I’m well aware that he was born in 1940 and therefore he can’t possibly remember. But all the same, when I read him I always think that he does remember – through the fog of deaths and births he remembers the Petersburg of ’twenty-one, the year of Our Lord 1921, the Petersburg where we buried Blok and were unable to bury Gumilev.
– Vladimir Veidle
Eyelids and lips close in concert.
He’s left the room,
and voice and vision cede
place to oblivion.
The mercury stiffens like a sentry
whose relief won’t come.
Nature, as it turns out,
adores a vacuum,
for that which is left to decay
in the clay soil
cannot be put on record, in diary
or chromosome.
Without that violin, without the sobbing cadence
of that cello, we
would have become either cattle
or swine...
The wind whistles up its courage, like a gangster,
whipping the mealy clouds.
And the Cheka death squad cranks, one-handed,
a crowd
of lorry engines, sluggish from the frost,
and wind-up gramophones,
so as to muffle the rifle shots
and Persephone’s moans.
March 1996-23 December 1997