Leonardo Alishan: Apparitions in April (Rhapsody for Gayane)

II

It's April, as all months are on my calendar,
and every day's the twenty-fourth.
And in April everything's in bloom in Utah;
tell me, love, why is my landscape always this desert?
The same bare, barren, burnt desert
with nothing in sight but a bottomless bottle
balanced on the tightrope of the horizon?

This desert is our home, my love,
with its black hills of scavenger birds
and its black seas of burning stones.
Hold my hand, granny, I'm just nine
and you are, after all, fourteen years old.


Leonardo Alishan
This poem was published in ASPORA, Volume II, 1995.