Mandelstam
(Taxi)
A guard’s right hand raised
waiting for the train to leave,
drag the people bone by bone
across the wheat fields.
Had I ever been to Leipzig?
There’s a factory there, the driver said,
where he was second in command.
He learnt his trade in the GDR
and speaks enough to fix the Mercedes
without resorting to bad translations;
with the original manual he took from the dash,
pages faded, stained oil black.
I came in on propellers,
my descent was coloured
by black ground and rust.
A line of iron drawn in the mud.
(Voronezh)
Mandelstam I did not see
standing in Lenin Square;
not a footprint
or loose word left behind.
There are grandmothers instead
living double widowed,
selling baguettes and kittens
in the hero city.
The names of those marched up and down
sucked beneath the tramway.
Syllables spewed like fertilizer.
At the traffic lights children sway like grain.
On the path to Victory Place
teenagers drink flagons and skate the ramps.
Young girls are pulled up through the years
like rhetoric and eternal flames.
They are the posters on the walls,
smiles on wars kept fresh
in two headed eagles’ eyes.
Songs of marches started
from the end of the street;
boys who pulled on ponytails,
dug in deep on the Moscow road,
greasing guns and testing the trigger.
Old tanks rest on concrete blocks,
new conscripts stumble like they did before,
kick up black dirt past the aeronautic works.
The flags have changed,
the music is the same as it was.
(Memorial)
Submarines were named for these towns;
cogs and wheels slipped from the dock,
cold cocoons of steel falling through oceans
people here have never seen.
You can buy the badge for twenty dollars.
Feed a widow for a week.
Channel One spells out the news.
It seems one mother is not the same
as the other. Wooden dolls
and metal detectors
stand guard in the lobby
of the Central Department Store.
Repainted and praised
dead armour becomes a monument.
The enemy at the gate draws crosses on the wall
and raises it’s arm
to a slogan not a God.
Railway stations still explode,
body parts burnt all look alike.
(Leaving)
Lenin Square keeps its star,
the rest hammered out or scraped away.
Fingerprints left on empty places.
The absence of plaques,
the blank spaces on the wall,
the swastikas on the corners
of the hidden synagogues;
they remind you because he was a Jew,
Mandelstam was not made wait
for the frozen hands of Hitler youth.
Someone set him off across the Urals
with no gun or lousy army boots.
Page(s) 53-55
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