Five winters to Vladivistok

by Genya Turovsky

"the night lacking darkness, but brightened by no light."  —  Maurice Blanchot

1st Winter he is lowered into the streets of his childhood as into a well the arcade echoes with the gait of angry emperors the boy thinks himself a bell bell tones the clang and clamor conscripted sent eastward out to sea encephalitis was an avocation in viral form what is called a calling the poet's prose thickened in the valves and chambers of a submarine he spent his childhood at extreme ends of the empire's dictionary transgressed against the birch trees broke ice with his throat singing
2nd Winter (no grass in that field of grass but love) every morning he would wake before dawn to watch her bicycle past him toward the flaming house she would at that very moment of proximity prevent him from the fragmented ordeal of speech he touched the skin of the passive voice absorbed the seepage of ink with its gauze sepia as the tea-stain centerless circle the circumference of his mouth irreparable the gaping hole where words alight and die
3rd Winter (meet me at Finland Station) the body reached its border his own body arbitrary is a gift once it has been given thinned by turpentine to no-color he cannot discern right from left down from up what is above his feet below his head is it snow the salt plain or a page abroad his body grows heavy as a ship shoaled in the frozen harbor because he is of there of that illogical element rather than of another the woman's voice saying I want to prolong your life
4th Winter (the ice of Lake Ladoga) but the equilibrium in the inner ear suggests that he is still without movement tooth marks on the stubbed pencil a signature orphaned of its hand vapor rises from the swamplands the throat spasms the bottle emptied the sarcoma cut away he stands knee deep in the snow declining comment his arm extended expectant as a falconer's wrist as the encroaching light disrupts the teary film on the eye of the statue
5th Winter (earth heaven earth) what dies when seen or what on seeing dies he said out of lack the voice comes parallel to speech hunger in the curled fist an ache in the loins to breathe finally is the minimal act drifting off to sleep his mouth invents the verb to reconcile oneself with the inevitable what follows behind the floats of the victory parade the noise of the spectator's receding in the newsreel's hum his tongue gropes for his teeth inside his mouth for her teeth in the absence of his own and we love those most who have long forgotten us in white nets of inertia the dulled relief of the sarcophagus are these gates of ivory gates of horn