Space and midnight fill all emptiness,
As lost love bleeds acidic dreams
Into the solvent sea:
Red like a Roman bath.
EURASIAN JETNOTE
Frontiers meet over steppe and meadow
At burial mound, salt waste or winter hut,
Beyond danubes and caspians
Where sturgeon breed by reed and barge-hull –
But wood outlives
Asia or Europe, love shaped by heart-torn
Internal bleeding of the stricken forest.
Wood dies, and is born again.
IRKUTSK
In Irkutsk a swastika was scrawled
On a wall so I took my handkerchief
And spat and rubbed
But it was tough chalk
Wondering why those Red pedestrians
Didn’t grind it off.
I’d done the same in London
Walking to the Tube
And missing the train quite often,
But here it was ineradicable Russian chalk
Though I chafed it to the barest shadow,
No one taking notice on their walk
Down Karl Marx Street. I strolled
Away to let them keep it.
Apart from scraping out a concave mark
The crippled cross would stay forever,
And anyway why should I get arrested
For damaging The People’s Property?
BAIKAL LAKE-DUSK
Black ice breaking without sound or reason:
Water below moves its shoulders
Like a giant craving to see snow.
Ninety-degree cold preserves mosquito eggs
As the fist of winter
Pulls into the sun’s mittens.
The domed sun touches the horizon,
A totem in the lake sinking
Till its feet touch bottom and reach fire.
SHAMAN AT LISTVYANKA
Stopped his cart
Refused food
Shook tin brass skulls copper
Turned to the sun
And pressed a horseshoe to his eyes
Spun a waterspout of words
Grave toes patterning the soil
Under a tree clothed all in green,
Chews beansprouts from his crown
Spins to pipe dance
Head between land and sky
Hand five candle-fingers
Fuelled by the gutters of his stomach.
Spins to music
Stick legs strut
In wide skin trousers:
Shouting melts and planctifies
Fisherboats and floating logs:
Recites alone and long
On Baikal fish and stork in one:
Sea that threatens fire-spiders
Copperbacks and claws –
Creep from the rimline lake
Feet to feel and lips to taste,
Have no heart but swarm
To eat from him and die of it –
As brass-hooved breakers
Break and draw them back
And he weaving
Over sand to green land
Melting and metalling
In blacksmith power.
Horses birds and torches flee
From tundra magic keening,
Flesh of man flying
Skinflags unfurling
In a merciless slipstream to the sun.
Drop, hear drums
Rend on the flight,
He so far within
Sly, taciturn and a bully when normal
Knowing he must keep that self out
Or power goes,
Be an old man forever
Carved in rock by the fire
After the last telling.
TOASTING
Drink, blackout, gutter-bout
Kick back nine swills of vodka
That put an iron band around
Thorned skullcap and fire
Of words toasting Life
Peace, Town or Cousin.
Bottles, heaped grub, dead towers in tabletown:
Wine descends in light and colour
As if the Devil had a straw stuck there
Greedily drawing liquid in
As consciousness draws out.
RAILWAY STATION
Death is the apotheosis of the Bourgeois Ethic.
Tolstoy when he felt it coming on
Left his family and set out for Jerusalem.
Death shared its railway station:
He in a coma heard trains banging
Where Anna violated life.
The fourth bell drowned his final wrath.
The Bolsheviks renamed the station after him
Instead of Bourgeois Death.
RIDE IT OUT
Ride it out, ride it,
Ride out this mare of sleeplessness
Galloping above the traffic roar
Of Gorki Street,
Weaving between Red stars
And the grind of cleaning wagons.
Today all Moscow was in mourning
Because there’s no queue at Lenin’s tomb.
I told them but they wouldn’t believe me.
Ride out this beast who won’t let me sleep,
Drags me up great Gorki Street
And into Pushkin Square,
Leningrad a rose on the horizon
Ringed by blood and water –
Pull up the blankets
And be small for a few hours of the night.
THE POET
The poet sings his poems on a bridge
A bridge open to horizontal rain
And the steely nudge of lightning,
Or icy moths that bring slow death
Croon him to sleep by snow-wings touching his eyes.
Through this he sings
No people coming close to watch when the snow
Melts and elemental water forces smash
Between cliff and rock under his swaying bridge.
When the water thins, his sweat-drops burst
On scorching rocks like sparks from a flower pod;
Through all this he sits and sings his poems
To those vague crowds on either bank
He cannot make out or consider
With such short sight, for after the first applauded
Poem he let his glasses smash into the rocks below.
The bridge belongs to him, his only property,
Grows no food, supports no houses –
Cheap to buy with the first mediocre poems.
It spans a river that divides two territories –
He knew it and made no mistake:
Today he faces one and tomorrow the other
But from blurred eyes they look the same to him:
Green fields and red-roofed houses
Rising to mountains where wars can be fought
Without a bitter end being reached –
The same on either side.
He does not write a poem every day
But each pet territory takes its turn
To hear his words in one set language burn
And drive them back from each other.