You insist upon living till the life you’d live
has damned you, your intransigence
forcing you on like a train that pounds
its rhythms across some hard white terrain.

Adulterous and anachronistic, a stubborn
glow illuminates your doomed affair
as when, like a ghost reborn, Strelnikov
told you: The private life is dead,

his rectitude a new kind of purity
whose thought is doctrinaire,
his speech a bridled mob
that makes you seek your chances

beyond the margin of events.
Arriving at Varykino, you find a house
that is wrecked in snow, a past's discredited
chattels forgotten beneath its sheets.

There is no sense beyond gesture
as you rework the pattern
of days stripped of consequence, awaiting spring,
its new growth pushing beneath untrodden snow.