Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LETTERS TO YESENIN: 1; TO D.G., by JAMES HARRISON


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LETTERS TO YESENIN: 1; TO D.G., by             Poem Explanation     Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: This matted and glossy photo of yesenin
Last Line: Years before the articulate noose.
Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim
Subject(s): Death; Memory; Russia; Yesenin, Sergei (1895-1925); Dead, The; Soviet Union; Russians


This matted and glossy photo of Yesenin
bought at a Leningrad newsstand - permanently
tilted on my desk: he doesn't stare at me
he stares at nothing; the difference between
a plane crash and a noose adds up to nothing.
And what can I do with heroes with my brain fixed
on so few of them? Again nothing. Regard his flat
magazine eyes with my half-cocked own, both
of us seeing nothing. In the vodka was nothing
and Isadora was nothing, the pistol waved
in New York was nothing, and that plank bridge
near your village home in Ryazan covered seven feet
of nothing, the clumsy noose that swung the tilted
body was nothing but a noose, a law of gravity
this seeking for the ground, a few feet of nothing
between shoes and the floor a light-year away.
So this is a song of Yesenin's noose that came
to nothing, but did a good job as we say back home
where there's nothing but snow. But I stood under
your balcony in St. Petersburg, yes St. Petersburg!
a crazed tourist with so much nothing in my heart
it wanted to implode. And I walked down to the Neva
embankment with a fine sleet falling and there was
finally something, a great river vastly flowing, flat
as your eyes; something to marry to my nothing heart
other than the poems you hurled into nothing those
years before the articulate noose.





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