Oriana
As you can probably guess, Oriana is not my “real” name. Given that few native-born Americans can pronounce Joasia -- and even if they try, ten minutes later they are calling me Sasha -- like so many immigrants, I too adopted a new name, one that seemed to fit my new hybrid identity. Having come to the U.S. when I was seventeen, by myself (something I strongly advise against), I was a proverbial impressionable teenager, torn between the pressure to Americanize and my dislike of popular American culture. It’s taken me decades to arrive at acceptance, at "my America" – and to understand that my real homeland is poetry. As one friend put it, “You are not an American poet. You are a poet who happens to write in English.”
After a brief stay in Washington, D.C., and then a winter in Milwaukee, I moved to Los Angeles, fell in love with California, and I began to write – first short stories, later mostly poetry and essays. I now live in San Diego near the Mexican border, in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood. Among my neighbors are many happy immigrants, so different from the bitter émigrés I first met. I don’t wish the three poems here to be understood as being only about loss; they are also about the richness and beauty of the journey.
Even though I’ve lived in California for decades now -- all my adult life -- Warsaw continues to be my city, part of my psychic landscape. Living in Warsaw meant taking buses, streetcars, and trains – moving through a great richness of images, which grew mysterious and momentary, a simultaneous arrival and departure.
Wolf Train
December, a shopping mall, above the traffic snarl I saw
an empty trolley on an overpass,
its windows lit with moonlike glow –
reminding me how much I loved
taking a train in Warsaw at night – how utterly I would enter
the train’s rhythm,
the knocking of the wheels against the shifting and dividing tracks;
blind backs of buildings,
unknown streets – an underworld
passing across my face reflected in the dark, drizzled glass –
disembodied, eroding in flashes
of random city lights. If I’d known
what station would be next –
if I’d known the windows of life
close quickly, and we look at the past
as through time’s prison bars –
in the cramped Warsaw apartment,
at fifteen, when I made up
my mind to live in the West –
would I have ever danced
as though we never lose
anything we love –
just keep adding beauty to beauty.
The trolley flying overhead
like a luminous ghost
brought me back to an unreal city,
in the same instant of stone and breath
arriving and departing,
falling and rising from its ruins.
The same moon moved between
darkness and light-wounded clouds,
winter’s hungry Wolf Moon,
adding phantom beauty to beauty.
“That is all,” a Zen master said.
That is all but it is splendid” –
the city fleeting in decaying gleam,
the wolf train riding the night sky
with a silent aria of howl.
**
Immigrants are notorious for idealizing the lost homeland. I tried to guard against it. Still, I had practically no doubt that I would have been happier had I stayed in Poland – yet, ironically, had I done so, I would have wondered what my life would be like if I lived abroad.
Every Spring I Remembered Lilacs
sweet sticky purple mouths
kissing me back after rain –
not the fruitless peach blooms
fevering Los Angeles,
poisonous haze of the oil refineries,
a few feeble stars. I could count
what I had on my fingers: one table,
three chairs, twice-a-year love life,
ten cents above the minimum wage.
I thought I should have never left
that pavement ticking with anger,
that sky of billowing archangels.
Would I have married the green-eyed
motorcycle rider I met in Mazurian woods –
we were married by the wild swans
that whooshed by over our heads –
Would I have my Janusz and Danuta,
teach them leafy legends of their names . . .
Each morning I’d open the balcony,
lace curtain like a shining wind.
I tried to check myself, imagining
my husband would have an affair
with his woman dentist, a neighbor watch
full-blast soccer on TV –
and I, like a character in Chekhov,
above a river of lilacs,
would wander through atlases and whisper
the ecstasy of foreign cities.
But the long street called Childhood
is not on any city map. And yet
every spring I remember lilacs,
chill droplets of rain I’d kiss
from the brief, boundless blossoms –
my face pressed into flowers,
my heart calm before sorrow,
mouth grazing clusters of moist stars.
**
Leaving Poland and arrival in the United States was a great divide that came to define my life. The astonishing part is that this divide never ceases to be – in a way, I am always that young girl who is leaving and arriving.
I Am Standing Still Forever
in the amber of late August,
a rooster crowing and crowing –
rusty seaside landscape
and a drunken Russian sailor,
weeping: See, you too
don’t know anyone in this town.
I am always leaving, leafing
in unending autumn –
poplars toss as to a beggar
coins of wind, of luck –
parents, grandparents
walking through bombed cities;
the all-season weather of ghosts –
I’m arriving: Go ahead,
squeeze the lemon, this is America.
A stranger greeted by strangers,
I am waving, smiling.
I am studying for the future:
I dissect rats and brains,
take a seminar on pain.
a tail stiff with formaldehyde
sticks out of my purse.
I receive invitations:
Please come in your
national costume –
and I’m standing still forever,
a young girl about to step
across the world.
My name trembles
on the nervous loudspeaker.
My name crackles, and I don’t
crackle back.
CR
Oriana, a former journalist and community college instructor, now teaches poetry workshops. Her awards include The New Letters Award, Felix Pollack Award, and a residency at Yaddo. Her poems, essays, and translations have been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry 1992, New Letters, Nimrod, The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, Texas Review, Wisconsin Review, American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Spoon River Review, and many other journals and anthologies.
