for the Acmeists
I
All news is bad news,
the octopus and the ink.
Blast and spasm from the
blond trumpets, a queen
uncloseted out of Ilya Repin
or Pasternak Sr. or one or the
other of the adoptive Bs,
be its silver Bakst or gold Benois.
Blurred beyond and past delight,
cold weather creeps through bones
and pennies buy the cure.
Marina says the city will
change its name three times.
Yes, there’ll be maps on lining
papers, but no key to guide us.
First Virgil, then Ovid the less-
trusted, turning over small black
stones with his toe.
All news is bad news.
II
The clues abound if one
only looks, there’s no seachart,
no Buddha’s tooth in Kandy.
Cool, wan, airy, doelike: the breeze
sighs through snapped leaves
the adjectives don’t prepare you
to actually look and see.
Failure so complete defies the rules
of survival, consumes the dreams
unfolding in the blinking eye,
the hoop-and-whip epic
in the closed room.
Comfort paints the eyes shut,
centipede truckling its red burden
over ants in cautious swarm.
Armenia plays hide and seek
beside the big bald lake,
a flung stone puts out
Memory’s left eye.
III
Compound, she said, not confound,
the reward a score
of staves and penciled cancels,
humming something hummed once
a hundred dusty years ago come Sunday.
A capital romance, a musical
phrase to irritate the cowards.
No better time to fall
in love, thick as thieves,
thick as flowers littering the field.
Nikolai speaks of ‘rights’
as though the answering silence
is that of a polite audience, huddling
velvet-gawped beyond the footlights.
Armed with a sprig of violet,
an incriminating teletype
and a black market cigarette,
Nikolai tells Anna not to be afraid.
IV
A table of midlife gentlemen
discuss the finer merits of
le petit poulain bossu, or
how their knobs grew sore
with excess of expensive love.
(Exterminate the brutes?) only joking!
‘Refinement’? that’s the word
I’m not looking for. I felt it thrill me once,
like the great guns of Corneille.
Rodogune’s Tragedie, or, The Gigantic Sniffle.
You’re a Racine-man yourself, I take it …
Stalking kulak Phedres down the chattery esplanades.
There were no phalloi and no
brains, no eyes and no tongues
to be found, pickled in the white
explorers’ boondocks museum.
The governors of Perm,
ravenous as Venetians,
shedding serpent tears for Yermak,
Tsar of Water, weighed down
by his breastplate of blue stars,
wandering off the beaten path.
The archive of atrocities
compiled in rumors only,
but pamphlets of excuses for
the keeping, quick as lookup.
Boris sends a single word:
trefoil (scratched through).
All of this, and enough.
V
No one’s been rousted into
custody as yet, is that correct?
Neither envelope’s been delivered
via front or back door,
is that not evidentially so?
Rainer Maria will beg you, Marina,
naming your friends,
the missing and the silent.
Come back to this, the crown of Bohemia,
come back to Prague and its Jew-baiting streets.
Pain so stylized, sobs so
glutinous, peel the pink sleeve
of official emotion, open wide
before the moment slips away.
Rodchenko still sketches, Tatlin’s
popsicle sticks are offensive to no one,
Meyerhold hums an unwritten aria,
makes love to his beautiful wife,
the dressing room door left coyly ajar.
The spark might be love,
the fuel a thorny crown,
the many in the one.
VI
Starvation diet supplemented with
rooftop snatches of Peer Gynt and
one’s own g-string pornorelle
there was a young lady from France ….
Count Witte’s railroads looked quite fine on paper;
Tojo toasts his ancestors with a tumbler of Glasgow rye;
Spanky and the Little Raskolnikovs,
a minstrel show for holy fools.
Wit comes in all sizes,
too much like the Siberian flea
to worry the bard, the butt, or Brutus.
The cloud, unraveling, whispers down
its reflection, like an early morning
lover bidding farewell and sleep.
The hour rolls over in its blanket
of air, light chimes the first
of many false alarms.
VII
A telegram from an orange grove:
Viva el caballito jorobadito …
Dulcinea by way of Baku,
derricks and/or windmills beckoning,
and soon the hourglass shatters.
Free love and the condom
of the NEP.
It took a full afternoon
of steno, threats, and sodium
pentothal to spill the pattern
and everyone stood up, aghast,
remembering what part they’d played
in the rescue gone bad.
Our Nina of the White enclave,
pirogis and southpaw blessings
in the humpbacked shadow of
Sacre Coeur.
Where exactly was the hideaway,
the shallow grave, the crow’s
nest cum pied-a-terre?
How sharp was the pebble?
How real is this remorse?
(Let’s agree: it’s not a
lie if you convince me.)
VIII
At times the names are everything,
(Anna, Nikolai, Osip), and what
exists outside the containment of
scouting consonant and rearguard vowel
must wait upon some laggard angel
with posthumous stopwatch,
armed with a trowel for cutting,
calloused palms to scoop to the fingers’ sieve.
Begin at the edge, tap inwards
to the heart, frame the rare small
patch of color with a narrow
foot of yellow cord.
One might weep for quick judgment
but the names refuse all invitations
to condemn, stone and silk
and silence and oneself,
left muttering behind.