I want to follow that with a poem to my father titled 1905.
While my father walked through mud
and wore his borrowed sister's shoes,
Russia attended, cooked awe and cheered.
And while he worked in a cellar bindery
and slept on workbenches rats slept over at night,
Dostoevsky's white Knights and Anna Karenina
were being read avidly amid joy, tears, and protests.
My father was not heard from, he was a silent one,
walking through the streets where the hot arguments went on
about guilt and poverty.
He walked, his work bundle underarm, from cellar
to monastery, to bind holy books and volumes
of the Russian classics.
And when they had had enough of Classics and needed blood,
he fled, for his was real to them.
Only he had worked and starved, all others
were but characters in a novel or a play.
Bless Chekhov, Gogol, and others for their genius,
but my father was the one who had not been immortalized,
and thus made untouchable.
Only he was real in Russia's torment.
Only he stood for life.
All else was books.
That was a torment that he, with his woman's shoes and work
bundle underarm and cellar job, could exist, apart
from their classical Giants.
And he fled.
And they turned back to their classics, and to themselves,
conversely unbelievable and unalive, to feed their rage,
but to decay as books do in the dusty air.