There's a poet who just got a teaching
job at San Diego State, where I started my teaching career.
His name is Ilya Kaminsky.
Ilya Kaminsky has a book called Dancing in Odessa.
It's a good book.
I met Ilya when he was 19 years old,
and he was just here freshly from Odessa.
And he was completely deaf, without hearing at all.
He had mumps when he was three years old,
and they were not treated well in the Soviet Union.
He lost his hearing completely.
Well, I teach a workshop in the summers at the New York State
Summer Writers Institute.
And you go to the workshop, and everyone introduces themselves.
And in the summer workshops, you get quite a collection
of people from different walks of life
who love poetry and want to write and care about it.
And they all introduce themselves
and say different things about themselves.
And well, I wrote in high school,
and I really haven't been back to it in a long time.
And I really want to go back to it,
so I'm doing so now that I'm retired and so on.
And we got to Ilya around the table.
He was last, and he said, my name is Ilya.
I am from Odessa, former Soviet Union.
I write poetry for God.
So I said, OK, class, let's open our books.
Everyone looked at him.
No one had ever said that before in the introductions.
And he became this sort of angel in my life,
and we studied together for seven years.
And I took him back to Odessa a couple of years
ago because I thought he should go back
and because Odessa had become this dream for him, a dream
city.
And so we went back, and this is a little poem from our time.
I also took him to Saint Petersburg
because this is, for him, the golden city
of the great Russian poets of the 20th century, Anna
Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva.
So this is about walking in Saint Petersburg and Ilya
talking about it.
"Fisherman," it's called, for Ilya.
"March.
The Neva still white, crisp as communion,
and as we walk its bridges, steadying ourselves
on the glaze, tubes of ice slide from the gutter-spouts
to the astonishment of dogs, some of whom
have not seen spring before, while others
pretend not to remember.
And a woman bends over her late potatoes, sorting and piling,
and you say, in this house lived the friend of my father
who was killed, and in that house lived another
and in this a very bad poet no longer known.
We come to the synagogue and go in,
as far back as a forgotten holiness, where
we are told you can whisper into the wall
and be heard on the other side.
But the rabbi doesn't know you are deaf.
We whisper into the wall to please him.
A sign in Cyrillic asks for donations,
and in exchange, we apparently buy tens
of matzos wrapped in paper.
There are only a hundred of us left in the city.
While we are here, a fisherman waits
on the river, seated with a bucket
beside him, his line in the hole, but in the last hour,
water has surrounded his slab of ice.
So unbeknownst, he is floating downstream,
having caught nothing, cold and delirious with winter thoughts,
as they all are and were, and as for rescue, no one will come.
It is spring.
The Neva white and crisp as communion."