Barbara Fisher: Two Poems

Remembering Moscow

What do I remember

of Moscow?

Not enough probably.

I never knew exactly where the hotel was

in relation to sights seen—

Red Square unbelievably huge,

onion domes of many colours

and the Kremlin chock-full

of cathedrals.

The chance too of one’s photo taken

with a convincing group of look-alikes,

Marx, Lenin and the last Tsar.

Oh, and the terrifying traffic.

But what I remember most

is wondering why the hotel dining-room

was serving so many young couples,

American, each with a small child

at their table.

They did not seem like tourists,

were not surrounded with

the apparatus of happiness and yet

I later found they all were looking

for something more than that.

They were in the final stages

of the Byzantine process

of adopting a Russian orphan.

A radiant couple in the lift

cradled their new daughter

awash in drifts of pink.

Three years old, they said—

and I had thought her barely one.

Hospital Vistas

Waking early to an indigo sky,

yellow roses on my windowsill

have absorbed the night,

are silhouettes now

against the drift of dawn

as a transformation scene

plays out its alchemy—

a gradual flood of apricot

fills the sky, revives

the golden flowers and leaves

a field of cloudless blue.

Cumuli clouds this morning,

flushed pink and edged with gold,

stage set for a baroque swirl

of female flesh—limbs and breasts,

floating tresses and some helmeted hero

rising naked from a storm

of discreet drapery …

The vision fades. A nurse

has come to check blood pressure

and take my temperature.

This afternoon, geography of cloud,

vast map of some forgotten land,

country of myth and fable,

home to dragons, unicorns,

with its unexplored coast and wandering sea,

distant mountain ranges,

all dissolving now in mist.