You’re wearing planetary blue
today, your gaze turned inward to regard your self-geology. Yet something from the Atlantic intrudes on your compact solitude, something evolved in a tidepool distinct from tidepools you plumbed in your childhood by the Pacific. Planetary blue is the color migrating songbirds follow by day, their wingbeat quickened through thickets of radio waves broadcast just to confound them. You feel those signals mingle with respiration and heartbeat to birth you a bright new being that can live for only a moment. Your clothing drapes to resolve the gap between you and this other, this blue-winged creature no one believes will successfully fly.
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An hour before dawn boulders
in the woods emit grayish light strong enough to wake people snoring in whitewashed suburbs or stashed in city apartments. Hiding in the woods, I’m used to this opaque illumination. But when I lived in the city I’d awaken in yellow sweat, unsure of which dream imploded. This post-glacial phenomenon hasn’t yet attracted scientists who could examine the light then crack open a boulder and assay its composition. They’d learn that only in sleep do stone and humans interact, preparing us for a distancing not even digital instruments can measure with any precision. In the village of Nizhrilovskaya there dwelt fewer than two hundred souls. And as they slept in their beds through the long winter nights, spidery wisps of wood smoke rose into the brittle air from the chimneys of their huts. These izbás, each of rough-hewn logs, were clustered on the flank of a hill where a few of the farmers tended meager flocks of goats and sheep while others coaxed threadbare plots of wheat and rye from the rocky soil. Six days by wagon from Saint Petersburg, it was a world unto itself, as far removed from the glories of the imperial court as from the nocturnal firmament. So as they slumbered, the humble folk of Nizhrilovskaya, if they possessed the capacity at all, could conjure only in their dreams the resplendence of the tsar, his beautiful wife and their five children. And when word finally reached them many weeks after the fact that all the royals were dead at the hands of the Bolsheviks, they were stupified.
“It is the will of God,” declared the village priest with great sagacity from the altar of St. Sophia’s, the tiny church that occupied the center of Nizhrilovskaya. His flock, the old and the young, echoed this somber pronouncement, bowing their heads reverently and crossing themselves once, twice, thrice while the priest swung a brass censer to and fro, leaving the air redolent with the sweet spice of frankincense. At the age of twenty-seven, Father Pyotr Petrovich Bulgakov was a man angular of body and intensity of mien, an imposing figure in his black cassock and clerical cap, gold cross and chain. The pallor of his drawn face was rendered the more stark by a bushy beard and sunken dark eyes that not a few of the villagers swore in hushed tones could pierce to their very souls. Paul’s confusion was dissipating, and intense anger was taking its place, as he stood in his bedroom on the family farm for the first time in thirty-two years. The five cardboard boxes stacked in the closet held his vinyl records he purchased years after he left for the city, books from his undergraduate years, he thought he had given away. Paul pulled a manuscript he recognized from his graduate class, “Reform, Revolt, and Revolution in the Maclure Collection.” The 72-page paper analysed four-hundred pamphlets produced during the French Revolution. All these items were taken from his house in Saskatoon, and the farm was on the Alder Ridge Road between High Prairie and Valley View in the south Peace River region. The trip was over nine hundred kilometres.
“What is that?” asked Jennifer, Paul’s wife. She had changed from her black skirt, white blouse, and jacket she wore in court to more comfortable jeans and blue shirt. She wouldn’t be recognised as a lawyer as they travelled through the small towns on their way back home. Paul liked her petit elegant appearance regardless of what she wore.
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