The
Night Russia Vanished
(after Anna Akhmatova)
I remember the trees
and how the snow lit up the night from the train's passage.
I drank tea. I smoked.
The trees flashed, once, twice and then...nothing.
I thought I heard a small child cry. Or was it the muffled
coughs between the tracks?
The gentleman seated across from me—
lost everything: the poised stare, the paper, the gloves.
The living. The dead. The wasted talk.
There was Alexis' Brahms filling the stifled air of the parlor,
the way his long slender hands desired more, something unattainable.
He closed his eyes and quite simply left
us to ourselves. I loved him for that—for forgetting.
He's fallen asleep again.
Better to sleep than to smoke and think.
How strange—still young, still slight
against the falling snow. As pale
and deep as the snow.
An empty glass, and suddenly your days
are as remote and opaque as the moon's immigration, the Balkans.
Terror always begins like a beautiful requiem:
the parades and cheers and little waving flags easily seduce you.
And then it happens almost over night:
The loud abominable fists at your door. The arrests
for no reason. And our submissiveness,
those prison gates,
stark and helpless as our God.
That night, Mandelstam
was taken away into the night.
His brother received his death certificate.
By spring, the bees plundered the buried sun.
I can't remember how many evenings we spent—
the lamp-light flowing down inside the café's smoke
where it was safe to read a few lines of verse.
I only remember the trees, now. Bare. Black. A blur
against the window's passage,
the private moments, disappearing—
Leningrad: city of exile. No past.