Saturday, June 29, 2013

...poem about sustained silent reading and communism for Brianne Ahmann (and poets Kyle Devalk and Megan Cannella)



USSR

 

Was the acronym they spoon fed us in third grade

Early afternoons chocolate-milk

Handle-bar cafeteria catered moustaches

Past the mulch burns and calluses of

 Autumnal recess

 

After the Lord’s prayer

 

 when we were required to look down

 

Into the open puddle of splayed ink

 alphabet inching across Russian tea

Gray plains of paper not knowing anything about

The cold war or the soviet republic

Or the Berlin wall

Not knowing a thing about the missile

Crisis two decades earlier, how our teachers

Would later describe to us the fashion in

Which they huddled fetus posture beneath the dessert

plateaus of their desks, the shrill of the siren

Heralding  an over head whistling screech of uncertainty

Waiting to find themselves incubating

In an ashy bulb of spontaneous silence

 

No more, or

 

The Russian grad student I was in love with

who told me that when she growing up

USA was the enemy and who wouldn’t sleep with me

  because  she was marrying a different man

Almost thirty years older

 who drove a firebird

And who came from a republic of money

 

How, on Bloomsday that same year

I did more

Shrooms than a Mario brother down at

The Red Foxx den

 Walking up  The balding cement arch of Main street Hill at 3am

Convinced with my long hair

And tattered jeans

 that I was an American slacker

Variation of Odysseus

And that the Russian girl

 was my Penelope

And how I had to kill the

Dual-Suitors of commerce and capitalism

Before our lips could possibly

Fold into each other’s breath

Licking the back of  Christmas envelopes

loose pocket  change fountain pebble

 

 widening of her eyes 

 

Like how we used to read

sustained passages of enduring silence,

 

Uninterrupted, painfully, pledging the pangs of our allegiance

To the scripted shells of language

Dripping off the cold sheet of a white page

One chilly icicle-shaped

Tear drop at a time.
 
 

 

No comments: