SONGS OF ARON:
An Émigré's Poetry Notebook

          i
Morning fog floating the blue ridge
as Vedder mountain shoulders itself
out of hiding like words of a dark love
in a long night's dream. In Crimea
the mist brooded offshore,
then abandoned itself, its direction obscure,
and you felt each thin instance of sea-fingers
drawing stones and sand and your feet
toward the deep, the ghost of your body
shivering. Crimea, where traces of wagons
and foot-goers move from hill to hill
and between the hills the railway
and streams that join and run
soundlessly to the sea.
Here, on our Yarrow Central Road,
when the geese stop their complaints
I hear the heart's clatter in the street's
loose gravel, like the long nuzzle of cows
moving as one, coming home to evening
from the common pasture,
taking the light with them,
each finding its yard, turning
with a sway of head and neck,
the young herdsman embellishing
simple notes of a hymn,
his stick a baton, a heifer
near the rear
moaning like a fog horn

The sky peering between
clouds to something deep down,
unstartled by the nakedness
of a valley at sunset

The train's long whistle
on the valley's far side,
adjustments of the oncoming as it
arrives, the burst of the moment,
rupture as the last car rushes away.
Gone. It's hard to describe—
this strange beauty of desolation

          ii
There was a moment last night
that entered the stars' privacy,
burning them out as my ears buzzed
with nerves of air. Then
a gauze-work of light on dust
in the window pane, and now
my wife, my Helena, singing as I grasp
the stone to whet my knife blade's
appetite for a paper-thin edge,
a fly buzzing its passion
for just this light, the pencil
sharp, pen beside the page

Another fly, large, intent as Doctor Epp
as he cut away the last piece
of my smashed fingernail.
I hit the fly with the back of my
hand, watch it recover in the inkwell,
swim across, walk to my journal,
write its drunken entry across the page,
lift off and beat a quicker time
on the window pane

          iii
My wife says it was our neighbour
who stole four of our geese
last week; two others are laying eggs,
a third began yesterday

I wonder how the future will be
without poetry, without the words
we carry with us to the end.
Nor should you dream, the two visiting preachers
told me. They fear that banked-up
words will wash away virtue.
I have asked them not to return

All this is clear in the morning light.
Helena is baking bread, three crows
are harrying an eagle's whitening turn
above the tree line, and I have stepped outside
to watch herdsman and cows file by
to the village pasture, what's left
of this departure,
the crows screaming as one

If a stranger tries to filch a cow's milk
in the open pasture she'll step into the pail

No thief can hide himself forever
like God. I will count our geese
because our neighbour, destitute as we,
steals at night like local Russians
my father trained to complain silently
and work our horses in the field
five rows at a time with a hint of reins
and Low German commands.
Those rows upon rows still call me.
Father taught me too, and I always felt
the horses liked to hear me sing hymns
softly or recite Pushkin

          iv
Father named me after himself,
Aron, his mustached face bristled with sweat,
keeping those straight rows company.
Had they been children
instead of black earth there would have been
an unbelievable restraint.
Mother named my sisters, others
named our Crimean estate, fields of
hybrids and grafted plants,
experimental plots, greenhouses,
summer house and gardens,
sheepcote whitened each spring,
chaise horses black as our shining gigs
and coaches, and the brown Belgians
looking to the barn-door light,
snorting for their harness,
in the field the metronomic, indolent sound
of harness, in the spring the ploughed edge
shining in the notch between their ears,
hawks gliding back and forth
off to the side above the hill as though
to watch what would happen to us

          v
Émigrés just outside
the grassy terraces of the lake
drained eight years ago,
each spring new cut banks
along the Vedder River, overhang
of soil at the top like a too large
hairpiece, bars of gravel
and sand shifting with estimates
of what may have been,
walking home in deer trails through
cottonwoods, poplars, willows, quaking aspen,
alders, blackberry brambles.
The common pasture
on the west side, like our back yard,
pimpled with molehills abiding our presence
but greying in the sun

          vi
We're a simple people,
Low-German Dutch, and Mennonite,
brooding regret along the edges
of our past, colonials in Russia,
familiar places appearing only to disappear
except in dreams or like stars at dawn.

Stars are a passion with me,
I know where to find them, and if not,
I leave finding to chance,
like the birth of the first star
or God's uncreated light pulled back
an inch or two at a time
and wider in a moment of hope,
unwilling to separate the passionate
from the divine. Dante, exiled to Ravenna,
dreamt of how earth and sun and stars flew
into the void to their appointed place,
circling hell and paradise.
My passport bears the circles of
hell's large round stamp of time,
the past severed from itself like my brother's
leg, the pain still keening, still letting go

All this talk of forgetting.
My son says he speaks for the village
but what is missing finds us
as the militia did, the leader's beard
beaded with venereal pustules,
men who wanted our women, who rode
stolen horses poorly, who took our animals
and useless rubles and finally the soil
drenched like the sawdust floor of a
slaughterhouse, shapes familiar
still dear, the smell not going
away, the smell of fear, knife,
guts, of blood running to the door

Madness serving notice
that the house would be picked clean
forever, even if the future screams itself
hoarse, and we said, "There."
What we had belonged not to us
but to entranced time

"The opening cantos to a journal-like poem
about a pioneer Mennonite settler in Yarrow."

© Leonard Neufeldt