My sister is older than me, by over a hundred years; Daddy a dynamo, prolific, with new wives as often as new cars.
Sis's name is Sonya, and she spoke to me, not a year after she died. My tea had gone cold on the night table, and so she brought a samovar and a tale to tell, waking me with a kiss.
Being kissed by ghosts may be a Russian thing, like the men getting drunk, or the inevitable failure of the collectives. I patted the bed and we sat together, like reindeer waiting to pull the sleigh of a midnight fable. Finally, Sonya began.
"I met Grigori Rasputin in a barn when I was 17. He was asleep, slack-jawed in late morning half-light, the motes spinning lazily around him like stars. The Russian cross he wore and the vodka bottle he cradled both shone as if they had souls of their own."
I propped myself up with an elbow and listened.
"There are ways and there are ways, little sparrow," Sonya went on. "Labor is productive, prayer is powerful. But sometimes the breeze stirs the leaves just as if they were barynya dancers. All I did was set my bucket down and join him--a breeze myself-- and he showed me how God created the world."
I said, "They say he stank. That he was insane! How could you--"
"Pochemuchka," my sister whispered, "Madness is essentially Russian. Without that, without hallucinations in our blood, how could we endure the winter? And he smelled only of straw, holiness, and masculine vigor."
Sonya smiled then. "Little One, do you remember my oldest, the sandy-haired one, my poet who died on the battlefield in 1915? Of course you wouldn't. I forget how young you are." She looked far away for a moment, even for a ghost. "He had the gift. The same one you have, a closeness with the spirit world, and an appetite for everything."
The tea was gone. Even here, dawn arrives eventually. Sonya finished her story, saying, "I warned Grigori to beware of cakes, aristocrats, bullets, and wide cold waters. He laughed, his big bearded head thrown back, a booming laugh like a fireball landing in a Siberian forest. He told me he already knew."
With that, Sonya was gone. Our old one-eyed rooster crowed outside in the yard. I sat up, pushing my long hair back with my fingers, and collected my coat, scarf, and ice skates. Out, then, to the pond where a local fox keeps her den full of kits, watching my every move. I spread my arms out to glide, easy as branches in a breeze, not needing to lay eyes on her to know, just the same, that she is there. ________
Here, in the ideal post-revolutionary state, one does not simply fall in love with Katya.
Starry-eyed fool, stumbling across the cobblestone streets carrying disintegrating roses, straighten up and lose that stupid smile before the gendarmes make their hourly pass.
Katya is the perfect and ultimate expression of our national ambition. Tell me, which would you--would anyone!-- rather watch pass by.... a thousand rumbling tanks with their idiot erections, or Katya, with her smooth, slender outstretched arms?
Night and day, noble workers tend the fields where they grow the million blooms which shall adorn her in a single week. As a people, we have dispensed with severe, bearded gods hovering somewhere in the sky, and replaced them with Katya, late of Odessa, now our symbol, our pride!
Oh go, ahead. Float, giddy and love-retarded, to the stone steps of the appropriate bureau. Fill out the lengthy forms, sit through the interminable classes, and then wait in your disgusting hovel for six to eight weeks. Imagine the moment when, in your unsteady hands you hold the response, the long-awaited summary denial of your application to love Katya.
Why so pale and wan, fond lover? And what next?
Listen, Pooky. Let's go to the glorious state-controlled theater and while they put on some skull-crackingly dull film or opera, I will trace my tongue along your salt-stained lips, as easy as a gull gliding along the wharves. Odessa, jewel and treasured port city, is as empty now as you are. Kiss me back. What the hell!
Everyone loves Katya--men, women, babies, cats and rose bushes, they're all silly over her. Be different! Pretend you are a Czarist-era poet of some high degree, and scribble something right now, for yourself, for me! I involve no tedious mandated process, no cooling of your heels by the mailbox for months. Here, in our nook of creaking seats, we can make our own opera, Katya-less and if not perfect, then, at least, immediate, and as combustible as the Balkans. ________
The line "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" is, of course, from the poem of the same name written by Sir John Suckling, and can be found HERE.
We were texting. Olga said, 4 a portrait. I told her no 1 does ur portrait in the middle of the night.
She knew, yanno, to be careful of older guys in chat rooms and stuff, but this one walked right in, said get ready, come downstairs.
I said, where r ur jewels? She said, in my dress, stitched inside. She sent me a j-peg. I said you rock that, girl. Now sneak out. Meet me at Bigby's.
She said idk. I said, they got BOGO. Just come. She sent an emoji and that was it.
Years later, living in New York City and older than shit, we still were BFFs. She'd been sober 27 years. I'd been divorced twice. Sometimes she'd see Putin on the television and trash him in Russian. I found her a memeof him falling off a horse, and showed it to her on my phone.
We laughed til I started coughing. She banged her palm against my back until I could breathe. "Thanks, Your Highness." "Fuck you," said Olga, but she meant "welx". _____
The "Life" section of the Detroit Daily Worker begins running a column called "The Advice Communist" alongside state-sanctioned recipes for cornbread pie and tips for decorating your collective factory.
Dear Advice Communist, writes Cheryl from Oak Park, My mother wants a big church wedding, but my fiance doesn't. They fight continually about it and I am in the
middle.
Please help.
The Advice Communist reads the letter carefully, adjusts his
pince-nez, then composes his response:
There is no God, therefore your mother is a czarist symp-
athizer.
Inform the authorities about her. Then after she
disappears, get married by a noble worker in the bed
of his state-manufactured farm truck.
Nancy from Southfield writes, My relatives from Frankenmuth
are visiting for Thanksgiving, and I am worried because
they don't control their bratty kids. What can I do?
Dear Nancy: Drive back the fascist swine with a withering hail
of machine-gun fire, followed by mighty waves
of infantry. Pound them with artillery until nightfall,
then let the Michigan winter do the rest. If the cowards abandon
any of their indoctrinated swine-children, put them on
a train to the gulag. Happy Holidays!
The Detroit Daily Worker also runs the "Peanuts" comic
strip, featuring noble proletariat Lucy and
capitalist puppet Charlie Brown.
______
For De Jackson's "Let's Get Jambin' " at Dverse Place of Counterproductive Intoxication, and, of course, for the glory of the worker!
"The Advice Communist" first appeared as part of a May 7, 2011 post at my satire blog Objets D'art.
The Big Book Of Russian Haiku is missing from its shelf in the Chrysanthemum Room of the Glorious Proletariats' Library.
Five librarians, each of them an opium dream of precisely measured sensuality, and all of them wearing dark-framed eyeglasses and spit-shined riding boots,
Persuade me to wait exactly seven minutes while they submit my request to the appropriate bureaus. There is a carp pond and a jar of startlingly blue ink pens.
If they can locate The Big Book Of Russian Haiku for me, I can hold it like a discus, and break the jaw of my old professor with it; he betrayed the revolution by watching baseball and taking up Buddhism.
My time in the Chrysanthemum Room is nearly done, and I can hear ten unstoppable leather boots approaching down the hall. They tell me the book is gone lost to the Russian winter, and besides, what use anyway, to have it?
Then they invite me to share their samovar, samizdat, and sable fur they favor for reading Pushkin by candlelight with library patrons taken--one at a time--into their confidence. ________
For copyright reasons, I can't include the image that inspired me, but you can view it HERE.
I have the broad peasant face, plain as pie, that seems only to lack babushka and shawl. Such a woman as me should live a hundred miles from Kiev, looking up, seeing sun, then moon, sun, then moon, a million times and then some.
Who is the white angel, the blonde daughter of a czar, who whispers in my good ear? And who is the dark angel, the changeling from a doorstep, who whispers in my other, as I dream?
I have the broad peasant face, plain as pie, that seems to close like a cardboard suitcase. Such a woman as me might sleep a hundred miles past her stop, all the while seeing sun, then moon, sun, then moon, a million times in fascination. ______
A thing can come from the sky and not be a bird. For example, the Great Siberian Fireball of 1908 came from the sky, but was demonstrably larger than any common songbird. It did not build nests, but rather, leveled all the trees in which nests might have been built. Therefore, the Great Siberian Fireball was either a) not a bird, or b) a very stupid or careless bird, of tremendous size. Art requires patience, but patience does not necessarily result in art. Some things can be delayed, and still be attended to in good time-- the permafrost, little villages, this reporter... won't we all still surely be here? Meanwhile, the morning is uncommonly bright, that sable looks fetching on you, and the secret police have continued to document our love.
When you took so long to get here, I had my doubts, I confess. I had my bags packed and was half way out onto the tarmac, but their report is filed and they are pleased. How do I know this? Why, honey, a little birdy told me. ________
Peter lifted a great city from out of a swamp, like a big, drunken, bearded midwife, with ambition his doula.
Black butterflies rise, holding up the gaudy double eagle, and they are the carriers of the souls of the thousands who died to build St. Petersburg.
Everything had to be brought in-- breath of lumber, breath of bricks to bring the cry of creation to this muddy shore.
Now, Tatiana stands by the window. Beyond her, the majesty of architecture-- the bold, solid embodiment of a giant's vision.
Tatiana wears very little. She is curved, like the earth. She doesn't know her Czars from her motorcars, but she is well aware
that when she stands there like this, the magnificence outside the window may as well not even be there. It melts, the admirer's eye already full with better design. She conquers the way the Moon does, inevitably, with desire and insanity, and with only as much blood as may be needed in order to get the job done. ________
In the eggshell of my mind, we had stolen this other chick's car-- one that went to the automobile graveyard decades ago.
I was driving. It was a stick-shift. We could see a small strip of pavement through the floorboards, as blurred as we were, stoned immaculate.
No one ever did for a tee shirt what you did for that one. it isn't that you were so voluptuous-- no, you were as you are now, slender as an umbrella handle; but we were young, and you were perfect.
Your breasts were the size of large oranges-- I knew this because I had studied them like scripture only the night before, and with the urgency of the starving. All this while-- all the time we were driving, falling off the sides of bridges, lips together like a canning seal-- I was sleeping, softly breathing the night in, and then out again, filling it, Goddess-like, with the stars that are us-- or, at least, as I imagine us, now. Just before dawn, I was arrested. They wanted to know about your hair, and whether its blackness could be used to feather cosmonauts as they dance, weightless, like we do. They said to show them my hands, and when I showed them my hands, fields bloomed and the elk ate these blooms. They were astonished, but held me all the same.
Would you hold me, all the same, you with your Gypsy blood and your hands that hold a bottle or a crucifix with the same sure confidence and the smirk you save for holy moments?
They will kill me, these police with their reports; or they will wake me, and what will be the difference?
You and I will be older, gone down the river of time. Look at all our mistakes! I love them. I do. Better than any of the things we thought were important.
I wish these fools would let me go back to sleep, or just make me disappear the way they are known for doing. I won't tell them about your hair, no matter what they try. I won't tell them that my hands knew the little bumps that rose around your nipples in the afternoon when responsible people were sober, and someplace else.
I won't tell them that I loved you, and love you still. There are some dreams that are the more beautiful for not being tangible. Take a letter, though you are not here; take my heart, though yours was never really mine. Take all the gorgeous things I dream, before they bash my brains in. It is the least you can do for the sake of our souls lost in the ether like Fox and Carrot-Top. _______
Note: Fox and Carrot-Top (or Lisa and Ryzhik) were the "Soviet Space Dogs" who made a sub-orbital flight in the summer of 1951.
"stoned immaculate" is from "Texas Radio & The Big Beat" by The Doors.
This is for Izy's Out Of Standard at Real Toads. She says to take three words from a job we hated, and use them in a poem that is NOT about that job. I once worked at a specialty grocery store, many years ago. My words are eggshell, oranges and canning. I might add that I showed up for work drunk as a seaside whore one day, and so my words could also be stoned, bottle and mistakes.
When I met you, you already had almost everything.
You spoke, and from a halved lime, a golden-eyed tiger stepped. From the tiger's mouth, came vermillion birds, and in the birds' beaks, silver rings to please you.
If I had told you I loved you then, I could not have borne the weather of your face-- a clear sky of indifference, or your smile, constant as any equator.
I knew, that to win you, I would have to get beneath your heart-- I would have to fold my yellow wings, with their India ink edges; become vermiform and as light as a ghost's fingers on a cotton ball.
There I slept.
After six Novembers and a single Spring, I opened my eyes-- a solitary traveler when I arrived, I had become four. You felt the North, South, East and West of me within yourself, nesting your heart, as if you were a Russian hat, and I, Medusa's vanity: her hair.
Now, we are together forever, like bone and limb or the closed and golden gates of your almond eyes.
I am more than content to be your courtesan, your slave, your palm leaf, arched over you like Desire's own angel-- but if you dismiss me, all the matryoshkas of our union will break.
You will see me, at last, as I really am, a constellation of spilled confectioner's sugar anointing these shattered nesting dolls with their linseed smiles, drug store red lipstick on every jagged edge. _______
Matryoshka dolls, also known as Russian nesting dolls, or babushka dolls, consist of a series of similarly painted dolls, each one revealing a smaller doll inside it, down to the last and smallest doll, which is typically a baby.
There are thighs and then there are thighs-- yours put foreign powers on DefCon 5 out of pure jealousy.
Night shift at the factory is enough to melt skulls, reverse the flow of hearts, turn bones to industrial byproduct out of sheer boredom. I loved you wearing jeans and safety goggles, better than gown and pearls any day.
We took a picnic lunch to the city park, and set our eyes to floating on the gray waters of the flammable, compromised river that cuts through it. "This is fun," we lied, and fed bread to a one-eyed pigeon who kept missing with his first peck.
The customs agents had stopped me the time before; they searched my emphysemic, cookie-cutter piece of shit right down to the wheel wells. Holding up my rubber boots, one of them asked, "Do you work at the plant?" Well, what do you think, asshole? What do you think? So you got even with them for me the next time-- you, fluent in Russian, Romanian and doubletalk pretended not to understand the agent's fractured schoolroom parlance, and mumbled until he let you through just to be rid of you.
How crazy that you should be Catholic-- I've never seen a craftier shoplifter. Each time the grid went down, I kissed you for your pilfered candles, your flashlight, your shitty little radio that kept us informed as I buried my face in your sweetness like a supplicant.
There are thighs and then there are thighs, and yours are the finest ever to grace my cracker box apartment that I had to be on a waiting list for years, to get. Everything is always in short supply-- once, you backed me through a rope of yellow hazard tape and right into a defective forklift with a kiss, on work time. My shoe soles picked up God knows what from the filthy floor, but my heart was happy as the assembly lines rattled behind us.
There is plenty everywhere that can poison a person, or sow cancer seeds that will explode later on. We gave that year of our lives to the production of jugs of kitchen cleanser, since banned. Everyone who worked there had red hands and brittle nails, despite the gloves, despite the icons some of us prayed to. Oh well. I was happy, and even though you left just as it all seemed so good, that year was pure, flawless, redeeming even, like love can be sometimes, and as your thighs definitely were, and still are, in some other woman's bed in another town, where you mumble into her ear in Romanian and she holds you closer for all the good such motions ever do. ________
Be nice to her. Feed her, take her to bed; whatever it takes,
because
she can pull visions from out of thin air. She knows if you're gonna fall down the stairs,
but if she likes you, she'll take your arm, smile like a Russian Blue, and say, "Honey, let's go down in the elevator."
Natalya the psychic will know if you're faking. Don't tell her you love her if you're lying.
Pianos fall out of the sky every day, and she'll send you on your way without a blink or a word of warning if you've been telling tales and screwing with her heart.
Love her, fuck her sweetly on a Sunday morning when you should be at church.
Pour the most inventive, smoldering, sincere confessions from your lips to her ear, as you move over her, easy, like cream over corn flakes.
Do these things and you'll have the love of a Russian Blue. Lucky omen. Lucky you. _______
Do not rely on time. It recedes unendingly-- There is less of it now, even, than there was when you began to read this poem; The grave yawns. Do not rely on time.
Do not believe in your own wits, Or that yours are sharper, somehow, than others'. Once, you believed that lost teeth were boughten by fairies, And that only old people died. Do not believe in your own wits.
Religion, causes, various grand undertakings-- Do not live for these, They come and go. Do not live for fame or wealth-- Every third chump on the street is famous, wealthy, and echoingly vacant and hollow.
Only these things matter- Tanya, Tanya's thighs, Tanya's face, Tanya's breasts and Tanya's pleased smile.
Take my advice-- Sell everything, Compromise everything, Forget position, principles, pride-- What good do they do you?
Find Tanya at the place they call La Maison de L'oiseau Vert. Kill or betray anyone who gets in your way.
Leave now-- The things that matter matter only for such a short time. Go to her, She is waiting. _______
