The General Situation

Last Night...

...before going to bed, I was bored, really bored, so I looked at CNN.com. There was a story about a guy who decapitated his five-year-old sister with a knife. (CNN used the word "butchered.") I closed the window as quickly as I could, but it was too late.

I dreamed that I was in a polyamorous relationship with Adam and Tina Fey. The three of us were in bed and I was having sex with Tina—I'll spare you the details, except to say that it was awful, terrible. No reflection on her: Neither of us was into it; she looked like she was late for a meeting. At some point, we heard a noise, and only later did we realize that the noise was what scared off the serial killer running loose in our building. (Adam had disappeared from the dream.) I heard a commotion in the hallway, so I went out to the hall, and a writer I used to work with at Travel + Leisure was running around, distraught. "Is Dana okay?" I asked, because the editor-in-chief of Food & Wine lived across from Tina, Adam, and me. She shook her head, crying. The killer had murdered poor Dana, as well as a young butcher named Andrew Carmellini; they weren't together at the time. (In the morning, I recognized Andrew Carmellini as the name of the ex-chef of A Voce, a restaurant in New York.)

In real life, I got up and went to the bathroom. I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to shake off this dream—it was silly and absurd, but also freakily vivid. Sure enough, when I returned to bed, I dreamed that I was in a restaurant, and that I went to the bathroom only to have a serial killer (carrying a machete) follow me inside. I hid in the stall as he tried to eviscerate me from under the door. I don't remember how it ended.

And that is why I make it a point not to watch violent movies. (Apologies to Tina Fey, Dana Cowin, and Andrew Carmellini for being dragged into this; no apologies to Adam, for whom it's part of the deal.) Someday, perhaps I'll also learn not to blog after a gin and tonic and a glass of wine.

Hey, Iowa! Nice Affections!

Came across this photo the other day... While on a road trip in Iowa a few years back, my friend Shawnda and I parked outside the Iowa Supreme Court to get a better look at the capital building. Then we saw this statue. Many pix were taken; may poses were struck.

"Thundering, Mumbling from Every Direction"

Poetry magazine's April issue is devoted to poetry in translation, which generally leaves me cold—all the better for this beautiful bummer of a poem about Moscow.

Stanzas

In memory of my mother

By Sergei Gandlevskii

Translated by Sasha Dugdale

I

Speak then. What is it you wanted to say? Was it the way

The barge slid down the city river in sunset’s pursuit,

Two thirds of June passed, the twenty-second today

And summer on tiptoes, in an effort to stretch to the light,

How the linden trees breathed through the stifling square

And in July there was thundering, mumbling from every direction?

But that speech needed gravity, needed some weight at its core

And not lightness—that, I’m afraid, was deception.

II

Can you smell it: how sweet-rotting melon scented the greengrocer’s store

Out of sight in the archway the crashing of empty crates

On a breeze from the outskirts, the handcars’ jostling call

And an archive of leaf-fall covered the pavements’ gray.

Let the Rubik’s Cube fall from your hand, it is not worth the strain

All effortful planning in vain, take the grapes, eat your fill

In the quiet backyard on a bench, see for real, there in the rain

What will come to your mind in the hills and the hollows of hell.

III

And go now, where you were going. But your nights here, in rain

Especially in rain, the steady bare branch of the upas tree

Learnt to death like the alphabet, feels for the window pane—

G for glass, touching the frame, the words you heard at her knee

And although I learnt little at school, I see as if it were now

Through the flask’s throat and falling from above to beneath

With an unforgettable shivering, the fine sand heaping below.

The simplest device, but such an opening for grief.

IV

You’re done for, you deceiver, you cheat, with the tottering

Tripod, your cunning replete, beat your rage on the floor like a staff

That a stream might come forth, ghostly, transparent and blossoming

With the odor of ozone under the municipal office tin roof.

The soft furnishings sting you with static—then resound,

Speak again, as if under duress, without manifesto or school

If these terrible times, this place the Lord has renounced

Can fill with such love, the straggler, the spent force that is you.

V

Aged forty-seven and widowed, Aizenstadt, shuffling, feels

His way round the kitchen to the empty medicine chest

Is there anything to raise a smile or a glass to here?

Not even the comical long johns, in mourning and flapping half-mast.

This place, where a good time means down in the yard by the crates

Drinking with the men who have seen a good thing or two,

Making toasts to Esenin and Chenier as if they were once mates

And another wage packet spent like the last one on booze.   

VI

After death I will leave my beloved city and there, without,

I will lift my throat to the heavens, my horns tipped back to the earth,

And marked by my sorrow I will give forth from my trumpeting mouth

To sound through the autumn wastes, the truths for which speech had no words.

How the barge was drawn down the river by sunset’s last fingering ray

How, on my left wrist, time’s steel cooled and hissed

How the magic door was unlocked with an ordinary key

Speak. Such misfortune leaves us little else.