Maria Gapotchenko
Autumn

Never you see a twenty-year-old stomping on leaves
        or throwing mulch
Around his mailbox flower-bed on Gristmill Road.
Always it is a forty-year-old with stubble on his face and
        a plaid flannel shirt
On his shoulders that, naked, might resemble an oak branch.

He, the forty-year-old, buys the smallest pumpkin and
        gives it to his small boy
To put outside for a strange autumn ritual that doesn't
         even exist where I come from
And doesn't even excite my imagination, but excites the imagination
        of this small boy
Growing up under an oak on Gristmill Road, stomping on mulch,
        throwing leaves
All around the mailbox flower-bed.

I learned these things living in New England, a long way away
From where mud rhymes with frozen rain, and
         Pushkin's autumn, especially,
Is nothing to do with anything here, in my new flannel homeland.

Winter ca. 1745

That year I was to bite into them with ferociousness.
I was unremitting. One might say unrelenting.
I made them quarry the earth’s marble with their bare hands.
I made them endure on summer’s dried grasses,
They learned to say their prayers. Distantly
I served His cause well. I converted many –
Almost as many as did live that year.

_ _

Maria Gapotchenko came to the United States from Russia in 1993. The themes of her collegiate writing seminars at Boston University are friendship and Russian literature.

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