gyumri on my mind
Gyumri! A city sitting between the Mountains of the Caucuses on one side and the edge of the vast empty Arpacay valley that makes up Eastern Turkey on the other. I loved those low Armenian mountains; that range where Mount Aragats shadows our little, ruined city and further south, beyond our sight lies the mythical Mount Ararat where Noah landed his Ark. Yerevan, the Armenian capital, gets that view. We get the very edge of everything — ruined, earthquake shattered city block after ruined, earthquake shattered city block — mountains that nestle us and then then spread out in either direction, disappearing into the horizon — a dry grassland swept by unending wind that looks like some long-forgotten seabed — and somewhere out in all that emptiness, I could hear, Kurds and the Turkish army fighting. That was in 1995. I wrote this to Shelby a little while ago:
What was it? A thought of cold day triggered a memory of living in Gyumri (formerly Alexndropol, formerly Leninakan, formerly Kumayri) and from that I wrote this sonnet.
Ah, poetry! You must understand, this was after the Leninakan Earthquake of 1988 that killed 25,000 people and left the city in ruins. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1995 to '97. I worked in an orphanage for disabled babies and taught English at the Lord Byron School and walked by this church every day on my way to work.
Ten years ago I was changing diapers and feeding newly borns. This is the mythology I tell myself, the memories I remind myself. I lived on the graves of countless, countless, countless dead people. Unable to bury everyone, the dead were left where they lay. It was winter, December, there was no heat. People burning their libraries for warmth. The survivors building on top of all this. My hut lay on top of mass graves.
This is the mythology I tell myself, the memories I remind myself. I love Gyumri and those mountains and that empty seabed and those little babies. Then a memory of a cold day brings all this back. Sentimental poetry is, they say, a danger. I kept a diary up until my 27th birthday. That too is sentimental. As well as all this I carry with me.
Say it simple. I walked by a ruined
church in the main square every day. Do not
mention all your drinking, how you weakened
and threw up blood. Just the ruined church. What
it meant to walk by that church, the distraught
widow, the dying neighbor, the pepper
legged dog that died outside your window. Not
the church. You stopped seeing that. And later:
"Spirit soon/ I shall wander these/ winter
fields," your last diary entry. The dog
died and the neighbor died. You grew harder
and drank and you went blind. All this drunk fog.
The dog died. The neighbor died. And blindness.
Blindness. No church. No church. Worthless. Worthless.