Tonight Antigone works her will
upon the newsprint,
harped by poison,
stung by reprimand,
a tally of lost souls between the red lines
of the sad charter,
one last look around,
this Abdication’s Eve.
The shrinking of the world has come
by rotten stages, a cookery so odd
the Arctic looks half-eaten into blue,
the map’s upper edge some twelve
feet up the wall,
the dolphins’ key and sidebar,
eye-level to a staggering infant.
The hotel menu has been posted
by a kitchen royalist,
though appetites are measured
in republican servings and no one
can remember the glamorless new names.
A misplaced Duchess, raped
in the observatory, moans
against a jut of chalky tower,
the sky a fizz of winter light,
gray clouds smothering the opposite coastline
with such Slavic lack of ambiguity
that even the urgent rapist felt his lungs
grow damp, his legs watery
upon the middle-landing where he paused
to catch his breath, to puzzle
at the allegorical wreckage he’d made of her.
Not being the one the crowd was roaming after,
he was apprehended like a starling
in a bull’s wide net,
and asked politely to select among
the mercies he might throw himself upon.
The victim suffers through her own interview
with a lamb’s mien and Lavinia’s
hangdog mane, although her vocabulary
is neither dumbed nor wistful
and the stenographer’s compassion
burps in tired veins and almost (it seems)
the weather might succumb to color.
Here, at this very juncture of justice
and antigonal blindness, a funny uncle,
Creon with a Bolshevik’s red star,
should stray from character and rave
against the slut-gay light spilling
from the Winter Palace’s high window
its hourglass of golden sand
upon the snow below,
packed tight by Cossack boots,
the canvas hooves of Mongol ponies
pining for the prairie.
Antigone is weary of these anthems
meant for men alone,
remembering the scorched-earth backlash
of rejected gods.
Her heels echo to a tablature
of drumshot clicks and sudden stops,
a harrowing of the lowest rooms
that leaves the thuggish curators
gatemouthed and panting, pawing
behind a fez-topped monkey
whose only parade is this way or exit.
Three devils stoop to enter, rain
shimmering down their trouser legs,
and the regulars look up with marvel
at these strangers who’ve left the engine running.
Statements are taken, witnessed, notarized,
and then they’re gone again.
The rain rages down upon the streets
that rubber and twist, one broken hole
and guttering shine and then another,
cobbled two-lanes that ribbon and shoot
to where the river bumps its barges
like annoyance made majestic,
a break in the weather
but not tonight.
She moves like nightmare through the
groggy crowd, surfacing from their swim
in the wine cellars of Theatre Street.
Their crushing is blocked
upon her uncle’s calendar
like a promise of dominos,
feast days of solid red
to mark the turning year,
a year in which his niece (herself)
will cease to worry him,
give up reactionary politics,
demean herself to some pretty profession,
allow herself to be seduced
by someone sufficiently fraternal,
whose Party card she’ll never see,
nor the coded cables from the Ministry.
The crowd gropes itself and surges
and someone shouts that Christ’s been
sighted, walking purposeful upon the
bitter Neva, white-suited as a snowman
on the river’s monked black shudder.
A hundred yards within the Pale of
Petrograd, her brother’s corpse
continues its open air disunion,
dragged from a shallow grave
by the same sad plotters who earlier took
her shovels and bribes, the homemade marker
of a double-winged cross.
What good will this latest Jesus be
to her, consumed with the delivery
into silence and shelter
of a bag of bones she once loved, loves still?
The crowd catches her in its smelly tide
and she is borne along towards the river,
the mob’s excitement infectious
as bad manners, the red and white
provocateurs the rudest of the lot.
Torches line the quay,
bristling in the wet air
like a dozing dragon’s spine,
the eddy of the crowd
a muddy foam against white stone.
The floating Son of Man turns out to be
just that, a tramp from the vodka swamps,
polar-beared in a Brigadier’s burgled furs,
a refuse barge to bear him down
the river, his lost disciples
a pair of tough-talking urchins,
penguined close behind.
Unimpressed, the mob moves on,
their marching hymn a brood
of piety and idiot’s delight.
Antigone remains, predicting,
against all proof,
the ultimate triumph of white terror
over red, her brother’s
violent tendencies and reckless pride,
to one day be the stuff of
commissions and memorials,
no cluster of victor’s roses
without its share
of thorns.