kaliedoscope

I have been to Russia many times and never touched its earth, never seen the frigid limbs of white birch. But I have walked through the rural manor, now a Soviet sanatorium, now a museum no one visits, and there in Petersburg was young Nabokov holding his father's hand before a white-bearded man, "That was Tolstoy," he says to his son as they walk on, just as Thomas Wolfe walked by Whitman on the Brooklyn Bridge. I have stomped about in Raskalnikov's boots hearing their echo reverberate among the golden threadwork cast by the gas lamps between the rustling trees over the crooked heaving slabs of sidewalk on a stillborn night. I called the strike, dodged the hissing gas grenade, ran with my only son from the merging ranks. I stood spellbound before Trotsky's raging prophecy and heard Lenin's banging fist. Mandelstam's poem forms itself on my moving lips -- I walk in his exile, as he walked with Dante before him. I have mown rye with a sweep of my scythe, and haggled over a slab of bloody beef thrown against the stump. I bathe on the banks of the Volga and run barefoot back to babuchka, who rocks me to sleep telling of a grey wolf lost in the forest. In the candlelight, they were murmuring verses - it was Pushkin, it was Church Slavonic. An icon of St. Francis glowed golden on the wall lit beneath it by a small, steady flame -- but lo, St. Francis is squinting, he has put on a tie. In the bleak, neglected streets of unadorned doms I run to a friend to trade a leather jacket for two tickets to a concert hall, and trade them for pencils, and pencils for a sack of rye. My cap sags strangely over my left eye.