Triin Paja

IN THE VINEYARD

the bed, narrow as a coffin,
creaks like a tame swan

when I wake,
famished, in the night.

I pick grapes from the vineyard
with bees gone delirious

from rotting fruit.

below a leaf, a quiescent insect
dreams

of when it was liquid
in its jade chrysalis, a memory

as impossible as my own arrival:

a muddy loaf in mother’s
magnolia hands.

I ask, like the bees,
if memory is always blighted.

if beneath this chamfron of
maturity,
manners,

I am still a stupidly generous child,

a cursed animal
lurking in the vines

with my one startling joy: my desire to live.

TRIIN PAJA is a poet from Estonia. Her poetry collection Nõges (Värske Raamat, 2018) won the Betti Alver Literary Award, and she has also received The Juhan Liiv Prize for Poetry and Värske Rõhk Poetry Award, as well as a Pushcart Prize for a poem in English. Her English poetry has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Portland Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Room.