it's leaving me, the tree that grew from the letters of my life, furrowed the notebook of my skin. But now it autumns away into the earth I've left in water's memory. There, I heard, the past was a golden rose, there, I heard, the past is nothingness growing through the muck like a fiddle. I have melted wax into my ears, hid myself from that music, but the rain finds me even when the clouds are waterless, the sky is the color of a worn coat stitched with thunder.
###
Rose Lemberg lived in Ukraine, subarctic Russia, and Israel before immigrating to the US, where she works as a professor of Nostalgic and Marginal Studies. Her prose and poetry appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex, Goblin Fruit, Through the Gate, Mythic Delirium, Fantasy Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other venues. She edits Stone Telling with Shweta Narayan, and has recently edited The Moment of Change, an anthology of feminist speculative poetry, for Aqueduct Press. Rose can be found at roselemberg.net and her Livejournal blog.
The title Lekoved a Strune "in honor of a string" is a quote from one of Rose's favorite Yiddish poems, Avrom Sutzkever's Di Fidlroyz (The Fiddlerose).