Waking up to that long ago language, and only old ladies about the place, already busy making lunch in the basement restaurant, the pots boiling and the music like a heartbeat or the river that sustains us all, their nattering and their beets, and a posse of wild dogs outside the window; even at that late hour on my first morning, the Chernobyl bus rolling up next to the beer kiosk and I assumed the same as I’d assumed before, but in a foreign tongue the outlines of the familiar blur without notice enough to keep you from stumbling on the curb of what you don’t know.  Lutsk, like the relics of plenty of other places that I’d never see or know, opened and closed at once, gave no notice, while some half a world away from where sunrise was a few minutes later each morning, the rest of you rose to the cadence you’d practiced the day before, and the day before, though in that place, near the castle of the cassocks, where I pissed in a hole in the floor while the two women whispered in the public room, the poets recognized where the sounds had changed, felt the muscles seize in the shoulders, waited for the breath to start again as a bellows, rising and then falling but always near the flame, and all the while in the direction of the Black Sea, the machinery of empire, stamped in small bits and smaller moments, churned and the serfs broke against more rocks as the tsars–ours and yours about the same–worried only about how to schedule more trains, how to move more coal that turned out not to be diamonds after all.

 

Glen Young is a kayak guide and ski instructor. He serves on the boards of the Harbor Springs Festival of the Book; Mackinac Arts Council; Top of the Mitt Writing Project; and Miller Van Winkle Chapter of Trout Unlimited.