MOST OF US AREN'T WORTH MUCH

MOST OF US AREN’T WORTH MUCH

with much love to the memory of Nina Nadezdhin

Most of us aren’t worth much, but you were, and I could feel the weight of that

as if some autumn dusk had wrapped itself like skin around an apple

and dropped it in my hand, a small, warm planet, and said,

here, Patrick, eat.

I could stand beside you and know

that a mountain was a petty thing without splendor,

that a river was a pilgrimage to nowhere that died in a crackling of sand and salt,

that the moon was only a moldy stone in a cemetery of worthless lighthouses,

that a loaf of bread, an olive, an orange were empty shrines

and the earth, a sad, tormented place, a house on fire

better lived in the ashes than in the flames,

that life itself was only a shadow dressed up in leaves and feathers and names

until it was wholly transformed by the humanity of someone like you

into another substance that glowed in the bloodstream,

a friendly metal, a sad gold with heavy eyelids.

I could stand beside you and know the difference

between a ladle and a sword, a bell and a bullet.

I could stand beside you and know the difference

between someone who knew how to endure pain and inflict it

and someone who had suffered their way out of a grave into a garden.

Now it’s two a.m. in Perth,

and it’s forever, years ago, and it’s you and Daniel

driving up the dirt road to the front door of the farm at Long Bay,

Daniel igneous with poetry, a soft bear in bluejeans and black turtleneck,

Kiev in Canada, and you, a pantry full of Russian-Jewish desserts,

warm loaves of bread wrapped in teacloths you unswaddled

as if you were pulling small infants in wicker baskets

out of the river of your unfailing bounty over and over again

and everything you cooked was a smile,

was a shy green star that came with the history of an offering,

and even the fruit, the chandeliers of grapes, the pregnant pears,

the crescents of cantaloupe, seemed to taste of the way you gave them.

Daniel has won his laurels, his name as a poet,

and who wasn’t amazed by your devotion to the man and his work

as if once more, in a new country, a new language, a new medium

moving from the denser tears of Russia into the thinner laughter of English,

he had to grow lungs and legs and learn to breathe again on land

and you were the sea behind him that watched and fretted and believed

even when he couldn’t, that one day his poetry would walk all the way to the stars on its own: and it looks like you were right.

But there was a day, one August day, a day of wind and clouds

that brindled the turbulent hills and fields of yellow hay

with the shadows of their continental enormities

moving across the earth, across the sun

as if they were immense hands swung like bells through blessing after blessing,

a day of light and sorrows, of birch and locust trees and wild sunflowers

thrashed by the sudden squalls that overturned the birds

when you and Daniel returned from a walk together,

younger lovers than yesterday as if in the hour you were gone

you had found Russia together once more as only you could know it

and it was a private place between two people in love in one solitude

beside a lonely Canadian lake:

and there you were, free and whole and happy within yourself

and something unsayable but wonderful in your eyes that belonged to no one,

a light that was always yours, that shone like the moon in spring

through the branches of an orchard on a cool night

saturated with peace:

and there you still are, radiant and serene, who could forget it,

crowned with a wreath of English ox-eyed daisies

and everywhere in the air around you,

the fragrance of wet silver

as the girl in the muse in the goddess

humbled two poets with a vision

of the root in the silence

that surpassed their art.

PATRICK WHITE