Three Lilacs, and: Instead of Lilacs:

All poetry is a catastrophe.

—Anna Ahkmatova

Years later, when everyone came to visit, when there were awards,recognition and international travel, when there was Mozart again,black bread and vodka; when you could read and talk about Pushkin,Mandelstam and even the long dead Gumilyov at your own pace,your own leisure. There was the special bouquet,for your seventy-fifth birthday, gatheredby a firm friendly hand from your garden.The artist sketch of you, magnificent,a simple dress in the pale bruised brooding color;and the ones pressed between the pages of From Six Books,that a young man, fumbling and nervous, brought for your signature.These are the things, these three lilacs, that you were finally ableto hold and turn over again and again, no, not merely as ideas,but as the flowers them-selves, in your hand.Yes, these are the things, these three lilacs,that, you said, (you showed!) the groveling work of poetry is made from.

Instead of Lilacs:

I brought you a world of trouble. We should have knownthat nothing is ever easy in Soviet Russia.So many things they accused you of: groveling before a foreigner.But if they could have seen you that night: tall, pale, bruised,you were that bunch of lilacs! Heady perfumed scentcoming in through a low cold Russian window.One conversation shifted endlessly into another.We talked and talked and it seemed we would keep talking forever.We did not know it then, but tomorrow the persecution of you,of your estranged son, would begin all over.