a little poem

a little poem

Dream of a New World Order


We’re in bed beneath a goose down quilt
in the dacha of a friend who can’t return.
Painted eggs adorn the sill.
The stove is packed with birch on low.
It is December and for the first time in seventy years
there are lights in the windows again.
We are watching the end
of Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow on the VCR,
corrupted by its formalism of purple flowers.

It’s snowing again.

We discuss the movie’s poetry for a while,
the indelible, disparate things that contradict
the state’s denial of the soul.
You say, “This country roamed the ward for seventy
years stabbing its heart with a German blade.”
You say, “Now showing on the giant screen
of the fallen world the censored film of a meadow.”

We get up for dinner in our robes
and have some caviar, borscht and wine.
We put Gorky on and lie back down.
Your father calls.
You spill your wine on my pillow reaching for the phone.
You ask him how he got our number.
“Never mind,” he says, “now listen . . .”

You tell him that you’re with me now,
that communism is dead, that without the example of love
both here and at home the world is doomed.
He tells you that love is a criminal roaming your heart
with a golden tongue, that the world never changes
despite the end of empires and the hopes of the young.
I can hear his American voice in the Russian receiver:
“What about those folks in the permafrost just north of you?
What about Mandelstam, Sakharov and Wallenberg?
Tell me one damned thing their love did for them.”
You tell him about the baby then.
He falls as silent as the snow.
We are at the part where Gorky is walking
beside the Volga, taking it in, seeing who he is.
The snow is melting in the fields.
The sun is out and the ice is breaking.

I take the phone from you as Gorky stares at the scud
of floes and I tell your father that he’ll be sorry
if he thinks “America” can happen in a country
where the sausages are filled with sawdust
and the vodka bottles have no caps, where the ghosts
of ten thousand peasants cry out from the ground like stones
and all the officials are in love with difficulty,
where madness, passion and nihilism tour the countryside
in a dazzling troika, and a nose absconds
to a stranger’s oven, where the songs are funny,
long and sad and everyone votes for the common man.
I tell him this is the right place for love,
so error-ridden and cold,
that we may be here forever, this far removed,
somewhere in Siberia, watching films about meadows
and the children who survived the war,
learning the language slowly, one difficult word at a time.
I say good bye and hang up the phone.

An old man down the road without any teeth
utters a proverb from the time of Rus:
“Eat bread and salt and speak the truth.”
The camera closes in on his face.
It has that unabashed, mystified Russian look
that burns the script.
He is catching the backside of the Lord.
I kiss your neck as you fall asleep.
It’s 1914. It’s 2001.