Partitas of the Soviet
In Moscow, I had met Irina, the
contact of a contact.
She showed up in the hotel lobby,
wearing a magnificent mink coat,
scored abroad.
Her English was charming.
I hadn’t requested that she drive,
but since it was so cold out
she brought her huge American SUV.
We parked down near St. Basil’s.
She works as an interpreter rather
than a tour guide,
as she had to insist to a Kremlin
ticket-taker, he reminding her
unauthorised tour guides were NOT
permitted.
She reminding him of her rights
to speak English wherever she wanted.
After the Mayakovsky, its beautiful
mosaic ceilings,
followed by Revolution Square and
statues
in the Soviet style,
we returned early to the hotel, perhaps
too early.
I’m now typing the thong is like a
subway car;
the bacteria go from rectum to vagina
to the bladder.
She turns over, commenting
I really like the part where you have
me say,
he makes a move to put me in his
mouth.
I have nothing else to add.
After photo-ops at the cannon that
never fired,
and the bell that never rang,
apart from the translation and
clue-giving
it was worth several dollars having
someone available
to snap me in the stations.
*
I had all that trouble with
Immigration.
As you know, I’ve also not been well.
I went to the clinic, did the Herpes
test.
Christ.
They gave me a number, anonymous
patient 99565.
Irina had some potassium sulphate, or
something.
We sat in her car.
She rolls a piece of gauze, dilutes
the chemical,
touches the blisters, and the top of
my head blew off.
I don’t think I’ll go back to the
clinic;
Irina seems to know what to do.
Anyway, I’m better now.
They issued the visa anyway.
*
In Moscow, three months after
the thong incident reduced my poetry
to Dadaist gibberish,
I had actual proof of cat worship.
I had just turned a corner to find
this little bookshop,
thinking I might get a book on
mushrooms,
and what should appear but cat
shrines.
In each shrine a sleeping cat,
perfectly spherical.
The woman behind the counter,
giant eyes behind giant glasses,
obviously the priestess of the
shrines, says
well, yes, Irina is crazy, but she’s
nice to cats.
She decorates lamps
with little overhanging beads and cat
photos.
I agreed this was crazy, but wanted
it to stay this way.
As I photographed the priestess, she
capped the Persian
in a smart boater, red-ribboned, and
sang Irina’s famous
Cat Glorifying Poem # 2.
*
Gypsy children, panhandling,
some singing, playing musical
instruments,
a few selling kittens out of
cardboard boxes.
One woman there, just kneeling over
an icon all day,
bobbing her head up and down over it.
During an exercise on clipping
unstressed vowels in Red Square, I
was asked for my documents.
He said he was in barracks near the
Three Monkeys bar,
if I had any dollars.
Seven metro stops up the blue line,
the massive statue of Lenin on the
main highway.
*
At the Anglo-American school in
Pokrovsky Hills,
I picked up her last e mail, salted
with strings of garlic bulbs,
MIG-25s, John Lennon wire-rims,
closing
I’m still here, somewhere, try
Uzbekistan, kiss kiss.
From Samarkand to Fergana by train,
then through the Pamir mountains, Osh
to Bishkek—
after a few days
I left that city by night bus to
Tashkent.
By then I had her diary, high minded,
old fashioned writing, endeavours
predominantly visual,
but with some structuring,
found and read despite the content
warnings:
Nietzsche, karaoke bar lyrics, PIN
randomly changing,
trashy blonde take
do-I-look-cute-in-this-sari, et cetera,
simplicity hidden
beneath misquotes of Russian poets
pre-glasnost.
Why not, became her main motto.
I had a dream last night, about our
house.
Writing this made me remember I’ve
dreamt about it
often lately, though it doesn’t exist
in this place,
or in this time.
In the same manner the Earth’s
surface
divides oceans and continents,
and we continue as we do, pretending
everything is concluded, that it is
possible
to conclude, everywhere
a static of images escaping, a virus
uploaded,
snatching events, a helix of nine
lives and after,
the way a rain of hailstones breaks
the Moscow heat.
*
Last flight out— we rise and bank.
In the distance, to the east,
precursor mist
shapes the mountain passes, each
granite trail
cut blankly through the cloud.
No comments:
Post a Comment