How Spring Almost Came That Year
by Clare Goulet
... [ ] has intelligence that commanders have received orders to proceed (Feb 20, 2022)
While waiting
for the ancient city to be bombed that weekend we went
to the market, the women here and in Kyiv, Odesa, sun
glinting off the seaport there and here on the Atlantic, all of us unslept,
farmers hauling the last crates of winter potato and leek, smoked
fish and blood-wrapped meats as we moved, processional, past laid tables
of pastries and pickled pear, past the stacked pale wheels of cheese. The sky that day
only blue and here they’d run out of button mushrooms. I hold a heavy
sack of carrots close to my chest while, there, Kateryna Matsuka with sleek
grey hair and very red lipstick also chooses carrots, her machine gun careless
across her body. A dozen brown eggs, each of us checking
rows of delicate shells uncracked, neushkodzhenyy, unhurt, their word
for being still intact. One strong coffee each, the packed café
there; here an early crowd also jostles in the scream
of the espresso machine, thick rich grounds like having your face pressed
into dirt. In a small, lit square in the rectangle of my mobile I watch a violinist
play Vivaldi on Maidan cobbles where no machines roll over the ground. I count four
people there, listening to the violin with me. That afternoon we left the city, driving west
on Highway 103 to Jericho Road, tar breaking into rubble for the last mile, escaping
this tense, endless week. A house hides in birch woods—leave the car and the roar
fills your ears like shouts from a distant stadium, thaw, inevitable stream
swollen, unstoppable, breaking ice, limbs, everything in its path. Inside:
my host pours hot water over old roses, windows facing east, blank sky, bare mud,
three china cups held in our laps and the talk is the news and the news
waits. Day here, night there, we know what comes; only the bounding
oblivious dog with his orange ball lunges, and my daughter throws
the ball and the dog brings it hopeful back, and she throws the ball, again
he brings it back. And our cups rattle only a little here and there
and again she throws it—
And that was that. The café and the market
and the farmer and the stall
and the tea and the child
and the dog, and the ball.
“This piece was written quickly on Saturday Feb 19, 2022, that weekend of terrible waiting, in so many places, for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; everything felt urgent and strange. I sent this piece out of my hands to Collateral the next day, Feb 20, deliberately fast, before Putin’s cold, deranged speech of Mon Feb 21 and his declaration of open war Feb 24. Quickly, as I didn’t know if I would remember what the waiting felt like, once war started. (I can’t.)” —Clare Goulet
A Québécois-British hybrid raised in Nova Scotia, Clare Goulet has published creative nonfiction, short and longform poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms for journals in Canada and abroad—recently “Crane Path” in The Ilanot Review and a chapter on Bringhurst’s poems for Listening for the Heartbeat of Being (MQUP)—as well as reviews, author interviews, research on metaphor and polyphony. She has edited for The Fiddlehead, Brick Books, Nimbus, and Gaspereau Press, co-edited Lyric Ecology (Cormorant)on the work of Jan Zwicky, and teaches in Halifax, Canada.