This next one is also new.
I wrote this last March and I wrote The Prisoner in December.
I just recently mailed this on to my editor
to also add to the book.
This is called The Emigre and it's about a Russian woman.
Lubyanka is the prison in Russia where Stalin
imprisoned a lot of people.
And if you watch that program, Reilly, Ace of Spies,
then you'll remember the name Lubyanka.
"The Emigre"
I stared down from a terrace at the firemen and their slickers.
Black mice and black hats.
Close my hand around some smoke, then open it
and that smoke is gone like the Russia of my childhood.
When I was a girl, my father worked for the Cheka.
One morning, he forced my mother outside in her torn nightgown.
The apartment was filled with a scent.
Ink.
Paper.
Fresh bread.
I was warm, full of potato latkes and milk.
I sang the song of the world revolution,
but that revolution betrayed my mother.
It's quiet now, as the fire trucks pull out
onto the asphalt sea like tiny crimson arcs,
as quiet as the apartment when I stopped singing.
When my father said, "Come.
Your mother's safe."
I followed him down the steps, but near bottom I stopped.
He turned around and held out his arms.
Then I jumped.
I sit down at the word processor.
On the screen, a page from the memoir I am writing.
Even now, I hear my father's voice
as he shouts at my mother.
She jerks her head toward me, then raises her skirt
and wipes her face.
I erase one word, another, until the whole page is gone,
but I cannot erase that scene.
My mother is locked forever in the Lubyanka inside me,
her dirty bruised face streaked with tears.
The handbill she printed in that beautiful script of hers
torn and scattered about her on the floor
like mutilated black and yellow butterflies.
Now as I lean over the keys with my eyes closed,
her face rises inside me, a fat harvest moon in a sky of India
ink, a face whose features are so clear, so like my own,
that I cannot deny them, yet I do deny them.
My life is mine.
She's dead.
She died.
She dies each time I write.
But no, she's alive.
She condemns me for leaving, for bearing witness only
in the dark.
I begin once more.
A scene fades in, out, there are shouts from outside.
A door is flung back.
Mother and father are taken from the room.
Father, who worked for the Cheka, murdered by the Cheka.
Mother, who opposed it, also murdered.
I go back to the window, look up with a gray tarpaulin of sky,
and see Father riding a red star down from proletarian heaven.
And further out, Mother, straddling her own renegade
star, gesturing and waving to me.
They want to teach me to die for what I believe,
but I say disown the world.
Don't save it.
Don't try.
Live for what you believe.
Survive.
Survive another night.
But here they are, pressing their bloody faces
against the glass.
I slide the bolt back.
It's then our eyes meet, my two brown speckled marbles
and their sockets filled with a black blinding
light of the universe.
Jerry Stern came to read in Kentucky
and I had been trying to work on this.
I had seen this program about Russian emigres,
which was really interesting.
A lot of them aren't really happy or comfortable
with freedom.
It's a frightening thing for people who haven't really
had it or whatever.
Maybe we don't have complete freedom,
but we have a lot more than a lot of the emigres do.
At any rate, and Jerry Stern was reading
and he was talking about Mayakovsky
and he said Mayakovsky had been betrayed by the revolution,
and I thought that is kind of what I want
for the mother in the poem.