Somewhere in Moscow

She picks up a carrot and slices
the feathery green from the frost-blackened root.
There are hundreds to get through

and you know the street, brown with snow, crawls
for a mile and three-quarters, that they drop
in the pail like the minutes
and days of this featureless woman
wearing two rusty coats tied with string

and you want their rough skin in her hands
to bring back the marl round the dacha,
her mother’s lace collar, the wink of a match
in the bowl of her grandfather’s pipe,
the birch forests smaller than hope.

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