Ivan the Terrible & His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581

After Ilya Repin

In every attic

of our private, premodern imaginations 

Ivan the Terrible cradles

his son’s gore-greased face, ceaselessly.

He has always already 

killed him.

Snow falls clean through

the calendar’s drafty column of Mondays 

as prewinter’s firstdeclension

gathering just north of newness

as the glittering blue drift 

of a conclusion.

There will be no one to fuss over the mess then, 

no one to vacuum upthe rugs,

or bother with the gravity

of what has been swept under them.

Things move on 

inconspicuously.

The moon—old vandal!—gores its crescent 

through the view,

leaving dawn’s restoration project to smooth over

our dubious works:

the lash, the law, the letter,

the gashes through the center of the frame.

Koudelka’s Negatives

It was the time of such things — Levis

After we fix the names of far away,

there is only this ribbon of boulevard,

unwinding from a wristwatch.

At its end, the end of dime-store matrimony:

a still-young set of lovers, who—

seemingly seconds before—set off

into the now-flat caramel fizz of sky,

atop a carousel cart horse.

That people should belong to any place

is not, I’m told, an a priori.

The old tradition among migratory birds

is that the earth belongs to rest

and riverrun. Among the arctic greyling,

what the earth is called,

I cannot, in good conscience,

here relay. But rest assured,

the boulevard is not, strictly speaking,

a place. Rather, it is what was

a place to those who can imagine

what remembering a place must feel like:

thunderheads smuggling the smell

of dill, silt from someone else’s skin

under a fingernail, paving tiles,

and the minute hand pitched forward,

free from all resistance.

On its face, the times that time

is clocked in moments are a different

kind of revolution. In Tartu,

I spoke words I love to speak:

პოემა, báseň, стих.

Only, my mouth was full of teeth

and so the music came out weak.

Somewhere, the dead are buried

in each other’s arms; somewhere,

the hillsides turn the ashy pocks

into a rug of tarragon; Yeltsin

is yelling from atop a tank

of chemicals and doesn’t seem

to get the picture. Times being

what they are, it’s not

a matter of remembering;

I haven’t sense enough for that.

What begins, begins again, until

we all forget to call it sameness, laugh

at the somehow-empty bottle

in the freezer, split kisses

over the year’s orchestral tune-up,

wonder where the time has gone.

Here— sense’s penumbra. Here—

stars above the boulevard,

pitched in an upturned colander,

under which we trust

the light to tell us lies

in all the dialects of distance.