The Sentiment of Soothing Return

Crowded in the screech of Soviet metro I
stood intaking the absorbing lull.
It rocked me gently to the long forgotten standpoints,
to the starts of what has been concluded,
hovered me between the state of holding on to
a metal bar with one hand,
a beer with the other—
and an indeterminate motion towards
a memory of standing
in a gentle rocking,
bulleting through the immense Moscow
a million times before…
recorded in the bones that still make me.

I could have taken ages of this.
People around me stumbled in and out of their hell to stand beside me,
stuck together
with a viscous demand of unquestioned
adjacent realities.
My old friends,
absorbed in everything around them
that was everything to them, stood telling me stories
of the way one month left not a virgin in our class
and catalogued the stations we passed and streets
with orderly gossip.
Moscow was village like, aged
by the ease of endless fateful encounters
and ligatures of unabridged confessions over wine.

I could have stood there by you, on an ugly balcony of soviet sleeping district,
watching over the rain collecting on the roofs of stores
remodeled to sell imported cell-phones and other sleek,
top-of-the-line electronics in demand,
over the puddles people jumped across
on their way from the metro station, that was always
conveniently close—
in walking distance from the playgrounds rebuilt
over the fields that took my early wars,
in walking distance from the rooms where you and I would stay
with lights turned off,
from schooling, and dead pets,
the stories that made a day a novel,
from nighttimes that encrypted motions of us,
younger, from room to room, mid-flirt;
and from this singing in the night I can hear from the apartment
adamant singing I used to rip from the very air
my lungs knew nothing of as it filled them
the singing that was mine
that now,
as I see it kept on like a heritage,
is anthropologically curious….

There, by your side,
you and I not speaking of the years we spent apart,
I could have stood for ages,
watching a cigarette fall down eight flights to the ground,
because you’d taken it out of my hand
and threw it, telling me I shouldn’t start.


March 6, 2007