Elegy Owed (6 page)

Lev and Svetlana are science students at Moscow University.

They fall in love. World War II happens. Lev goes to war and is captured

by the Germans. After the war, denounced by fellow Russians

who heard him speaking German, Lev is sentenced to death for treason,

his sentence commuted to ten years in the gulag. I am so far sorry

for Lev and Svetlana but not amazed. My amazement begins when Svetlana

breaks into the gulag, not once but several times, to see and touch Lev.

I have lived for three weeks as a man who knows this thing was done,

have washed dishes and dug a trench trying to imagine her first step

after closing the door, the first step Svetlana took under the power

of the thought, I am going to sneak into the gulag. I felt I knew the world

and then found out it contained that first step and every next step

toward guns and dogs and the Arctic Circle, it made me so happy

that she did this that I dug a better trench and washed cleaner plates

and tried to think of a place on my wife's body I'd never kissed.

I thought of such a place and kissed her there and explained

why kissing her there was the least I could do to show the world

I have a new and more generous understanding of life: I will get drunk

and throw knives at clouds but also kiss my wife's darkest privacy

to demonstrate I am willing to convert reverence to deed.

After I told my wife the story of Lev and Svetlana, she went to the ground

and put her hands around a dead plant and screamed at it to try harder,

she looked foolish and I loved her even more and joined her in screaming

at death, it made me feel Russian and obstinate and eternal, all good things

to feel, and where I kissed her isn't necessarily where you're thinking: maybe

miles into her ears and not with lips but words.

Low clouds on the mountain about as high

as stars on top of a five-story building are

when I've gone up the fire escape

in my brain, where everything

is a mist and a slow wet kiss

meanders across the horizon

as the day's version of time, how I'll know

I haven't died has never been clear, it's raining

harder now than all the cups

I'll ever drink from could hold, a thirty-

by-thirty roof can fill a fifty-five-gallon rain barrel

after one-tenth of one inch of rain, I am a harvest

of such listenings to rivers and oceans

coming back to us from the sky, where they've gone

is where we see ourselves going, where everything

is a mist and a slow wet kiss

leads me back where I began, my father

leaning against my mother in a doorway, in a hurry, in a year

they'll be dead or ten, some soon

is the lit fuse trailing each of us, the clouds

like a wedding ring around the mountain

gone as of eight lines ago, I've been missing them

secretly before your eyes, as when we meet

and you say things or just stand there

helping your clothes not fall down, I've no clue

why mind-reading never caught on, I would page

after page of you and dog-ear and marginalia

is after all love, is tracks and we have come

as far in this moment as we might ever get, if this is the end,

I'm enjoying that crows haven't changed their story,

if this is the end, I have successfully

never worn cargo pants, if this is the end, I can admit

the orgy I've been trying to have

with everything leads naturally

to melancholia, for who has such long arms

as that, tongue as that, and to draw

one atom in is to let another go, I am afraid

I would try to name them all, how many Sallys

and Petes would that be, how many Keshons,

how many dust motes do I come across and feel

I'm being rude to by not adoring

more personally, more like the last chance

every chance is

Back then I was going steady

with fog, who could dance

like no one's business, I threw her over

for a leaf that one day fluttered

first her shadow then her whole life

into my hand, that's a lot

of responsibility and a lot

of relatives, this leaf

and that leaf and all the other leaves

hung around, I told her

I needed space, which was true,

without it, I'd only be a soul

and no one's sure that wisp

is real, that's why we say

of real estate,
location, location,

location,
and of speech,

locution, locution, locution,

and of love,
yes, yes, yes,

I am on my knees, will you have me,

world?

Dead things here

get a fan club

of vultures. It's cunning

to watch the sky admit

it wants to eat.

One vulture

tells another

tells another, theirs

is the largest wingspan

of sharing I have known.

What they'll do

to my once-dear

fence-leaping deer

is make it a dun sack

between road

and river engaging

in their voyages.

At least this hovering

of truly ugly birds

unless you look at them

metaphorically

reminds me to think

of someone I love

and prove it.

So if your phone rings

in a bit, it could be

sort of death calling

to ask,
How's it going,

as I sort of hope

you'll be life answering,

Fine.

It would be beautiful to wear a hat

of moonlight along the shops on a sunny day

when everyone has unpacked their faces

of work. Hopping on one stilt. Dragging the sea

behind me like a child with a puppy.

I have been a fence too long. I have kept a hive

for a head and kissed you with bees, and whispered

stings. It would be beautiful to hold a contest

for the eyes most like an opened jail cell.

I am tired of proving my heart a grenade.

It makes no sense when we are surrounded by fields

of genitals. It makes no peace to hammer

all day with my scowls against your temples.

I have been the calendar called Monday Monday Monday.

I have breathed like I'm swimming with an unrung

bell tied around my ankles. When I say my name

I hear a burned-down church. I have been

a dead crow shaving in the mirror. I have treated

the afterbirth better than my child.

It would be beautiful to go to the butcher's

and put the cow back together with vines

and semen and applause. No more axe handles

taking the place of ballerinas. No more apologizing

for the rudeness of bombs. Either we mean

to blow arms off or we don't. Either we have acid

in our veins or feathers or I am not a doctor.

I am afraid and swinging a pillowcase

full of doorknobs over my head to hold my place

on a rock a Roman stood on and thought,

I could conquer this, I could teach this wind

to bow. It would be beautiful to be the wind

saying, fat chance. To put the doorknobs back

on doors that once were trees we climbed

to be like our heroes, the birds and the sun

and the night was this huge kite I promised

myself I would one day hold the string of.

In other languages

you are beautiful — mort, muerto — I wish

I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean

were sitting in that chair playing cards

and noticing how famous you are

on my cell phone — picture of your eyes

guarding your nose and the fire

you set by walking, picture of dawn

getting up early to enthrall your skin — what I hate

about stars is they're not those candles

that make a joke of cake, that you blow on

and they die and come back, and you,

you're not those candles either, how often I realize

I'm not breathing, to be like you

or just afraid to move at all, a lung

or finger, is it time already

for inventory, a mountain, I have three

of those, a bag of hair, box of ashes, if you

were a cigarette I'd be cancer, if you

were a leaf, you were a leaf, every leaf, as far

as this tree can say

I look forward to your tracks in snow

walking on their own down the mountain

while I think of you at the window

as someone who just hasn't called in a while,

having less and less an image of you

than a need to ask the fog

to come in and sit to tea, to solid motions

like integers hammering the world together.

You're not even pieces anymore,

not even bone scraps, and when I try to picture you,

my memory kills you all over again. A few

of the actual pictures I'd tattoo

to the parable of breath: the one that holds

the shadow of your hair against your cheek

for ransom, the one that stares at the back

of your head, the one of you on a cliff,

beyond which an island of bird shit

with seals warming their daily somnolence

reminds me of love and other misreadings

of nature, all of them versions of me

ironing the sky to wear to the séance

I keep wanting the wind

stuck on a barbed wire fence to be.

Imagination says things like that

without knowing what they mean. It means

there's all this wind and barbed wire

I don't know what to do with, that so far,

you've performed your tasks

as a dead person admirably, being no where

I've looked for you except barely in words

that just now dug up an apple tree

and moved it up the mountain, closer to rain.

Long, thin clouds like the sky is smoking.

I tell it to stop or share, it doesn't

stop or share, this is what happens

to my requests: they rise.

When I was a kid, a neighbor man

had a few and tied a cherry bomb

to a pigeon, it flew furiously

until kaboom. Feathers and bits

of what made the pigeon go

landed on the Smitky twins

playing hopscotch, they looked up,

I looked at them looking up, two of everything

the same, like their parents

knew the odds of needing a spare.

My wife wants to fly in a hot air balloon.

I say to her,
I'll wait here

with the turtles.
I try to save them

from getting squished when they cross the road.

They don't know it's a road or what a road

is for, getting away is what a road is for,

then coming back, then wondering why

you came back is what a road is for.

My wife's people are Ukranian, beets

are important to them. I tried to arm wrestle

her father once, he said,
Why

would I do that: if I beat your arm

the rest of you will want revenge.

The other day, some kids

knocked a ball through our window,

one of them asked for it back, I said
Sure,

if you give me the bat.
He did,

then he asked for the bat, I said

If you give me the ball,

he started to hand it over

when I saw understanding

bloom in his face. That never happened

for me: understanding blooming in my face.

Not the way I wanted it to. So I'll die

and someone will have to deal

with what's left, the body, the shoes,

the socks. The last person on Earth

will just be dead: not buried or mourned

or missed. Like with kites, I cut the string

when they're way up,

because who'd want to come back?

So somewhere are all these kites,

like somewhere are all the picture frames

from the camps, and the bows

from hair, and the hair itself

I saw once in a museum, some of it,

in a room all its own, as if one day

the heads would come back and think,

That's where I put you,
like I do

with keys when I find them in my hand.

When he learned I'm a poet he asked if I knew

this other poet.
We don't all know each other,

I told him after he informed me she likes cheese

similes. Love is like cheese, time is like cheese,

cheese is surprisingly like cheese. Then I said,

I know this poet,
and he went,
See.
“He went, see”

means he said see, see, but you know that

if you're American and alive. I explained

that “I know this poet” means “I know her work,”

when he was like,
Work?
“When he was like”

is like “he went,” which is past tense of “he goes,”

in case you're from another country and confused

by our lack of roundabouts.
But poetry isn't work,

he said,
unless you're talking about reading it.

But I'm not talking about reading it,
I went,

in a moment that was the future past of everything

I'd do from then on. Such as snag the last

of the hyacinth cookies and step onto the veranda

to be awed by stars. Where I went,
It's hard work,

to be awed by stars: they're just little lights

about which we learn a song as children.

And he was like,
But I do wonder what they are,

as both of us lifted our heads like birds

waiting for our mother to throw up in our mouths.

When I shared the image, he was like,
Gross,

but then he went,
You're right, that's what we do,

we expect the sky to feed us.
This led

to a long discussion about yearning

in which the word “yearning” never appeared,

in which he went and I went and he was like

and I was like and the stars

kept doing what the song says they do,

because “burn your hydrogen burn your hydrogen

little star” doesn't fit the diatonic harmony

that pivots on an opposition between tonic and dominant

in a tune derived from “Ah! Vous Dirai-Je, Maman.”

Then a woman came out wearing a red dress

the size of a whisper, lit a smoke

and the smoke's smoke acted all floaty

and sexy and better than us, and she was like,

Want one?
and we were like,
Yes.