Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LETTERS TO YESENIN: 28; TO ROBERT DUNCAN, by JAMES HARRISON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LETTERS TO YESENIN: 28; TO ROBERT DUNCAN, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: O to use the word winged as in bird or victory or airplane for
Last Line: Flapped your arms madly, unwinged but craving a little flight.
Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim
Subject(s): Imaginary Conversations; Russia; Yesenin, Sergei (1895-1925); Soviet Union; Russians


O to use the word winged as in bird or victory or airplane for the first time.
Not for spirit though, yours or anyone else's or the bird that flew errantly
into the car radiator. Or for poems that sink heavily to our stomachs like
fried foods, the powerful ones, visceral, as impure as the bodies they flaunt.
Curious what you paid for your cocaine to get winged. We know the price of the
poems, one body and soul net, one brain already tethered to the dark, one
ingenious leash never to hold a dog, two midwinter eyes that lost their
technicolor. Think what you missed. Mayakovsky's pistol shot. The Siege of
Leningrad. Crows feasting on all of those frozen German eyes. Good Russian
crows that earned a meal putting up with all of that insufferable racket of war.
Curious crows watching midnight purges, wary of owls, and the girl in the green
dress on the ground before a line of soldiers. She and the crow exchange
pitiless glances. She flaps her arms but is not winged. Maybe there is one
ancient crow that remembers the Czarina's jeweled sleigh, the ring of its small
gold bells; and the sickly winged horse in the cellar of the Winter Palace,
product of a mad breeding experiment for eventual escape, how it was dumped into
the Neva before the talons grew through the hooves, the marvel of it lost in the
uproar of those days, the proof of it in the bones somewhere on the floor of the
Baltic delta. But we all get lost in the course of empire, which lacks the
Brownian movement's stability. We count on iron men to stick to their guns.
Our governments are weapons of exhaustion. Poems fly out of yellow windows at
night with a stall factor just under a foot, beneath our knees and the pre-
Fourth of July corn in the garden. At least at that level radar can't detect
them and they're safe from State interference. We know perfectly well you
flapped your arms madly, unwinged but craving a little flight.





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