Sometimes, they say in the book reviews, you come across a book

At exactly the right time in your life. They say it like it’s a good thing.

But whenever I find myself too sunk in empathy, in words that hug

And prick and clamour, I take a step back, a deep shuddering breath,

And I think about Tchaikovsky taking a break from his libretto,

The French horns needling him, as they needled me 

During the second-coldest winter of my life, working in like ticks.

I imagine his great hand wiping dandruff from his white beard

As he rises to check the mail. 

I imagine the calamity that comes in a pretty scented envelope.

It might be a stretch to say that Pushkin, in breaking his hero’s heart,

Also infected Tchaikovsky with the cholera that would finish him. 

Yet, a real man died for the sake of a fictional Tatiana, as, during that winter of the horns,

I’d have died for her, as well. So, when I find myself reading something

Perfect and terrible, I must remind myself:

Tchaikovsky, despite the tug he might have felt between his ribs,

Was not Onegin. 

And no matter how much I bleed onto pages,

I am not Anna Karenina.

I am not Natasha Rostov.

I am not Catherine Earnshaw.

I am not Mrs. Bentley.

It is not likely that I will die with my bosom across a railroad track,

In a fever that coincides with childbirth on the moors,

In a prairie shack, raising other women’s sons,

Or warm in my bed on my lavish country estate.

It is more likely that I will be struck down in my prime

In some very avoidable scooter accident,

Or perhaps by bacteria that wouldn’t quit, even after

I went and bought a tub of Manuka honey,

Or because I went back to collect a neighbours dog

Even as the wildfire crested the hill. 

So, when I become entangled in similarities, and turn

With the keen analysis of an amateur literary critic

Onto the dirty tangling secrets of my two families

(Maybe that estranged cousin will make us all pay for it yet),

Onto the exact sequence of romantic attachments I’ve had

(Maybe this second chance at love will be cut short by gangrene),

Onto every French horn that radiates through my eardrums

And beats its way soulwards,

I must stop, dog-ear the page, and put my head down on my desk.

This story will not be my undoing. 

I will find some new and original way to ruin my own life.

 

 

(Image: Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin)