We might
have seen
each
other, Osya,
though not in Voronezh. The factories
of industrialized nations all look
the same. We might, or, perhaps, it was
my father who made jokes with you
across the counter in the Yeliseev
about how the new is really the old
classic poetry that never changes
into anything more than more poets
who shout and starve and drink
their own brand of beauty down
until the kernels of their voices,
the earth in words, the metaphorical
wind, plows their hair like the hand
of Akhmatova played with the delicious
curls of General Primakov, also gleaned
in Stalin's purges by thugs and gulags,
the prisons of obliterated innocence,
the hunger, cold, and terror, all
the culls of cruelty. After all, Osya,
hope is always new and you and Voldnya
talked all one December night in St. Petersburg,
though the memory of this has been purged,
about hunger in the interplanetary spaces,
about the revolutionary wheat in the ether,
just as we are talking now, of a heaven,
where there are no purges, no Joseph
Stalins or McCarthys, and Akhmatova strokes
the tallness of Gumilev, shot by Bolsheviks,
with her sublime lips, and words are always
allowed to take their real shape.
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