It should have been easy to pull the plow from the marsh now the thaw has settled in but
It took two men & the plow horse all working together to finally clear it at last
That was what Stella read aloud to me as she flipped through those letters her mother had sent
After her father died & her brothers left Moscow for Canada & she left finally too
& I should have known when she boarded the Montrealer in her Zhivago coat—all the rage that year
Yet never right for a winter in Baltimore—& she’d left behind
The photograph framed & nailed by our bed of Pasternak alone at his desk in Peredelkino
A room spare as a monk’s filled with snow-lit light & on one wall you could make out the print of
Audubon’s great snowy heron standing in marsh grass its beak poised at an angle of fierce attention
Its eyes locked in that acute otherworldly focus of Pasternak’s own—& she left too on the maple table
The tiny framed snapshot I’d taken: Stella holding up her truly beloved companion My Sister, Life
My only copy I’d given to her the very one she’d spirited away