Lara

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I was looking for my muse and I found you –

sleeping between freshly laundered sheets

while wolves you took for dogs were howling

in the dark beyond your safety zone.

Iced rowanberries in the snow and strong white arms –

your concentration in the library at Yuryatin –

abandoned weeping on the coffin of your lover:

you stole my mind to live through for a time.

The sleigh is swallowed into distance. In your final

understated disappearing a part of me goes too –

out of fiction into history and the death camps,

lost in a multitude of women with no names.

©Virginia Rounding, 1994

First published in Stand Magazine, Spring 1997