Lev Vladimirovich

They ask me why.

How does a Southern hillbilly speak

the language of a frozen tundra,

the Cold War, of purges and pogroms?

A practical question, a pragmatic people —

It all started with a contradiction… or three.

A Saltine cracker wrapped in golden ivy.

An Amazon felled by a gray-sweatered sprite.

A swamp city eclipsing the sun.

Incomplete smiles answer words

that cannot explain an impossible dream shared:

Svoboda i odinochestvo.

He never told me that, above all,

he craved freedom and solitude,

but perhaps I understood in a way that knowing can’t —

He lived best when feeling found form;

the inexplicable metered out into wing-tipped words

trailing snowberry velvet on rough cave walls.

From this fullness of solitude

he took me to parasite trials and silenced voices

until exile escaped the censors;

to an endless icy plain that caged

innocence, suffering, expectation;

to the indifferent candlelit window

and confused gloves of a final yellow parting;

to mothers, sisters, wives huddled hopeless,

breath fading into stone-cold prison walls;

to a monkey in a crowded bus,

tip-tapping chaos onto Soviet commuters’ heads.

All this he showed me without ever leaving

the white clapboard halls whose windows

saw the same sky of Brodsky, Zoshchenko, Akhmatova.

In him he carried a world that was sometimes absurd

to show us our rules are ephemeral, at best.

He carried what had been taken but never lost,

and with a finger to his beard,

a light passing through thick glasses

to small, dark, bottomless eyes paused in thought,

he would crack open the door, and it burst full

with lacquered music, stringless puppets,

and cucumbers chasing vodka until dawn.

But when he left, the door did not close;

the wings he found for us still soar,

shimmered to life by motley stars dancing

beneath the prism of his humble lion’s soul.

15 November 2009