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The Russia Suite

(Moscow: Scenes from Memory, con't)

4. ARBAT                                                                                            

 

Here converge the newly reborn 

Zanies of Glasnost: Quaint Arbat,

A stretch of turn-of-the-century facades,

Lining the street like so many Potemkin props:

Victorian lampposts with their wrought-iron

Stems blossoming into globes of glass,

Bricked pavements preserved by law

From motor fumes. Pass by Arbat. Everyone

Meets everybody on ‘Perestroika Street’:

Beatniks time-warped, the truly hungry

And the truly lost, history’s gypsies,

Jugglers of fate, flouters of convention,

Flaunters of indifference, preachers,

Visionaries, circus midgets, punks.

Bob Dylan’s doppelganger sings in a corner

For kopeks; two painted ladies smile at us

In the common language of the races:

We smile back--our Asian curiosity

In exchange for their Slavic secrets.

From behind a crimson door an Italian

Harlequin mimes us a surprise. At the next

Corner a miniature artist offer us his

Updated version of Hieronymus Bosch’s

Apocalypse: Purple and orange mezzotint

Of the final fireball that will engulf us all,

Signed by him, take note, who has

Exhibited in Paris. Listen. Here, perhaps,

Do the dimensions of empire teeter in equipoise:

Where four Lithuanian nuns still light candles

For their brethren slain by Stalin,

As the chattering provincials are disgorged

At an intersection by an Intourist bus...

While somewhere else in the city,

Beyond this liberalism’s Disneyland,

Crowds queue up at the state-owned shops

For precious beef and tomatoes, limp greens,

Rancid cheese, battered fruit and potatoes;

And over at the Armory, both the fashionable

And the tawdry line up for a precious view

Of the gem-encrusted eggs of Faberge.

 

1991

A Feberge Egg.jpg

FROM TOP: Woodcut of a Slavic horseman, which became the cover art for Poems en Route; 

a Faberge egg; and Red Square at night: with the Kremlin and Spassky Gate at left, GUM shopping mall in the middle, and St. Basil's Cathedral at right.

KremlinRedSq Night.jpg
EnRouteAmazon.jpg

5. WHITE NIGHT FROM THE HOTEL ROSSIYA  

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From the tall windows of the Hotel Rossiya

I gazed at the luminescent July night

And thought of the Russia my heart chose to see:

Mike’s demure Uzbeki, Zulia, eavesdropping

On our English as we marveled at the exhibit

Of Tolstoy’s memorabilia: Cravats and cobbler’s

Tools (he made his own boots), black

Tandem bike, the ubiquitous quill and ink well...

Or Sveta, the evening’s castlekeep

At the hotel desk, whom we wooed with poems

And cigarettes (the latter for her boyfriend,

We teased), but she just smiled.

Or Dmitri, our able guide, the smiling Muscovite,

Lover of Davao bananas safely tucked

In his attaché case among the tourist brochures,

Whose favorite American movie

Was Australian: ‘Dundee Crocodile’! 

Or the omnipresent Matrioshka doll

In her deceiving simplicity: multiplying

Yet diminishing herself as if to infinity,

Smiling her lacquered smile at us

From the Berioska shelves.

But who could forget the plaintive

Chorus of bekerchiefed babushkas

In the Orthodox dusk at Zagorsk?

Or our ardent debates and vows of friendship

With the inebriated nationalist in Kiev?

Or Peredelkino, Moscow’s rural outskirt,

Where a spring purled in the quiet of Pasternak’s grave?

Ah, to know Russia, indeed. Or never at all.

I watched museum workers dig for artifacts

In an ancient corner of Red Square,

And saw bricks crumble under the Kremlin Wall.

I fancied seeing the ghost of the Past

Haunt the Victorian malls of Gum,

Haunt the halls beyond this damp hotel room,

From where I, in my stranger’s conceit

Presumed to know what my heart could choose,

As if by gazing alone, one could peel,

Skin by skin, the onion domes of St. Basil’s.

 

1993

 

 

 

 

 

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Berioska.The Russian silver birch. The name adopted for the state-owned duty-free shops.

Gum.An acronym for something that escapes me now. Moscow’s version of the megamall.

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