For Anna Akhmatova

Who had been in love with her that summer? Did it matter? The incidental willow is what she would remember, bare like a silver brooch on a sky of foxfur during the winters of famine and deportations. She wished she had something more cheerful to show them: a list of the flowering shrubs in a city park, lovers and toddlers asprawl behind rosebushes; workers with mallets indulging in horseplay while knocking partitions of sheetrock to splinters: energy's avatars, feminine, masculine. Forehead against the cold pane, she would always be ten-and-a-half years older than the century.                                         * She remembered Mother reading them Nekrasov as they ate sardines with white cheese and tomatoes while sun set late on the same seacoast where Tomis had sheltered and repelled an exiled poet. She would eat the same briny cheese in the heat of Tashkent waiting for news from re-named Leningrad.                                         * It had pleasured her, a language which incised choreographed chance encounters, almost-uttered words, eye-contact, electricity of an evaded touch: she wrote about brief summers, solitude's inebriation in the dusk that fell at almost midnight. (Louise Labé in a less clement climate, with electricity and indoor plumbing.) She and her friends and lovers chiselled lyrics until the decade (what did they think of revolution?) caught up with them, the elegant companions, and set them to a different exercise.                                         * (Which travelling companions would you pick? Who would have chosen to endure Céline? Pasternak wrote a paean to Stalin; Donne, for Pascal, would be a heretic.)                                         * Something held her back from choosing exile when the exacting enterprise went rotten. Russia was not her motherland: it was Saint Petersburg, the birch-lined corridors of Tsarskoye Selo – but she was not retained by bark-scales spreading up her limbs, with a god's breath in her ears: there were her threatened friends, her son in prison (who would not understand her coded letters or what had held her back from choosing exile after she did the paperwork to place him in the Russian Gymnasium in Paris the year his father met a firing squad; and Marina – who would not live long – wrote, she would meet them at the train station). Tinned fish, gas rings, staggering armchairs, stained toilets – mass graves of compromising manuscripts. Was her exigent Muse the despised dictator who censored, exiled, starved, imprisoned, murdered, hurting the prodigy of birch and willow into her late genius of debridement? "Submissive to you? You must be out of your mind . . ."                                         * How could she imagine, the "gay little sinner," up daybreak to dawn, the exactions of history? City rerouted for transit to labor camps, first husband shot in prison, their son in prison, then in a labor camp, on the front, then still in prison. She, over fifty, grown aquiline, vigilant, larger than life, "casta diva," her arias camouflaged witness, evoking the dailiness veiled in translation or foreign geographies. Can you, yourself, in your eyrie, imagine it while an empire's gearshifts creak behind you?                                         * She made her despair the Virgin's or Cleopatra's – under the circumstances, not outrageous. She would write in praise of peace brought by the tyrant if her lines might evoke an adjective passed down from underling to underling until some hungry guard unlocked a door . . . It didn't happen. Her son called her superficial. Larger than life, with all her flaws apparent she rolled on the floor and howled in indignation, more like the peasant she had come to resemble than Anna Comnena or Cleopatra or the ikon of words who was asked by other women at the prison wall "Can you describe this?"                                         * Once, in a youthful funk, she had made a poem of her son, (then just four) at her churchyard graveside unable to resurrect his flighty mother except to the balance sheet of her defections. She was alone, and he was alive, in prison. The impatient butterfly of Tsarskoye Selo a solid matron, stood below the frozen walls, with her permitted package, like the others – whether they had been doting or neglectful mothers.