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Ode to the Czar’s Assassin
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
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Ode to the Czar’s Assassin 1 I sing of the Czar’s assassin, of his knife, of the delicate thread he winds three times around the neck of Czar Alexander the Second. I sing to the words he whispers as he helps Alexander take his last breath. It is to him I owe my life. 2 I thank the Czar’s assassin for scaring my little grandmother, 1 8 2 for sending her flying with her feather bed and a few metal pots and pans into the new world. I sing to Czar Alexander’s mother who foolishly entrusted her child to a poet— Vasily Zhukovsky who wrapped him in verses and trained him to be gentle. Alas, see how poetry can ruin a man! 3 I sing to Alexander who took the silver tracks that carried his people from Moscow to Petersburg and stretched them across the world, rail lines opening outward like his freed people. That is how he let my little grandmother begin to dream. 4 I sing to the Czar’s assassin for reminding her to be afraid. I sing to my grandmother’s fear, INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE MESSIAH 1 8 3 [44.212.50.220] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:32 GMT) to her snail’s antennae that sniffed the dangerous air of Lithuania, to her mother who packed a wicker basket so full three strong men had to carry it. I sing to the useless items she dragged from the old world to the new, to embroidered bedsheets, hairpins, to delicate cups and saucers that would break along the way, to feathers plucked one by one that would gather beads of moisture and sink to the bottom of the wicker basket. 5 I sing to my grandmother’s high-bottoned shoes, to her old legs when I knelt before her years later and pulled at the layers of rubber stockings like bark on a tree. I sing to the child whose fear 1 8 4 OVER THE ROOFTOPS OF TIME took her away from the oak trees, the beloved language the rivers and fields of her life. 6 I praise the Czar’s assassin who kept me from being bones in the graveyard, blood earth in the massacre pit provender for the sacred oaks. I would have been birch or flax, rye seed in their bread, spore in their mushroom, wild strawberry, filament of hair, cry for help scratched into the wall of the Czar’s fortress or cell in the great wash of their Nieman their Neris—twin rivers pulling at the shore. 7 I sing to the Czar’s assassin for not letting my grandmother feel at home in Lithuania. INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE MESSIAH 1 8 5 [44.212.50.220] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:32 GMT) For giving me my life, so I could, one day, return to the rivers, the stones, to the earth of her childhood that reaching across the landscape of my mother’s body I could walk in my grandmother’s steps. 1 8 6 OVER THE ROOFTOPS OF TIME ...