The next poem I'm going to do is slightly longer.
It's an elegy for the Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam.
If you do not know who he is, I usually
tell people to go to the library, which is that way.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
And it's one of the best libraries
in the world for poetry.
So Mandelstam is under letter M.
[LAUGHTER]
And all you need to know for the purpose of this poem
was that Mandelstam was a great Russian poet who
happened to write a poem against the government.
It happened to be Joseph Stalin's government.
The time happened to be 19--
1930s, which means that he was sent into exile where he died.
And his wife, Nadezhda, was also sent in another exile,
but she survived.
That's all you need to know for the purpose of this poem.
The poem is sometimes spoken in voices that
were particular to Mandelstam.
It's both broad and [INAUDIBLE].
"Musica Humana."
A modern Orpheus sent to hell, he never returned,
while his widow searched across one sixth of the earth's
surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up
inside, memorizing them by night in case
they were found by Furies with a search warrant.
While there is still some light on the page,
he escapes in a stranger's coat with his wife.
And the cloth smells of sweat, a dog runs after them,
licking the earth where they walked and then sat.
In a kitchen, on a stairwell, above the toilet,
he will show her the way to silence.
They will leave the radio talking to itself.
Making love, they turn off the lights,
but the neighbor has binoculars and he watches,
dust settling on his lids.
It is the 1930s.
Petersburg is a frozen ship.
The cathedrals, cafés, down Nevski Prospect they move,
as the New State sticks its pins into them.
In Crimea, he gathered together rich liberals
and said to them strictly-- on Judgment Day,
if you're asked whether you understood the poet Osip
Mandelstam, say no.
Have you fed him?
You must answer yes.
I am reading aloud the book of my life on earth and confess,
I loved grapefruit.
In a kitchen-- sausages, testing vodka,
the men raise their cups.
A boy in a white shirt, I dip my finger into sweetness.
Mother washes behind my ears.
And we speak of everything that does not come true,
which is to say--
it was August.
August-- the light in the trees, full of fury.
August filling hands with a language
that tastes like smoke.
Now, memory, pour some beer, salt the rim of the glass,
you who are writing me, have what you want--
a golden coin, my tongue to put it under.
The younger brother of a cloud, he
walks unshaven in dark-green pants.
In cathedrals, he falls on his knees, praying happiness.
His words on the floor are skeletons of dead birds.
I have loved, yes.
Washed my hands.
Spoke of loyalty to the earth.
Now death, a loverboy, counts my fingers.
I escape and am caught, escape again and am caught, escape
and am caught--
in this song, the singer is a clay figure,
poetry is the self--
I resist the self.
Elsewhere St. Petersburg stands like a lost youth
whose churches, ships, and guillotines
accelerate our lives.
In summer 1924, Osip Mandelstam brought his young wife
to St. Petersburg.
Nadezhda was what the French call laide mais charmante.
An eccentric-- of course he was.
He threw a student down the staircase for complaining
he wasn't published, Osip shouting--
Was Sappho?
Was Jesus Christ?
Poet is a voice, I say, like Icarus,
whispering to himself as he falls.
Yes, my life as a broken branch in the wind
hits the Northern ground.
I'm writing now a history of snow,
the lamplight bathing the ships that sail across the page.
But on certain afternoons, the Republic of Psalms opens up
and I grow frightened that I haven't lived, died,
not enough to scratch this ecstasy into vowels, hear
splashes of clear biblical speech.
I read Plato, Augustine, the loneliness of their syllables
while Icarus keeps falling.
And I read Akhmatova, her rich weight
binds me to the earth, the nut trees on a terrace breathing
the dry air, the daylight.
Yes, I lived.
The State hung me up by the feet,
I saw St. Petersburg's daughters,
swans, I learned the grammar of gulls' array
and found myself for good down Pushkin Street,
while memory sat in the corner, erasing me with a sponge.
I have made mistakes, yes--
in bed I compared the government to my girlfriend.
Government-- an arrogant barber's hand
shaving off the skin.
All of us dancing happily around him.
He sat on the edge of his chair and dreamt aloud
of good dinners.
He composed his poems not at his desk
but in the streets of St. Petersburg.
He adored the image of the rooster tearing apart night
under the walls of Acropolis with this song.
Locked up in the cell, he was banging on the door--
you have got to let me out, I wasn't made for prison.
Once or twice in his life, a man is peeled like apples.
What is left is a voice that splits his being down
to the center.
We see-- obscenity, fright, mud--
but there is joy of shape, there is always
more than one silence.
Between here and Nevski Prospect,
the years, birdlike, stretch-- pray
for this man who lived on bread and tomatoes
while dogs recited his poetry in each street.
Yes, count March, July, weave them together
with a thread-- it is time, Lord,
press these words against your silence.
The story is told of a man who escapes and is captured
into the prose of evenings--
after making love, he sits up on a kitchen
floor, eyes wide open, speaks of the Lord's emptiness
in whose image we are made.
He is out of work.
Among silverware and dirt, he is kissing his wife's neck so
the skin of her belly tightens.
One would think of a boy laying syllables with his tongue
onto a woman's skin--
those are lines sewn entirely of silence.
Nadezhda, his wife, looks up from the page and speaks--
Osip, Akhmatova and I were standing together
when suddenly Mandelstam melted with joy--
several little girls ran past us,
imagining themselves to be horses.
The first one stopped, impatiently asking--
"Where is the last horsy?"
I grabbed Mandelstam by his hand to prevent him from joining,
and Akhmatova, too, sensing danger, whispered--
"Do not run away from us, you are our last horsy."
Nadezhda continues to speak.
As I die, I walk barefoot across my country,
here winter builds the strongest solitude,
tractors break into centaurs and gallop through plain speech--
I am 23, we live in a cocoon, the butterflies are mating.
Osip he puts his fingers into fire,
he gets up early, walking around in his sandals.
Writes slowly.
Players fall into the room.
Moths are watching him from the window.
As his tongue passes over on my skin,
I see his face from underneath, his aching clarity--
thus Nadezhda speaks, standing in an orange light,
her hands are quiet, talking to themselves--
O God of Abraham, of Isaak and of Jacob
on your scale of Good and Evil, put a plate of warm food.
Nadezhda continues to speak.
When my husband returned it from Voronezh,
in his mouth he hid a silver spoon--
in his dreams, down Nevski Prospect,
the dictator ran like a wolf after his past,
a wolf with sleep in its eyes.
He believed in the human being.
Couldn't cure himself of Petersburg.
He recited by heart phone numbers of the dead.
O, what he told in a low voice-- the unspoken words
became the traces of islands.
When he slapped Tolstoy in the face, it was good.
When they took my husband, each word disappeared into a book.
They watched him as he spoke-- the vowels had teeth-marks.
And they said-- you must leave him alone for already
behind his back the stones circle all by themselves
and fall.
Osip had thick eyelashes, to the middle of his cheeks.
We were walking along Prehistenka Street, what we are
talking about I don't remember.
We turned onto Gogol Boulevard, and Osip
said, "I am ready for death."
At his arrest, they were searching
for poems, all over the floor.
We sat in one room.
On the other side of the wall, at a neighbor's,
a Hawaiian guitar was playing.
In my presence, the investigator found "The Wolf"
and showed it to Osip.
He nodded slightly.
Taking his leave, he kissed me.
He was led away at 7 A.M.
At the end of each vision, Mandelstam
stands with a clod of earth, throwing bits
at the passers-by.
You will recognize him, Lord--
he hated Tsarskoe Selo, told Mayakovski--
"stop reading your verse, you are not a Rumanian orchestra."
But what harmony was?
It raveled and unraveled.
Nadezhda said the snow fell inside her,
she heard the voice of young chickens all over her flesh.
Nadezhda, her Yes and No are difficult to tell apart.
She dances, a skirt tucked between her thighs
and the light is strengthening.
In each room's four corners--
he is making love to her earlobes, brows,
weaking days into knots.
He is traveling across her kitchen,
touching furniture, a small propeller in his head turning
as he speaks.
Outside, a boy pissing against a tree,
a beggar cursing at his cat--
that summer 1938-- the walls were hot,
the sun beat against the city's slabs,
the city that loved to say yes to the powerful.
At the end of each vision, he rubbed her feet with milk.
She opened her body, lay on his stomach.
We will meet in Petersburg, he said,
we have buried the sun there.