Robert Cole
Lenin’s Brain
On the removal of Lenin’s remains to be inhearsed next to his mother’s tomb in St. Petersburg.
When experts checked out Lenin’s brainfolds
They discovered he had extra wrinkles,
The simple distinction of Darwinian advantage,
Not so much Swiss cheese burnt by midnight oil
As Solzhenitsyn suspected, a fusty walnut,
What part reptilian?
The secateurs of gentlemen historians
Cut back a floating moonflower,
A clinging Anastasia; squiggling synapses,
Cyrillics commissared by the Hermitage,
A withered leaf like the millinery of his mother’s,
Folded down with mothballs in hope.
They uncurtain the chambers, the mould, his architectonics;
The slide, courtesy of Reuters,
Resembles a dry blood spattered wall.
Robert Cole recently read for us at Ambit Live!, Brentwood Theatre, with Gerda Mayer, Marita Over and Peter Porter, as part of the Essex Book Festival. His latest collection is Dancing Naked to Beethoven (The Brobdingnagian Times Press).
Page(s) 95
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