If I Were Able To Count Up To Five…

What she was thinking over I wonder

Ever well-dressed elderly Kapr-Tarry

Always on a bench in front of her house

One with faded sidings

Its color a dried bread crust

I liked to melt in my mouth

What she was then pondering over

Wearing national black sackman*

In front of her front garden

When she trained us to count from one to five

In the strange lingo of Gorny Mari folk

Carefully bending little kids’ fingers

Oh, if I were only more intent

Or better concentrated on it

If my fingers were not so dirty

Then I would have learned

To count from one to five

In a mysterious Gorny Mari language

Fair girls from alien Gorny Mari land

Would ride bicycles to my town

Their white teeth dazzling me

And sparkles

From the bikes’ spokes

Reflected in my cracked lenses

In the morning I’d hurry to meet them

Skipping a small rivulet

It’s just a tiny brook in summer

When the bright-eyed girls from Kozhvazh

Were cycling into my town

To buy some daily bread

Dashing they swept past me

On bikes so close to me

The fair girls of Gorny Mari side

They were so much alike

Like sisters

But not like my sister at all

I heard that an elder girl

Had been waiting for a Mari guy

Who served in the Army

But if he served in the Navy

She had to tarry for him even more

For three long years

When old woman Kapr-Tarry

Peacefully passed away

Then Master Leon

The strongest man in the town

Hammered out and brought

A huge iron cross

As he had promised before

To engrave there the years

A Gorny Mari woman Kapr-Tarry

Kept sitting on a bench here

Waiting for her husband a soldier

Who never was back from the front in fact

Yet I don’t know his name

In spring in her front garden

Right in front of her house

One with faded sidings

A white lilac flowering shrub ever blossoms out

And I’m picking a spray of lilac

So low a fence over

I’m looking for an inflorescence

With five petals

Among all those cross-headed ones

Oh, if I were able to count up to five

If Kapr-Tarry had bent my little finger

So tiny, a little boy’s

Ikty

Kockty

Kamyt

Four

Five.

~ Valery Petrovskiy

Valery Petrovskiy is a Chuvash State University, Cheboksary graduate in English, and graduated VKSch Higher School, Moscow in Journalism.  His work has been published in The Missing Slate, Metazen, Legendary, Monarch, and elsewhere.  He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and Super-10 finalist to The Open Russia’s Literary Contest, 2012. Valery lives in a remote village by the Volga River, Russia. 

* sackman – traditional Russian women’s clothing

Featured artwork:  Cotton Candies, by Maria Khan.