.
I hold my life in my arms;
while the music lasts, we last.
I hold my death in my arms;
every night I marry myself.
“You are mine,” I sing
to everything that sings,
that dances on one leg,
hangs by one last leaf —
“Love me tender,” I croon
to the candle, a nun,
and the humming river of cars
in the street below the ravine —
lights and shadows passing,
kissing as they pass.
THE GUARDIANS
Three women walked into autumn
in a mountain village at night.
The youngest, the beautiful one, said,
“Let’s lie down and look at the stars.”
Oh speech beyond delight:
two women lying down
on the road, while the third
like a mother stood guard.
No star was withheld. A sky like that
needs to be seen lying down.
The pavement felt like a good
firm bed, neither cold nor hard.
In my childhood such wealth
was called a diamond night –
this dome of blazing darkness,
this vertigo of light.
And we were not afraid.
We lay open-eyed
while above us burned
the diamond city of time.
We could wish endless wishes,
but there was no need,
with such luxurious
light in our lives. We lay silent
in the silence of the stars,
letting the kingdom come.
Oriana Ivy was born in Poland and came to the United States when she was 17.
Her poems, essays, book reviews, and translations from modern Polish poetry have been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry 1992, Nimrod, New Letters, The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Black Warrior, Wisconsin Review, Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Review, Southern Poetry Review, and many other journals and anthologies.
A former journalist and community college instructor, she teaches poetry workshops.
She lives in San Diego.