White Nights
- White Nights
Midnight could be noon, people strollingon the Embankment unable or unwillingto tell the difference. Drunken song and linked arms.But it is January I love, when night tucks in the cornersof the city with piles of snow pushed against the curb.The blinking lights of the blini café, the samovar’sbreath puffing against the front window.Walking back from the metro, blackness presses againstthe Soviet block apartments until they are indistinguishable.Darkness untamed even in this major metropolis.The day I took the wrong minibus, ended far from the city,the fear of never getting back, picturing my wool coatcurled beneath the birches, a small animal.Not that the bus left me so far out, but aloneon a road, past a half-frozen lake, a shabby churchwith a midnight cupola, no English in sight.I crossed the road, stamped my feet to keep from numbing,a prayer to keep my tongue from losing its agility.A man pulled a sled piled with firewood on a path that was no path.And I waited. [End Page 34]
Carol V. Davis is the author of Between Storms (2012). She won the 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, her work has been read on NPR and at the Library of Congress and is in the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She received a 2015 Barbara Deming grant and is poetry editor of the Los Angeles newspaper, The Jewish Journal.
