Overtakelessness

I

Watching Black Sea sand draw away from your feet the lateness of faith—that teetering while slumped over a phone. That someone of the same hamlet knows little of it, of others of it. A menagerie of pottery shards and sheepskin. That a hermit is to others merely a country: a painting of a woman looking at the back of another woman’s head, her bonnet, her hair escaping.

II

The matriarch wore gloves duct-taped to her sleeves, a mask and sunhat, crying as she sprayed fungicide on her dogwood. Seeing Van Gogh’s peasant boots, she would nod about exhaustion massaged then hardened. A one-room house made too dark by curtains. With a vinegar-soaked rag on my thumb, I scrub a corner no one sees. I arrange slivers of mulch at the wood’s edge. And the church’s five-acre crowd in the parking lot howls as if in celebration.

But my culture reveals itself beyond iconostas veiled in smoke, housing mystics at different ages embraced at the knees. Babka and cabbage. Language like a string of muffled bells. What an American might call cold or withholding. Beyond. That he thinks I have. That he has. What appears as a disease. Assuming to wither is our final divine gift.

III

The Lord’s servant keeps trying to convince me to return to the blessed wine. Unseen worlds inside one spoonful. How many countries inside this one. Walking down Cedar to Taylor, I listen for Carpathian grass hush, that green glow against ankle bones. A lost cat circles a streetlight’s pool in the asphalt. Crouched and hand out, I’m orbited. The night cool and humid as a mauve coffin. Today over video conference, a baritone lulls parishioners out of this world.

IV

Before the word, Americans already had the concept of overtakelessness. The overtakelessness of the invisible after the visible’s owned as donation. Overtakelessness of the dead, majestic “beyond / The majesties of Earth.” For example, a Trypillian figurine perched in a Moscow penthouse. Inside a dream of recovery. I’d rather be someone, eternity being too long.

Remember Ruthenians (that exonym) dispersed like threads of cream in tea? My 90-plus Baba disappeared, too, her memory crumbled into a mariachi band. Old tin plates she licked. A red Crimea-shaped mole picked until it leaked in revolt.

No land taken, just ghostly, like a story, proven true by a white rock kept as a souvenir in your pocket. No land gone but flattened. Now a fighter jet rips another cloud. A mail carrier tries to figure out who’s flying it. Who’s about to be hit. The overtakelessness of right before.