The old Russian poet sits down at a bistro with his muse.
New York, of course, sometime late in summer.
Sweat seeps through the distended belly of his shirt.
He’s spent two hours in front of the mirror, dressing.
Now he greets the shock of time since those Leningrad years,
the American Memories constructed and demolished
in her severe face, his decadent glutton gut.
I wouldn’t recognize you on the street if we passed,
she tells him sadly in Russian,

the language burning his throat.

He speaks in English, proudly. He tells her about his
lavish apartment, his wealthy friends.
She tries to understand.
She is unaccustomed to the heat, and the noise, she
has made a mistake coming here.
He dedicated half of his poems to her.
She spent decades trying to smuggle them in, failing.
Beautiful; extravagant! reported friends.
She read some the night before in her hotel
and mostly she felt distorted, her stomach churned.
That manufactured life of theirs, the perpetual youth.
She is amber/ in my displaced heart he wrote.
He tells her about his years in Siberia, his years
in prison. The poetry I wrote then? My god, it
was divine. The most spectacular I’ve ever
written. And all of it lost, all of it lost the minute
I finished. Because there was no pen in my cell,
no instrument. But I wrote the poems anyway,
poems for you, beautiful verse. All for you.
And it saved me, though now I think it has killed me,
to create and lose such beauty.
She doesn’t understand; her English is rudimentary.
She cannot interject because her pride is immense.
He sees hard years in her fissured face, her
corroded eyes. The point is, poetry saved my life.
You saved me. She smiles and nods. He reaches
out and takes her calloused hands
in his plump, vermiform fingers.
So this is America,
she says,
of course,
in Russian.