Perhaps he’d rather have been
picking up clumps of coal 
along the railroad tracks 
not on-foot into a graying distance 
toward Norton where moose nudge 
paths through stands of pine and balsam.

Ahead, Cleantha would be waiting, 
shawled at her door, 
pressing pennies into his hand 
for her burlap sack 
of molasses, tins of salt pork, 
and other sundries.

So when he knocked, 
she, a miniature spinster
opened onto his shivering, invited him 
Come sit by the fire and offered 
her delivery boy tea and biscuits, 

a tape measure in hand, 
quilting pins resembling a porcupine
stuck in her apron’s bib 
and told him Hold still while I size up
your shoulders and waist. 

She snipped incisions down trousers, 
once her dead brothers. 
With precision the design took form, 
a jacket with buttonholes,

hood made from a flannel sheet 
yanked off the window.
Eager to please the young man 
who’d delivered food,
she rubbed her hands, instructed 
Try the jacket’s fit.

All the way back home that jacket blazed,
and once there he pressed it 
to the foot of his bed,
petting it each time he fetched something.
                        

	“My home is burning, my homeland
	Is bleeding, and therefore I am.”
	—Bohdan Andrukh

It happened one night, perhaps more,
that a sleeping Canadian Goose
at the Honey Lake Wildlife Refuge
hadn’t felt the trap-ice
creep in around its body 
holding it prisoner, unable
to flap free. So, when the coyote,
tongue hanging like a torn rag,
gingerly crept up, circled around
the bird, the goose awakened, 
frantically powered up to free herself,
ice becoming blood’s crazed map.

So it is that Putin entraps
thousands, borders sealed;
citizens hiding in subway tunnels
the fortunate unharmed.

A double-headed eagle
depicts empire, while Ukraine’s
national bird, the nightingale 
sweetly sings. We, in other countries, 
are left with a sorrow so large it doesn’t fit 
in the geography of comprehension.

Listen, listen, the nightingale sings,
my fatherland is burning, my heart scorched.