Euterpe and Melpomene would meanwhile
be tuning up their tooting instruments,
then up would bob the maestro like a sealion
out of the icehole that the spotlight melts,
a soloist all spiffed up like a penguin
slides to position on the stage’s floe,
while busily the old crone kappeldiener
hands broadsheets out, like nihilist of yore;
I register this tra-la-la, but meantime
a different object holds my eyes in thrall:
that twinkling crystalline inverted mountain,
that cascade frozen high above the stalls,
whose final spark of light was soon to die,
and nothing I can do will make it stay.
On stage a squire pretends to be a peasant,
the backdrop twitches, light follows the dark,
the music marches us away to prison,
deprives us of our rights, puts us to work;
the heroine wrings her hands (right to the shoulders),
puts bells into our ears and makes them ring,
performs a strip-search of our hearts and souls, and
confiscates each and every sharp-edged thing.
The generals and the ministers and the statesmen
stiff in their boxes. Conversation dies.
The bargirl reads her agitprop-escapist
novel. But no escape from snow and ice.
Napkin. Ice bucket. Buffet iced with marble.
Frosty tall glasses. Snowy pinafores.
A rounded heap of glacier mints, their wrappers
with polar bear on iceberg, lies before.
Oh, how I used to love the chill wide spaces
of foyers bare in January’s first days,
and the soprano screech: ‘My dearest, take me’,
while sunshine strokes the plush of window drapes.
Outside, sole guardians of the Michael Garden –
bullfinches, in Suvórov uniform;
two lions, paw-up, strut like their commanders,
with pats of snow up here and on the rump.
Behind, Neva clapped up in chains for winter,
Karelia, Barents puddle not that far,
the source that sends us down this freezing weather –
the basic fact that makes us what we are.
Things stay the way our bronze creator made them;
the colder we, the closer our embrace;
an Ice Palace was built, and when it melted,
we raised the Winter one to take its place.
But all the same, and now I really mean it,
the measured ebb and flow of opera leads
to thinking – if I’ve had a drop too many –
that warm seas are what Russia really needs!