Philip Nikolayev

Roaring roast cake with bean base spareribs for me, carottes é touff é es medium rare, I like them a tad undercooked, still red with sap, tea leaves in olive oil, strawberry sushi flummoxed to the point of deliquescence, or better still, freshly picked cucumber rolls to match the lettuce steak, mesquite broiled to a crunchy andante, with all organic granola salsa, nuts nutritious to the max, and then of course the soypork casserole with legs of boletus, and tofu chops on a platter of tomato paste base salmon with a sprinkling of beet juice droplets, all served with a rich broccoli broth.

I’ve long had what Soviet psychiatrists called “a tendency toward vagrancy.” At four I would run away from home repeatedly for a whole day, alone or sometimes with a friend named Boris of like age. Knew full well we “just can’t do this,” but nudge for nudge and wink for wink, we’d board the trolleybus #10, I think, buy tickets at four kopeks each from our gleanings and savings of the week, stick them into the ticket punch on the wall, watch the chad fall as you pulled, and ride all across Kishinev in half an hour to get off near that unforgettable restaurant built in the likeness of a huge wine barrel. We peered inside, it was cool. Then we had options: go and splash in the local artificial lake (I couldn’t swim yet), wonder in between along the banks, catching frogs to take home in a glass jar to populate a small construction pond (why did we always use my shirt to do this?), or go and explore the local flea market, which was not at all safe to do, but even at four it’s nice to have options. (One guy sold what we thought was a gun, we asked him and he confirmed it.) Those were days of cholera epidemics in Moldova. We’d buy peasant-cooked fodder corn on the cob when we got hungry, haggled with old ladies over pennies. We wouldn’t catch the return trolley until sunset. Then it’s always the same picture: the wicket creaks open, the landlord’s mutant barks through froth, my wet shirt clings. I step out of the dark toward my mother waiting by the door of our “temporary house” on Kaluga Street, which was a bit of a dirt road, probably still is. She has been crying, takes me inside. Room and kitchen (no bathroom or running water): the room had a brick stove, the kitchen a dirt floor (with mice and sometimes grass) and a white washstand — these lines are all that has survived of them. There was great beauty in their squalor. She has been crying, takes me inside, says she will scold me later. I know it will be soon. First she must call the cops to tell them I’ve been found. Of course, back then I didn’t understand anything: neither how a poet harms his mother, nor how alienated (thank you, Marx, for that term) one can be from the start, and free in the grip of that greatest paradox of all — a happy Soviet childhood.

Talking like Pushkin to his horse, I climb into thick equestrian aesthetics. I’m horseman and veterinarian in one on an estate of troubled youth, I am an aristocratic fop, hello, galloping at full gallop shooting at treetops, yahoo to you Sir in treble multiplication, I know about stallions and I’m out of here to the city soon, I must meet N. or K., I forget which, and then the zisters C. Sorry, I mean the sisters Z. My sideburns incinerate the furniture in the salon of Y. I do not care for C++ , for I live in the nineteenth century. I barely lived through math at the Lyc é e. I’m now dans une boutique. Vous ne parlez pas fran ç ais? Merde, vous ê tes alors cr é tin, mon vieux monsieur le barbecue! What are you a Volga Tatar or something? Actually I’ve never been to Kazan but I wanna go some day, maybe when the emperor exiles me. You look familiar, I know you from somewhere. So what brings you to St. Petersburg on this particular twist of the century? Lozenges of the imagination climb reflected in the Neva of the sky and in the sky of the Neva and farther along the Nevkas, and the stars, the stars shine viscerally like old duel scars anticipated. I am stuck at home. I’ll never see you, Paris, London, Rome. Adrenal memory flows and gels and burns, acting in combination with my sideburns. I’ll show you some transculture. Gospoda, do you understand any Russian, ah? Nyet? Damn, then I must speak to you in English.

I. I am a man.  I’ve lived alone.  I’ve been  in  love.  I’ve  played  with fire, cursed the telephone, and basked in verse, in verve, and also Humid,     terrestrial,     mixed,     nongenderspecific, have   occasionally day’s  tumult  ushers  in   an evening with  a  lone moved  a  woman’s shut   icecream   stand,   false  promises  of  cone heart,  although  I also, and  scoop  near  Central  Park.   Juneific famously,  had  such  an awk- are   the   silhouettes  of   people  dreaming  by, ward   start.  Amazed  at lips,   lit   cigarette   tips,   thoughts  and  tulips  streaming  by how  much along   dimly   hospitable   park   lamps  toward  eleven symmetry  a  life with  an  occasional   rev   of   internal   combustion can  still  support,  I wafted   across   from   nearabouts. stare  in  rapt  near-idiocy,  like  a “What’s   this   you  are  talking  about,  Sarah?” foreign   passport, and you   hear  a  voice,  and   the  reply,  “I’m  sorry. April’s   Persian  lilacs but  what  was  I  supposed  to  do?”  Two   bats all  bloom  straight  into dash   through   a  silver  stretch  of  atmosphere. my  face,  and  various What   she   was  supposed  to  do   we  never  hear, other   blossom, too, depending on each case, while  you  are  softly  tangible, while  you are sweetly mine. We’re existentially  wise,  we’re  mortally divine. II. All whispers  know  where  whispers  go  and  lusters  where  with lusters flow, and when your palm is in my palm, just as my poem There  is   a  sparkling   tone  to  how  you   speak, is  in  your  poem,  look a   quickness   to   your   whisper,   an   implied at   this   stellar,  cellular, correctness   in   your   ironies.   We   stride organic   life   of   mine,   the along   emphatic   benches   in   the   weak general  and  particular,  the light   bristling   eloquent   dark.  Pine,   elm  and  oak gross  (as  well   as fall  silent  now  to  hear  you  tell  a  joke— fine)  intentions  I  epitomize. something  about  a  man  and  a   mandrake; Look,  seeing  through  its I think  it  cute  and  laugh  like  Captain  Drake. thin disguise the bleary We  then  explore  the  vagaries  of  light sky  whose   weepy  eyes  have found  underfoot  by  lamps,  and  kiss.  “Beatrix, rained   us  a  surprise. will    you   still   need   me  when   I’m   thirty-six?" A    lightning    bolt’s You   favorably   mumble  that  you  might, protruding  hand  snatched and  throw  a  willing  arm  around  my  nape. past us,  far and brief and I reassure you that there’s no escape. as  I  hold  you  in  my  arms,  you fill me with belief. Don’t wonder if and how, much  stranger  than right now, the  hyacinth of  sorrow may blossom  forth tomorrow. III. The  stars  in  liquid  decadence  reclaim  their  lost  positions, all knotty dispositions dissolved in limpid dance. They offer us their Another   couple   floats  up  through  thickened  ink stardom.   Oh,   we into  the  field  of  vision,  to  redissolve could  sympathize  with  them, leaving  a  thin  trail  of   perfume  and  love but   instead,  we   set  eyes and   visual   recollection  in   the  pink. with   them  upon  that  higher Cicadas   cataract  from  tree  to  tree. tsardom,  that  real  of  love  and A mock  nightingale  trills,  then  two,  then  three. reason.  Our  lengthy We  cut   short  across  grass  and  leaves  (then  four), cigarettes  crackle encountering   no  one  on  our  slight  detour with   dry  regrets  during where,   negligibly   burdened   with  a   sixpack, the  rainy   season,  but a  master  and  his  bulldog  rustle  on, we  ignore  their  humors, their a   small   red   light   fixed   to   her   furry   back. melancholy  murmurs, We  are  too  busy  with  our  love  to  see  them. decline   ascetic  rigors, Tomorrow   we’ll   be   going   back   to  Boston. welcome  straight  facts, Three   cheers   for   Central   Park  at   height   of   season. clear    figures, where   laws  concerning  numbers  come  plumed  with  midnight sounds, and spirits  stir  from  slumbers  like  angels out of clouds.

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