
is to search the internet for Russian poetry in vain attempts
for conversation starters, for new reasons to leave my stool
and find novel and nerdy ways to say, How are you this evening?
It is to be riveted to the bar, drunk and dreaming
of your Volgograd, one I never saw and never frequented
its taverns and winding city streets with you on my arm –
you, always on my arm, teaching me how the motherland
really calls, taking me through the real city, the real Russia,
real Eastern Europe with a love of butter, mayonnaise, beer —
and not the one Americans like me thought they read about
on Wikipedia – where a colossal concrete woman on a hill
wields a sword and gestures to the clouds, to the skyline
and to skyscrapers with an outreached and welcoming hand,
yet telling me how you can see a statue, a Slavic world, a pride
of a people and never totally stand in its tremendous shadow;
is to sit in a bar and steal glimpses of you and your silken hair,
long and flowing like the Volga and wish I could forever be
entangled there and in your arms; it is to have a heart aflame,
seething, and jealous when you politely smile at other men;
it is to wonder how your ancestors huddled in the rubble
and ruin of a besieged Stalingrad and trained their rifles
against invading fascists — and yet lived to raise lovely children;
is to practice pick-up lines using honest Anna Akhmatova
logic about the true meanings of smoldering, burning gazes,
and to fail to utter real words when you stand next to me;
is to not read Alexander Blok at all; is to be in total wonder
and stare at the bubbles in my pint of beer and ask: Will she
walk through the bar’s door tonight? Will she sit next to me?
Will she mention Mandelstam this time? Or laugh out loud
about Gogol and his notorious nose? How can I parse her
every word for profound meaning and romantic musings?
Reading Alexander Blok is to be reminded of the Russia
I daydreamed about as a sullen, heartbroken teenager
in Holland, stumbling from an American Air Force Base
and into an Utrecht anarcho-syndicalist bookstore and see
portraits of Trotsky, Bakunin, and Mayakovsky glower
over texts discounted and marked down for clearance;
It is to be reminded of other Russian writers, barren and bleak
snow swept steppes, Cossacks atop horses, charging
into hopeless battles and knowing they will never return;
it is to be an American who spent half of his life outside
America, seeking – always seeking – to find meaning
In every country he saw, every friend’s nationality around him,
only to find home in the lonely pages of Russian literature;
sometimes to read Alexander Blok is to not read him at all;
sometimes it’s to be reminded of who you don’t want to be:
it is to think somewhere else in time, Mayakovsky allegedly
spun a partially loaded revolver on his desk – only to pick it up
and push the muzzle against his chest, against his heart
and fire;
it is to know the dark alleys of my mind and become very afraid
every time my cold heart thaws and beats afresh, as obsessions
and crushes are twisting, woodland pathways into oblivion.
Yet even then,
it still yearning to kiss you deeply and needing to fully know the nuances and complexities and honesty of your native tongue.