The dark stair's colder than the snow-wan world outside, where pallid clouds and flakes are swirled before sun's burn. Ice ingots, each stair holds deposits of cold. Blood frozen into folds of newspaper wrap, the week's meat under your arm, you climb to your room's sparse furniture - to Shakespeare and the Bible, words that wait for harness - flocks of geese who consecrate the sky with wings that raise your audience above the anguish of their present tense. While in the Kremlin, Stalin asks his spies where you get the cash to bribe men to rise and, as your poems speak, weep for their nation, he who would torture for such adulation. |