Two excerpts from “Petropolis”


yes, it would be easy
to evade history and talk about
          isolated incidents instead, tragedies, sweet agonies
                    of an innocent love & intercourse
                    yes,
it would be easy to evade politics, to praise, let’s say,
                              this meal without mentioning
its ethnic origin and what else is cooking over there
and over here
          it would be
easy to praise the vodka, the bringer of joy
without describing the toilet basin blocked with vomit
          it would be easy to linger
in the enhanced beauty of a young woman, in the
sense of duty & destiny in the young man’s grave face
                              under the uniform cap
                    and not to admit having in mind
                                                  such words as
willingness, usability, servility, exploitability, live materiel
                     
it would be easy to compose
a scene with a bridge, a palace, a summer night & winter light, an artist
                               just before he, or she, is taken away
 
it would be easy to describe                                                                             
the wild nature over there, how delicate
and perfect, a grand surge of freedom
          while it still exists, and don’t look that way, look this way
 
it would be easy to just play with words
          and not with one’s health
 
it would be easy, if only one had
all the diseases of the brain and the heart, if one were
                                        blind and senile and deaf
 
 
 
   
                        *
 
 
here, close by
a birch forest full
of fallen trunks of trees like corpses, buried
corpses like tree trunks
citizens of a wonderful imaginary land
          all rotted now, turned into soil           
                                        of the State
 
here, closer
blocks of the city in the dusk
like sugar in weak tea, a place
where a poet decided to die
but failed, squealing mikes, great northern lotus flower, pig
                    and anti-pig staring at each other
          through the wrongly installed glass, I pat a horse
that’s alive, wouldn’t touch a dead one
                                        from a bronze one
                                                  I’d surely run for my life
 
          real laws don’t need any militia
          to force them through; in the backyards
                    old grannies
                    are feeding the cats
                              because the cats are hungry