That’s how the green warbler came into my life—
as I drove a red clay road to the interior,
backwater, wedding almonds thrown to the sky,
listening to Louis Armstrong on my playlist—
out here where my great-aunts disappeared on a summer day
a long time ago.
Along the gravel roads, villagers are listening to Komitas,
that composer-conductor priest of
raspy flame hymns—uncharted melodies—
voice of the wings of a warbler.
Out here the shadows of the
deportees from Karabakh—Artsakh as Armenians know it—
flow over the border to black and blue
redux.
Gold trumpet sun blazes down
the red tufa walls of an abandoned church.
A tuba erupts from a mountain spring
some peacocks play zither on branches
chickens peck and scratch the rocks
spiderwebs glow on fallen trees.
The wind xylophones broken glass and cans.
I keep moving into midnight.
The golden horn. The raspy tremolos. Light
from a cell phone in a shack near the river
where an old couple sit sipping something
out of glass cups—
glass cups in the knapsacks of the
deportees slumping down barren hills
into the waterfall of branches.
The light goes out. I keep driving into it.
That’s how the green warbler came into my life.