Classic and Contemporary Poetry
THESE DAYS, by NANCE VAN WINCKEL First Line: In the mausoleum lies the corpse of a man who rode Subject(s): Change; Death; Russia; Time; Dead, The; Soviet Union; Russians | ||||||||
In the mausoleum lies the corpse of a man who rode in a black limo, burgundy velvet over the windows, who drank grape brandy and griped about his liver, griped about Nomenklatura and all manner of ass-kissing in the party, though before he was dead, he was the party, dying by slow degrees from Stalin's poison. Four decades under glass. Never a perestroika man. Face and fingers spectrally lit. The yellow street lights come on for an hour, then off for two. Lignite smoke browning the day's new snow. Because you asked me to, I put on the black boots, stood by the cavernous body in formaldehyde. Four degrees under a freeze. Down chipped cobblestones, we'd crossed a glaze of snow. The body next to me spoke with your voice; its hands were yours touching glass. Our oval sighs of breath blasted beside a week's worth of new graffiti: what could be, what should be, shoved inside the dead man's orifices. And no one paid these days to paint over it. First published in The Kenyon Review, Volume 22 #2 Spring 2000. www.kenyonreview.org/roth | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...OXOTA: A SHORT RUSSIAN NOVEL: CHAPTER 259 by LYN HEJINIAN A FOREIGN COUNTRY by JOSEPHINE MILES THE DIAMOND PERSONA by NORMAN DUBIE IN MEMORIAM: 1933 (7. RUSSIA: ANNO 1905) by CHARLES REZNIKOFF TAKE A LETTER TO DMITRI SHOSTAKOVITCH by CARL SANDBURG READING THE RUSSIANS by RUTH STONE THE SOVIET CIRCUS VISITS HAVANA, 1969 by VIRGIL SUAREZ A PROBLEM IN AESTHETICS by KAREN SWENSON CIRCLE ONE: YOU HAVE, YOU DON'T HAVE, MY FULL ATTENTION by NANCE VAN WINCKEL TOWERS OF SIMON RODIA; FOR HOWARD W. SWENSON 1903-1081 by KAREN SWENSON |
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