This matted and glossy photo of Yesenin bought at a Leningrad newsstand - permanently tilted on my desk: he doesn't stare at me he stares at nothing; the difference between a plane crash and a noose adds up to nothing. And what can I do with heroes with my brain fixed on so few of them? Again nothing. Regard his flat magazine eyes with my half-cocked own, both of us seeing nothing. In the vodka was nothing and Isadora was nothing, the pistol waved in New York was nothing, and that plank bridge near your village home in Ryazan covered seven feet of nothing, the clumsy noose that swung the tilted body was nothing but a noose, a law of gravity this seeking for the ground, a few feet of nothing between shoes and the floor a light-year away. So this is a song of Yesenin's noose that came to nothing, but did a good job as we say back home where there's nothing but snow. But I stood under your balcony in St. Petersburg, yes St. Petersburg! a crazed tourist with so much nothing in my heart it wanted to implode. And I walked down to the Neva embankment with a fine sleet falling and there was finally something, a great river vastly flowing, flat as your eyes; something to marry to my nothing heart other than the poems you hurled into nothing those years before the articulate noose. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE MAN WITH THE HOE OUTWITTED by EDWIN MARKHAM HAILSTORM IN MAY by GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS WESTWARD HO! by CINCINNATUS HEINE MILLER SOJOURN IN THE WHALE by MARIANNE MOORE ENGLAND AND AMERICA IN 1782 by ALFRED TENNYSON TO SPAIN - A LAST WORD by EDITH MATILDA THOMAS DECEMBER 31ST by LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE |