This next poem is called "The Russian Poem."
I just got back from Russia.
I was there traveling with another poet,
named Jim Harrison.
He was here last June.
And I read Russian poetry, and it
has a kind of grandeur and sweep to it that I really envy.
And I'll read enough of it, and then I'll
think, god, I want to write a poem like that about America.
And I put down the book and I go off and I write a poem.
You know, a great wind is sweeping across America.
My hands are full of nettles.
And, you know, it goes on like that.
And it never works.
And it's always the poem that I wanted to write
and not the poem that was there to be written.
So this is my revenge, "The Russian Poem"
I was very impressed in Russia, one thing about it,
that there were statues of poets all over the place.
You know, we usually see generals or politicians
or whoever it was.
And I really freaked out a cab driver going through Moscow.
And had just gotten there and I saw a statue,
and I said, ah, Mayakovsky.
And he didn't speak English, of course, but he recognized that.
And he was really freaked out that an American,
you know, Mayakovsky, ah, well, Mayakovsky.
Mayakovsky, ah.
Pushkin, you know, and the same thing.
You could talk with anybody about poetry
if you could speak Russian or they could speak English.
But you just end up saying the poet's name back and forth,
appreciatively, many times.
But it got the idea across.
Anyway, I'm not usually able to write when I'm traveling.
This is one exception.
This poem is in four parts, "The Russian Poem."
And it begins with a quote from Jim Harrison, which he
wrote after he read the poem.
And it's, "What a challenge it would
be to translate 'The Brothers Karamazov' back into Russian."
That'll give you some idea of the tone of the poem.
Some of the references to food in it
were because I lost about 10 pounds in Moscow.
Not because the food wasn't bad, it was very good.
But just trying to get it was a good trick.
I'd go to three or four restaurants every meal
and be met with nyet.
So I missed a lot of meals.
Sometimes you'd get in the restaurant,
everything you'd point to on the menu, nyet.
So you end up living on brown bread, which
is pretty good brown bread, and vodka and caviar.
That's kind of tough.
But, anyway, "The Russian Poem."
Copious Natashas walk in the garden.
My summer palace of white marble,
each a triple Orpheus for my delight,
container of divine praline.
With 10 Natashas, I would have 30 places to go at night.
Or come.
How would you say it?
Her long hair gleamed.
A man could be happy with a place like this.
6 million books, 600 girls, a cellar
of wine and endless shashlik, a few simple pleasures.
When leaves fell and the sky turned somber,
I would roam to purge my boredom.
I would turn from my fire and my paintings,
from the glory of the State, from my overstuffed soul,
from the 20th century and the 19th.
A man's a fool to live one life.
I have a five-year plan, subject to revision,
the consequences of ennui.
I'll erect a flagpole for each Natasha.
Use your imagination.
They change the guard in Red Square, a goose step
and fallen arches, dancing in the Kremlin,
and a thousand Volgas grind their gears.
But I was speaking of Natashas and the gates of paradise.
It's really quite simple.
Applied physics and a little inventiveness,
forward, backward, upside down.
Natasha, Natasha, in her empire dress,
forgive her if she's a little thin.
I have a life planned for her.
And I taught her to use the most charming farewell
in the American idiom.
Buzz off, you chintzy bastard.
We are children grown strange, sleeping on airplanes,
in cities, on farms.
I'm the last poet of country roads,
but there'll always be another.
The wind will take up my singing,
the snow cover my tracks, when life grows impatient and stalks
from the room like a spoiled child.
Here I am, watching the snow coat
the golden domes of cathedrals, falling 5,000 miles
from home, where the apples are barely ripe.
I've come to Moscow to justify the Russian names
I would write and have written.
I walk by the river and through Red Square,
lights dramatic on the Kremlin wall, reader of too much
Yesenin and Mayakovsky.
But this isn't my country.
It isn't Christmas.
I can't live in this play I've contrived.
I want a burger and shake.
It's snowing in Moscow.
The Russian at my table eats a cube of sugar
and slurps the tea from his saucer.
We all have our disgusting habits.
I eat my peas with honey.
I've done it all my life.
Makes the peas taste funny, but it keeps them on my knife.
Suddenly, I see a map of Asia.
This isn't a movie set.
What am I doing in Moscow?
Napoleon couldn't hold out here.
A girl in a tracksuit sits next to me.
She has eight sausages, six eggs, and four cups of tea.
I grow faint.
The lights burn.
The flag waves.
Lenin sleeps in state.
I'll take the next plane to Leningrad
and recite the poems of the Neva.
I've had enough decrepit morality.
From my windows on Brodsky Street, the last yellow leaves.
At last, at ease, a human place.
Cold autumn on Nevsky Prospekt, the Winter Palace,
the Neva spread out like Venice, columns of St. Isaac's, lapis
and malachite, colors of perpetual Earth.
And across the square, a broken window,
balcony where Yesenin hung himself.
Isidora laughing in Paris.
Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Gogol, Gorky, globes of a street lamp,
a little rain.
Somewhere through the walls, a violin tuning.
Voices drift from the street.
I've slept away the afternoon.
Gray Moscow is another world.
The collective mind hums.
The woman in the window reads Henry Miller,
looks down at the street and smiles.
People say, what was Russia like?
It's hard to capsulize.
I suppose that's the best sort of way to begin.
You are given an interpreter when you're in Russia,
to interpret for you.
And they're supposed to keep an eye on you.
But, in Moscow, we had a young girl who was about 25
and is a member of the Komsomol.
And she was kind of curious about the West
but very guarded.
And all her answers sounded pretty well-rehearsed.
I asked her why Khrushchev wasn't
buried by the Kremlin wall.
"Well, he was retired, you know, and the party decided,
and, uh."
But in Leningrad, we had an older woman
who'd traveled around quite a bit and was quite literate.
And I gave her all the books that I had with me.
And she was thrilled, particularly
with the Tropic of Cancer, which she'd heard a great deal about.
But things get around there quite well.