Day of the Border Guards: Poems

Driving the M8

Driving the M8 There are bandits on this road, the kind who years ago would’ve lurked on horseback here at forest’s eave where the highway narrows obligingly at the edge of Vladimir oblast’: good spot for an ambush. I’m the one driving in this dream, although in life you usually drive the second-hand car with screw holes in the hood and trunk where someone filched the BMW emblems from right under the nose of the dvornik who loiters all day in the parking lot, keeping an eye on us foreigners (Whose eye? Why?). Our car’s muscular, smooth, but not like what the bandits drive, those tint-windowed Mercedes purring along the road, stiff-arming Soviet models that run on rubber bands and spit. Every Russian fixes cars. Sometimes the BMW breaks down: I pop the hood, make a show of feminine helplessness for ten, fifteen seconds, till the screech of tires, sometimes two or three sets, as the drivers of Ladas or Zhigulis or—once—a Chaika spring from their seats, wrenches in hand, itching to take a look beneath that foreign hood. They always manage to get it going again. Now bandits broker the trade in beach towels— hundreds of miles from the ocean, Mickey Mouse 26 waves his mitts from every clothesline an hour’s drive on either side of Sergiev Posad. We ask ourselves what the profit is in that but can’t come up with a satisfactory answer. Oh, you’re here—funny, I left alone. . . . Look! There’s a bandit pulling off the road. Cigarette dangling, Ray Bans cocked, he’s young, smooth-shaven, with something slightly vulpine about his cheek and nascent jowl. The kind of man who rarely looks at me, which is best because one glance in those ferocious, needy eyes and I’m a goner, I’m mom and whore and Little Red Riding Hood all rolled into one. The bandit bends to flick mud from his shoe as he shakes down the owners of beat-up cars parked by the roadside, impromptu market in enamel pans, patterned curtains, crystal chandeliers: opportunity knocking. I take it back: you’re not in this dream, after all. You’re never in my dreams anymore. Twenty- five years of tuna melts, nylon sheers, utility bills, and suddenly you’ve vanished, poof! As if you’d never been. As if you hadn’t dragged the mattress across the room on our wedding night, although it was one hundred and ten in the dark and the tiny window a/c might as well have been broken. As if you hadn’t wept next morning when you posed among bouquets and empty champagne bottles for the photograph still propped beside my bed: proof that joy exists, in spite of all our dreary evidence to the contrary. No matter: I’m following the wolf pack now, 27 I’m on the scent of danger. I know full well there’s a dumpster in my future, only, god, not today, oh, not today. Today I’m driving on what passes for a highway in Russia and, instead of you, maybe my passenger’s a highwayman: yes. Maybe I’m driving him along his rounds. You’re beautiful, he says in his Russian way, stroking my cheek and blowing smoke out the window. Or maybe I’m the one who’s saying it, because it’s true—he’s beautiful as wild, beautiful as feral, beautiful as fear. Soon we’re stopping at a hamlet composed of a dozen knock-kneed cottages. My bandit’s all business counting out his cut from jars of fresh pickles, pails of potatoes, buckets of cut daisies clustered at the feet of an empty stool that leans against a half-hinged gate. I’m tasting one of those pickles, feather-frond of dill still clinging to its rind, swallowing the brine and gall of being ornamental. Serviceable. I’ve decided there’s no such thing as essential: we’re—all of us— intimate strangers who’ll disappear some morning: tomorrow, or next month, or maybe twenty- five years along the line, joy becoming theoretical as it vanishes, unbelief chafing fingers where rings once held sway. With bandits, at least, I know what I’m getting. My passenger’s eyes stray to the gate, where a blonde, lipsticked siren accidentally hooks her miniskirt as she hastens...