Romancing Akhmatova

I come with the bones of my dead 
stacked like firewood in my arms,
three snow buffalo I yoke to a lamppost,

and ice in my goatee. You and your room 
are barely there, wisp of wallpaper 
curling from a missing baseboard.

The world has turned past your 
drunkards and harlots. I remember 
vaguely Brodsky’s rebuke

to those American writers who envied 
Russian poets—their readers,
their stature, their suffering—

and I can’t argue, but still I see 
in my charmed life a Leningrad
of loss. Is it something else, that photo

of the White Lily of Stalingrad—
Lydia Litvyak, standing on the wing of her Yak? 
I want to be with her, to kneel in steppe grass,

dipping shreds of parachute silk
in a bowl filled with ground acacia berries 
to make a scarf to wear in the cockpit,

it nestling around her neck, blowing silk 
and sex, the firing cylinders,
the exhaust. No, Anna, this won’t do.

Love as it’s known—the letters, the clasping, 
the till deaths—died like Lydia, a burning 
fuselage, her satin bra never recovered.

Fear fuels this new century too, just as it did 
in the last, the taste of iron in your mouth 
when you bit your lip as you made your way,

a loaf of rye tucked to your breast, to plead 
for your son. To bear that witness, weight, 
and, yes, his blame too: Why can’t you free me?

Anna, I have nothing in trade but this: 
In a field, my youngest son. Lacrosse.
He is nine. I sit on the sidelines

and watch them in their helmets, metal grills, 
shoulder pads. They play at their small war,
split seams, work give-and-takes, call out commands.

Their white, still-hairless calves and thighs 
pumping, their bone so close to flesh, 
nothing has readied me for the delicate blue

above their helmets, the deep green 
beneath their cleats, or how even a passing
ray of sunlight could cut them down at the knees.

Read more from Issue 16.2.