nearly a verb, this
roadlessness and flood.
more archaic scrawl appears
over the concrete of the city.

rasputitsa: early snowmelt
buried with earth in spring.

ras. first salvo. blown path.
the difficult spin of wheels
on native byways. their weather-
broken state. stalled tanks
and soldiers half-sunk,
mouths hollow with wind
and snowdrops.

rasputye, convergences.
watched crossroads.
another steppe turned back
from farmland field. we wade
through blue mist, scattering
seeds and cracked cones into
trenches of black soil
for a million trees
we will not see bloom.

pine, hornbeam, oak and birch
in peatland, floodplain, storm.

March. keep count. we war
even as we drag the furrow
toward the next new summer.
the flat, bright cast of a BBC
color-ramp map melts
into 2100, the north
bending from green to shades
of wildfire and dry wheat.

the U.S. understands
that the russian incursion could go
more smoothly if the temperature
would hold. our April rises
splashed in ice and sun
from a decade of breach

and unravel. rasputaite.
a plea made formal
or plural. somehow
transitive. I hand it over
to my mother. sorry
little cluster of gold chains

I neglected as they looped
and snarled in my pocket
or around my neck. I was not
much before, and still remain
a futile girl, not very quick
nor close at hand.

rasputa, old insult
for a peasant child.

I would find her hidden
in the foreign roses
with her marksman eye
and the thin, judicious
fingers of her line.

she would wait for me
to speak. pаспутай
это мне, I’d say.

clear me through
the rigged, distending maze
of this carnality and future,
artist. unloosen this for me.