Second Oklahoma Elegy Poem by Ivar Ivask

Now that is an unusual point of view.
What do you do for a living? I edit
a literary journal, global in scope.
In New York or San Francisco, I assume?
No, in Norman, Oklahoma. But surely
your accent is not Oklahoman! What is it?
Estonian. Really, Estonian? Well,
my father was; my mother was Latvian,
with German the language of home.
But where is Estonia? On the shores
of the Baltic, up there
in the northeastern corner of Europe,
right below Finland. Oh Finland I know!
Estonian, you see, is closely related
to Finnish, as close as Danish and Swedish.
That's strange. I thought the Russians
were there and Russian spoken everywhere.
Not everywhere, though many of us
do know some Russian we'd rather forget.
But why? Isn't it the language of marvellous
classics the world has come to adore?
Chekhov, you know, Pasternak and Tolstoy.
But also the language of Lenin and Stalin,
let's not forget. So it's things
international you do in Oklahoma.
Don't you ever want to go back to Estonia?
I do. Instead I have spent many a summer
in Finland which is almost like home,
and it's free. I see. You sound
more like a poet than critic to me.
How perceptive of you. I am a poet too.
Not in Estonian? Yes, in Estonian, spoken
by just over a million. And you write
Estonian poems in Oklahoma? During the winter
I do; in summer it may be in Finland.
I simply don't get it! And neither do I.