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This is a desert, and they call it peace, this is Liberation Day; the new government is drunk again, and the painter’s fear is white in his paint. Awake, This Summer I see you a minute, a year ago, at the door of our friend’s empty room, your eyes, the slanted-back weight of your body, moseying around. That night, your hand jumped in your sleep, you said “Everyone was friends” . . . Late summer mornings I slept in your side, in the sun, and to all your wishes in my sleep I wished “Yes.” A year’s ocean of sleep we moved in, without air; no one was friends. Awake, this summer, first finished with that, my chest hurts, and the shallowest breath is life. Mandelstam 1934–35. The time of his arrest and imprisonment in Moscow, and his exile, with his wife Nadezhda Jakolevna Khazina, to Voronezh. My mother’s house Russia home.deep.blue 169 ...

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