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The Simulacra

By D. Nurkse D. Nurkse

They were driving into the mountains, suddenly married,

sometimes touching each other’s cheek with a ﬁngernail

gingerly: the radio played ecstatic static: certain roads

marked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks,

or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas.

Sometimes they quarreled, sometimes they grew old,

the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind,

they made it. Small towns ﬂew past, Rodez, Albi,

limestone quarries, pear orchards, children racing

after hoops, wobbling when their shadows wavered,

infants crying for ﬁne rain, old women on stoops

darning gray veils—and who were we, watching?

Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the ﬁeld

where they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepness

of the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint,

how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.

Source: Poetry (June 2009).

Biography

D. Nurkse is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Rules of Paradise (2001), The Fall (2003), and The Border Kingdom (2008). His parents escaped Nazi Europe during World War II—his Estonian father worked for the League of Nations in Vienna, his mother was an artist—and moved to New York. Nurkse’s family moved back to live in Europe for a number of years, returning to the United States around the time of the . . .

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