St. Basil, 1993, and: Days of 1993

St. Basil, 1993

And he said, "go and say to the people: Hear, but do not understand. See, but do not perceive."

- Isaiah 6:9-10

Forget the postcard St. Basil's, cupolas
swirled ice cream sold on Red Square. Forget
the postcard, cupolas like fireworks
frozen in burst, colored onions pulled
up by unseen hands. Past the Tsar's bell-
too huge to use, only echoing now
the tour guide's canned prattle

to Pushkin Square's McDonald's.
The gypsy children sing their parts in a play
for pity. Rouged with dirt, they dance,
thrust a newborn at a tourist - her hands full,
they empty her pockets and run. Nearby,
a blind drunk's trembling palms
part the crowd, knock on car windows

like stunned birds. The city's too much.
I take an outbound, wedge between
a babushka's bloated coat, a mafia tough's

sleek leather. Cut a circle from steamy glass:
dim outlines of trees, unfinished apartments
decay, windows boarded. On unlit platforms,
people feel their way, their arms extend

against station buildings, feathered
by paper-scrap ads. In the bitter wind, walls
flutter and whip: Exchange apartment?
Call Dmitry. Notice. Have Moskvich, will sell.
Tracks end. A rusted kiosk, empty as a socket
where an eye had been. The sky stretches
past all imagining. What did I come here for?

Bear-thick workers sprawl in sleep,
orange overalls smeared with soot.
Cabbages in sacks hang on coat hooks,
sleeping heads loll to the rocking.
In the opposite seat, a child's dusty palms
in fists, as if to hide something hard.
His father's face a posthumous book.

He looks at me. Outside, light knifes between
trees. At this speed, they flatten, bend
around the corners of vision. A single tree
enlarges. Freezes. Distends, until I turn
away. Like the hunched backs
of babushkas, bodies carrying years
like oaks, every winter thickening limbs.

I wake: Moscow. And return again,
in dreams, to what I could not complete,
could not forget: the man I tripped over-
frozen, half-naked, his bloody mouth still
wincing red. And those who opened
their doors like family secrets in Monino,
Oktyabrskaya Polya, Taganka -stairs

to a floor never built. In winding streets
of dreams, I can almost hear Napoleon's gasp
at a people willing to burn the city to keep it
from him, the Tsarina's secret purr
at Potemkin's prop-towns built to impress
foreign guests. On the Volga, a church shimmers
its liquid reflection, glossy

as photos I glance through, looking
for Moscow. Already it slips from me,
the bundled crowd crossing the square,
sweet cigarettes, car fumes and sweat jostling
the bells tolling through Siberian air,
the name of the idiot healer I needed,
never found. He'd dip a coal in water,

touch the face. His mangled mouth offered
no words. Walked naked in snow, impervious
to those who beat him, until people believed him
holy. When he died, Ivan the Terrible
wept bitterly: the seizured frothing mouth
now bronzed into icon. St. Basil,
Basil the fool, bloomed into cupolas.

Days of 1993

1.

Akhmatova touches her neck, as if to protect
were no different than to choke, looks over her bare shoulder
to a hidden photographer, eyes aglimmer, as if
I were a burning city. As if she imagined the other

me, squinting through cracked taxi windshield, pointing out
the Kremlin to visiting parents. Is this the country we feared?
my dad asked, an ex-Cold Warrior aghast at the rutted
airport runway, at a Muscovite's habit of turning off

headlights at night on an open road, at the dual use
of newsprint in the toilet - to peruse and wipe your ass with.
In Vietnam, he'd marveled at teeming streets, difficulty
of completing even a phone call: to get anything done,

he'd joked then, it would take an act of Congress. Thirty years later,
listening to the tapes he'd sent home...