My Sister Life and The Zhivago Poems

To Love—To Walk

✦ 101 ✦ To Love—To Walk To love—to walk—while thunder roars, To trample grief, to know no shoes, To startle hedgehogs, pay with good The evil cobwebbed briars do. To drink from branches, take their blows, That bouncing back assault the air: “So that’s an echo?”—and to end Completely lost in kisses’ lair. To trudge to drumbeat, decked in burrs. To know by dusk: the sun is older Than all those stars and carts of oats, That Marguerite and tavern hostess. To lose one’s tongue, that season pass To Valkyries with stormy eyes, And grown as mute as heaven’s heat, To drown the forest masts in skies. And sprawled in thorns, to rake like cones The scattered knots of time and fate: The road; the coming to the inn; The dawn; the chill; the fish we ate. And down for good, to burst in song: “All gray I walked, till weak I died. The city once was choked in weeds, That swam in tears of soldiers’ wives. ✦ 102 ✦ “In shades of moonless threshing barns, In flames of flasks and pantry shelves, He too, no doubt—grown old and gray— Is doomed to bite the dust as well.” * And so I sang, I sang and died. And dying, kept returning like A boomerang . . . into her arms To say—as I recall—good-bye. Marguerite: the heroine of the opera Faust by Charles Gounod. Tavern hostess: according to Russian commentators, a reference to a character in Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov (based upon the drama of the same name by Pushkin). Valkyries: the daughters of Wotan and Erda in Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. ...