The Only Park

I found a beautiful park which is unlike any of the other parks in St Petersburg.. It is bare and lovely. Unpretentious and radiant. The ruffled layers of white snow are the only decoration.  It’s possible to change direction in time to crossing paths with any-one, so that the most delicious snowy solitude is possible.

This park is delicious because while all the other urban parks have high-heels and ice-skating rinks and ticket booths and music stands and statues and artifice in all its forms this has none of those. In once section  abandoned iron-railings, de-rooted and at an angle, gape from between the trees.

There are specific views which could belong to a rural postcard, so you can believe you’ve suddenly wandered into rural St Petersburg, a wooden stables leading to a country road and a pack of motley dogs, a poorly  maintained copse. Outside the edges of the postcard though, you would see merry red and white stripes of a factory chimney, a strange species of tree branchless tree. At the end of the winding road, suddenly massive blue and grey triangular buildings imposing their joyless colours onto the skyline like monstrous lego blocks. Everywhere there are tenement blocks and building works on the edges of the park. That hardly matters., they are only glinting their on the edges(how long I wonder, before they encroach more upon this space, though? ).

There are a few babushkas and old men in their tough beaver hats, walking briskly and the odd sporty person with walking skies. There was an unkempt man just standing there on the edge of the path smoking.

In a copse, a man had cleared a hole in the snow and made an impressive fire. It was amazing to see fire in the snow, in the woods, in the sun,

As I walked on through the park I thought the sienna trees and the miroitic snow, beautiful velvet shades, and the sunshine would go on forever, long after the railway bridge. I could almost imagine myself walking out from under a dear disused railway bridge in the English country side, to see wild horses and  and lovely  gentle skies (the English sky seems so gentle and small now, as terrible and storm-filled as it can be) and wild flowers making a mockery of the scattered remains of the track.

But there were only  heartbreaking insipid flat blocks, another residential area. The only way to preserve the illusion of a borderless forest is to weave round and around the paths, within the frame of a Maurice Denis or a Klimst, so straight and ordered are these winter trees and there in the distance glints and thunders the factories of modernism.