The Welcome

Budem kak solntse!

1. Balmont

“Let us be like the sun!”

1. Balmont

Let us be like the sun—

slice open pineapples,

catch their yellow nectar

drop by drop as they spin

like stern water wheels in

the white village. Begin

pure labor and welcome

the wooden turn of wheels,

apple presses wrung by white

hands under the white sun,

until the pineapple

has become a dry and

wooden orb by the door.

No explosion now of

nectar here from yonder.

So take down the bitter

Fruit; pull the pin; fling it far.

Sept., 1985

Gorham, Maine

Plague

“Death puts an end to your distress.

Read, traveler, what evil fate…”

cut in stone by Arent Passer, 1602

A wax board inscribed with a stylus

flaps against history’s stone tablet,

sticky and blind with age, poverty’s

almost illegible, yellow fate.

Monks collect tithes for redemption seals,

beating books, reading black numbers to

ignorant boys whose apprentice weals

rise like the baker’s twice-measured dough.

Masters, the members of guilds, raise pint

tankards to barrels, sacks, tombstones, chests,

lower their scepters like proclaimed saints

on fetid almshouses, clot-black death.

Weathervanes spin… here, windward axes,

there, wind way fortifications. Clocks

are wound as regular as taxes.

Wounds are staunched with tears and tattered flags.

Leeches the blood of the journeyman

into the crude, carved wax—wet, scarlet—

“Beware of crusaders, Samaritans!

Read this; take heed of my dire couplet:

Flee in haste; stay gone long.

Return when they are gone.”

Tallinn, Estonia

April 9, 2002

Pilgrimage

for Pierre

My sore feet have stepped these stones before—

but sprightly—as though on the lettuce leaves

of salad days which paved our strolls here,

hand in hand, you once wrote, and not more ro-

mantic than our would-be-walks in Paris.

Maybe, though Neva white nights were cer-

tainly more innocent than ribald,

drunken lurching on the Seine, post-disco,

pre-lust, barefoot from too-high heels and wild

mating rituals. On this Field of Mars

the north wind blows lilac kisses through

my hair, now unsecured as then, when you

picked me a branch, ensuring babushka-

wrath, surefire censure of a crime a-

gainst the state and way, way too much leg.

A dormant order gusts up little

duststorms; sandy stirrings of chaste past

whip up the lone-swept bride’s dress, nettle

the photographer who’s been licked by

the eternal flame. Neglected place

with only carved stone to bear witness

to the fallen heroes of the pro-

letariate. If memory serves, broken

bottles, cigarette butts and their bearers

were forbidden by the old, forgotten

guard. My God, from where that sad, ragged

brass band? “The Road Is Long?” (“Those Were the Days?”)

No more insanity. Look, Peter’s

Summer Gardens, western rationale.

Long alleys peopled with stone allegor-

ies. At the end a pond, castle.

Didn’t there used to be swans here, Pierre?

June 20, 2000

St. Petersburg, Russia

Election

The pterodactyl has been thawed.

Gingerly, unfurled wings are spread

while it draws a shade with its claws,

stealthily casting cold and doubt

over terra firma. Would there

had been an unearthly shriek, cries

of rebirth to arouse the deer,

warning that dark was near, that ice

was instantly on the move, rak-

ing roads for scurrying mice to

follow—dropping young and old, ach-

ing, along the frozen furrow.

Conveniently dying along

the blind, frozen furrow. Talons

pluck, plough them under with deft, strong

strokes. It grins, glides back to salons

where similar cryogenic

wonders lick their fingers, peel sins,

preaching, preening, photogenic

at the screening of great bird’s win.

Lihula, Estonia

November, 2004