When a friend asks why I keep returning to Russia, I talk about people in the back of a “march-route” taxi passing fare-money to a passenger in the front, back to back with the driver. She hands it over her shoulder, the driver makes change, and the process reverses, money passing down the line. I like the odd community. I say, it’s become a place I can enter, full of connecting alleys and friends. Don’t I know which central market has the lowest prices, and to ask who’s last, when I join a line? Where else could I use that? Those I love and have loved are people I was irresistibly drawn to, pursued, and at the same time, those who let me pursue them—one place, one time. Isn’t that a life, mine, and like a poem, shouldn’t it appear inevitable and freely elected, the contradiction joined in who I am? Suppose that woman had had blue eyes or I had lost this man’s address or no one answered the phone. We see alternatives, choices, when we could be no more than the means by which our genes express themselves. And if there are choices, couldn’t we be the result of how the one’s others made completed themselves, or prey to inexplicable forces, bound by love’s returns?

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