Half a World
Away, Siberia
Carol V. Davis
She won’t let me take a picture of them before I leave
I was instructed she said by a shaman
not until he’s twelve a danger death
I don’t understand Is there such a thing this power? The soul leaving the body
when the image forms in the shutter?
A mother and son
The boy designated an invalid
so home-schooled Nothing visible but he’s flighty
building jet
airplanes from balsa Hunched over the skin of wood cutting
a Tupolev 134 an Antonov 12
until the wings form and spread A man sits in Row 12B waiting for his
dinner
The day I arrived Timur age 9 put on his Russian Navy hat
Prompted by his mother finally said hello
One month later I left at 3am Never got to say goodbye Emptied my pockets of rubles
piled on the kitchen table No use for them at home Maybe
she’ll buy him wheels for the jet a tractor-trailer to haul it to the hangar
I wanted a photo I never got
Carol V. Davis is the author of Because I Cannot Leave This Body (Truman State Univ. Press, 2017) and Between Storms (TSUP, 2012). She won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Her first book, It’s Time to Talk About…, was published in an English/Russian edition by Symposium, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1997. Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, the Library of Congress and Radio Russia. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she also taught in Siberia, winter 2018 and teaches at Santa Monica College, California and Antioch Univ. Los Angeles. She was awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant in 2020, postponed because of Covid restrictions and will travel back to Siberia in April 2022 for it.