AFTER THE COUP
Language is a virus.
—William S. Burroughs
Yelena, I want to write you a poem of the men we've
loved,
how their names, oval like honey, cling to our lips.
I want to say to you we are sisters; there is no cure
for Tuesdays, Bach, revolution, and snow falling from
our memories—
always in another country. The children we don't
have,
words lost with meaning, a revelation: the senses
fade, or do they?
How do we measure generations, when you and I,
who, following our hearts, sleep alone
because our craft is hidden in the very definition of
snow?
The Inuit have 52 words for snow; how many have we
for love?
Who will recobble Kutzovsky Prospekt now the
barricades are down,
the tanks withdrawn? They say the fallen will be
buried in the Kremlin Wall—
even if they have to disinter someone to make room
for them.
Who will it be: Lenin, Stalin, John Reed?
Someone pinned onto my jacket, Demokratia,
a concept imported like independence, economy, and freedom.
Shall I tell you how I can't sleep in the hollow
where my lover's body made a lasting impression;
I have to move against the wall in order to find
rest?
But you know of these things we've never alluded to,
having no common language between us—
To those who could translate our thoughts,
we would never divulge such secrets.
The weather is changing,
they're pulling the statues of repression down to
their knees.
Both Vladimir and Iron Feliks were found to be hollow
inside after all.
Opposite the Bolshoi Theatre, Marx still stands amid
graffiti—
I apologise: I was wrong. . .
I can still see you walking down Shevchenko Street;
snow collecting in the blue pockets of your scarf.
There is something about snow that illuminates the
face
into the purity of angels—
no matter that it is dirty, or a symbol for the old
guard,
and the shelves still empty.
I always thought of Russia or the Ukraine
as a dark place in winter;
I forgot about the reflective quality of snow.
Or that East and West are somehow buried
in the curious fact that, in Arabic,
there is no distinction between ice and snow.
And there are no words for democracy or orgasm
in China. Tianenmen Square.
If the revolution succeeds or fails,
will language dictate thought?
I think of you on that street named after the poet,
your lover sneaking off to marry someone's intended
wife
while mine is unaccounted for. How does one measure
grief
when the collective beds of the harem are so full,
they buckle and strain and calve like ice floes in
spring?
They say only a small portion of the iceberg is
visible above water-line.
The ice in our lemonade (sweetened, no doubt, with kolkhotz sugar beets,
not honey) demonstrates this with consistency—
We fall from the blueness of our lover's eyes,
the iceberg, another summit to be scaled, like all
the rest.
I want to tell you how the fragrance of nectarines or
apples
in the cloistered stillness of a room in late
afternoon
is like that opening to sex.
We are haunted by the everyday things in our lives;
the slippers under the kitchen table,
forgotten clothes still holding the shape of the man.
The air grows colder, I wear flannel nightgowns,
the full moon is a reminder of walks along the Dniepr
midsummer, when there is little palpable difference
between air and flesh.
It seems as if the woman is always lying down a
harvest for the man,
no matter what country, century, or season. What of
Akhmatova?
Sometimes it feels there is no end to this concert
of silence.
We become experts in the business of waiting,
calling our advocation our art.
These indistinct words spill onto the snowblind page;
shadows of bare branches,
feeble attempts of fruit trees holding laden skies.
Our lips aren't jaded, they're made of common stone.
Maybe we did live other lives in other countries,
maybe the small boy skating on thin ice was your only
child;
the treacherous river is dark, brooding, and
vengefully swift.
If you look onto the white expanse, they've cut holes
into the skin
of the river, plummeting the icy depths for small
treasures.
The river's children glisten silvery, as if the moon
hid in their bellies.
They are not the Savior's body, they are feeding on
the moon,
each month she reminds us of the red tide,
squeezing out slave's blood, drop by drop.
Coral beads in the snow, on the sheets swaddling our
hearts.
Someone cautions me: Give even-numbered flowers to
the dead.
I cannot begin to count all the bouquets in Red
Square
to see if I'm among the living.
As honey ages, it darkens, turns bitter the sweetness
of long-withered blossoms buried in its core.
What generation of bees enters our lips to
reconstitute spring—
as if you could cage the very air with memory?
Winter nightclothes grow multiple arms to hold us
as we journey towards the longest night,
drinking resurrected light from the moon.
21
August 1991
1991 Soviet coup d'état
1992 Louisville Review, KY
1992 Richard Eberhardt Poetry Prize, Florida State University, First Honorable mention
1992/93 Sundog Florida State University
