Natalia Zaretsky taught Physics in college in Moscow, in 1980 emigrated to the United States. Her first book of poetry Autumn Solstice has been published by Windsong Publishing Co., CA. (2003). Her manuscript City of Naked Feelings would be published by the same publisher in September of 2006. She published the book Dayenu – My Journey into the Jewish World. Her poems have been published in Poetry Magazine, Iliad Press, Poetry.com, California Quarterly, Moment (magazine), The Louisville Review, Paterson Poetry Review, Gin Bender Review, The Louisville Review, The Georgetown Review and others.
Room with a View
I.
The cage of my room I pace
between the door and tomorrow –
a moving mark on my time-string,
short like a noose tying me
to an oxygen machine in the corner.
At times I take a world tour
scanning lithographs on four walls –
Goya, Renoir, Al-Greco,
Rodos, Paris, Jaffa –
mute memorial to past travels erected
in my final claustrophobicconfinement.
II.
A window’s sliding glass
as half-closed eyes warily
let sun sieve into a comely room
reflecting in parquet and mirror.
Melancholy of the Albinony’s adagio
fills the calm coffer up to the rim
brushes the past off paintings
hanging by thin threads of memory.
A flat skillet of the yellow lackluster wall
of the building across the ground strip,
narrow like a prison yard,
loads the entire square of the view,
rising to the edge of sun’s pancake.
The room idles away languorous hours,
abiding to the space limitation between
the window and the opposite drugged domicile.
At night the outside blackness bears
the illusion of vast green pastures,
shores, licked by tongues of warm sea,
metropolises peopled with travelers.
Then dawn cracks through
curtains soon enough,
and nightly hallucinations vanish.
Again the insipid yellow wall
looms before the window
with frightening nearness –
it may move closer and block the light,
and the room will die from suffocation,
quietly expire without a sound of complaint.
The Cause of Death will state:
lack of air and laughter.
