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Mayakovsky Welcomed to America, 1925
- Wesleyan University Press
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Mayakovsky Welcomed to America, 1925 Anywhere on the continent, if you bent close, you heard the song of birds in the radio letting you know they were alive, they were in climates better than yours, deeply shadowed by brilliant sunlight, borne aloft by perfume, taking the colors of their eyes from exhalations of orchids in Florida, in California, on the tennis and Barbizon islands sheltered in the crooked Georgia coast. And as you bent close, hearing the interviewer pause, and then the birds in the silence, then Mayakovsky, you could well imagine a nation feeding itself on flowerless nettles of futurity, fattening its children on bits of flagstone and the dust of crumbling facades. You could imagine the complete absence of the tropics, a defenceless freedom, a cello made of snow. The idea of orchids is harder than a wall. The failure of allegory and its kiss to nature in the innocent forms of birds and islands and young tennis players rising from the death of the crowd's applause to be tall as islands, sweetly upheld as the sexual wide-eyed scream of parrots, is sadder than a disgraceful polity. Out of the jasper and jade stirring of April the iron palm trees of human wishes have not appeared. The future is nude. We sent Mayakovsky to his death by drowning in the melted cellos of betrayal. In Paris, Napoleon erected a plaster elephant on the site of the Bastille. He meant to obscure the Revolution with exotica. The statue became a city of rats. Sad future, its monsters in ruins, its tyrants small as parrots. 35 ...