Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LETTERS TO YESENIN: 30, by JAMES HARRISON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LETTERS TO YESENIN: 30, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: The last and I'm shrinking from the coldness of your spirit: that
Last Line: With faithfully until they cast you out.
Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim
Subject(s): Death; Despair; Imaginary Conversations; Yesenin, Sergei (1895-1925); Dead, The


The last and I'm shrinking from the coldness of your spirit: that chill lurid
air that surrounds great Lenin in his tomb as if we had descended into a cloud
to find on the catafalque a man who has usurped nature, isn't dead any more than
you or I are dead. Only unlikely to meet and talk to our current forms. Today
I couldn't understand words so I scythed ragweed and goldenrod before it could
go to seed and multiply. I played with god imagining how to hold His obvious
scythe that caught you, so unlike the others, aware and cooperative. Is He glad
to help if we're willing? A boring question since we're so able and ingenious.
Sappho's sparrows are always telling us that love will save us, some other
will arrive to draw us cool water, lie down with us in our private darkness and
make us well. I think not. What a fabulous lie. We've disposed of sparrows
and god, the death of color, those who are dominated by noon and the vision of
night flowing in your ears and eyes and down your throat. But we didn't mean to
arrive at conclusions. Fifty years are only a moment between this granary and a
hanged man half the earth away. You are ten years younger than my grandmother
Hulda who still sings Lutheran hymns and watches the Muskegon River flow. In
whatever we do, we do damage to ourselves; and in those first images there were
always cowboys or cossacks fighting at night, murdered animals and girls never
to be touched; dozing with head on your dog's chest you understand breath and
believe in golden cities where you will live forever. And that fatal expectancy
-- not comprehending that we like our poems are flowers for the void. In those
last days you wondered why they turned their faces. Any common soul knew you
had consented to death, the only possible blasphemy. I write to you like some
half-witted, less courageous brother, unwilling to tease those ghosts you slept
with faithfully until they cast you out.





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