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'For Russians the stars are always incontinent, ejaculatory
smears across the squalor of a boundlessly
unhygienic sky. You’d scoff, Marina, at how I go at them
with a tiny plastic shovel and my litter box
technique, scooping up the sidereal splooge while trying
to wipe down the universe. You’d say
I tug at God’s Old Testament beard, praying the prayers
of a coward. You’d confide to your diary my eyelashes
don’t bat sootily enough. Such a lummox
could never rumple the sheets of Paris! You’d jot down
my ugly shoes, my idiotic jokes, reproach
my skies for lacking splendor, bleached
by electric lights and the haze of a dying atmosphere ...
What else could I do, Marina? You and your comrades
vanished long ago, exiled, shot, or pensioned
off by the End of History. So I inch through your legacy
with my groundling’s fears, my glut,
my botched American upbringing: I can’t imagine your
heartbreaks, but you’d never comprehend
how life for me arrived precanceled. Tonight, Marina,
the mercury streetlights will make us
ghastly: you can see only Venus from here, a drunken
queen’s pearl dissolving into the crescent moon’s
tipped-over goblet. Or perhaps I just fucked that up too.'
Russians
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