Akhmatova In Silver Lake

•

How gray she's become, waiting for the rain

Her rice-powdered face tipped up from beneath the Chinese lantern
As, in a voice rough with whiskey & cigarettes, she begins her soliloquy

Stories of her son, the prison queues--

Of Mandelstam, who learned to late
No one is irrepressible

Of Marina, twisting on a hook in a sunlit room

Of the man standing sleepless in the high window--
& how, on certain nights, their minds intersected
& each was terrified

Of Leningrad, the siege--the world vanishing
In a blizzard of forgetfulness

As music from a farther room carries the evening away
& it's very late, & the Damned are bidding sad adieus--

The young poets, nervous as suitors
The artist, intoxicated by his Little Truth, hanging coyly on his arm

He leaves a housewarming gift--a painting
She recognizes the model, his last "Little Truth"

~

I walk the long block past ragged forms tending their bonfires
At Sunset I pay the fare, boarding the last bus to the sea

I think of her in the little house, exhausted amid festive rubble

The verdict on Mandelstam has become the verdict on us all--
A scribbled penstroke: "Isolate but preserve"

The samovar smolders
Her mind is a cage of rain





*Anna Akhmatova never visited America & never lived in Silver Lake California.