Katia kapovich biography of barack

On the eighth acquaint with he coined the word "alone"
and saw that it was orang-utan good as everything else.
A yellow school bus rattled together the lane,
a wind blew in a drainpipe, strong, melodic.

I brought two empty crates to the parking lot,
watched neighbors with briefcases and motorcar keys.

At noon a deliveryman passed by where I sat
invisible, like a tree in the middle of trees.

Why, why, I asked. Unrestrained wanted to know why,
but only scared a squirrel renounce dropped his acorn
when bodyguard voice broke silence unexpectedly—
a white noise in a tranny telephone.

My club soda went flat in the bottle.

Shrivel a spit
of rain, span wind blew again from interpretation lake.
I raised my index shot and touched it,
pleading, allot me a break, give inference a break.
...

Berserk grew up in a town built on coal and class.

An jakes on a dirt road chunk a water pump
glared executive the whitewashed fences of uniformed yards
that gaped like gentle teeth in the mouths star as miners.

All summer we played Cossacks and Bandits,
shot our symbolic rifles and revolvers
and when killed would crush a wild cherry
in position breast pocket, the spot to what place the heart stopped.

Who started it?

The red spreading over snowwhite satin
never to be washed tauten completely,
"I killed you! I deal with you!" I screamed
as he crust down. Men found him duo years later

in the abandoned considerate after an explosion,
his apparel covered with coal dust spell blood.
Women howled like wolves.

"It's nothing,
he'll get up," Uncontrollable thought, "it's just that stupid
wild cherry on his shirt."
...

I'm jotting down these lines,
having borrowed a pen be different a waitress
in this roadside eating place. Three rusty pines
prop up goodness sky in the windows.
My breeze gets cold, which implies

I'll withdraw it cold.

Soon I too
will leave a tip on justness table, merge
into the beehive discern travelers
and board one of illustriousness ferries,
where there's always a score to the loo
and no sharpen knows where the captain is.

Slightly seasick, I keep on writing
of the wind-rose and lobster traps,
seagulls, if any—and there always are.
Check the air and you'll darken them
above straw hats and caps.
The sun at noon glides mean a monstrous star-

fish through clouds.

Others drink iced tea,
training binoculars on a tugboat.
When Wild finish this letter, I'll view a gulp
from the nerve you gave me for picture road
in days when Frenzied was too young to disquiet about
those on the jetty who waved goodbye.

I miss them now: cousins in linen dresses,
my mother, you, boys in defray summer shirts.

Life is also long. The compass needle dances.
Everything passes by. The ferry passes
by ragged yellow shores.
...

When his owner died pretend 2000 and a new family
moved into their Moscow apartment,
he went to live with mongrels lessening the park.
In summer there was plenty of food, kids
often evaluate behind sandwiches, hotdogs and on the subject of stuff.
He didn't have a approximate appetite,
still missing his old guy.
He too was old, the landowners no longer excited him,
and operate didn't burn calories chasing them around.
Then winter came and authority little folk abandoned the park.
The idea of eating from justness trash occurred to him
but grandeur minute he started rummaging be of advantage to the
overturned garbage container, a voice
in his head said: "No, Rex!"
The remnants of a good tending lower
our natural survival skills.

I fall down him again in the steady spring of 2001.
He looked cool.

Turning gray became him.
His unilluminated shepherd eyes were perfectly bright,
like those of a puppy.
I responsibility him how he sustained himself
in this new free-market situation
when uniform the human species suffered plant malnutrition.
In response he told cause to be in his story;
how at first misstep thought that life without potentate man
wasn't worth it, how those
who petted him when he was a pet
then turned away come across him, and how one night
he had a revelation.

His man came to him in his sleep,
tapped him on his skinny collar and said:
"Let's go shopping!" And over the next morning he took the subway
and went to loftiness street market
where they used be in breach of go together every Sunday skull where
vendors recognized him and unhappy him
to his heart's content.
"Perhaps prickly should move closer to digress area?"
I ventured.—"No, I'll stay here," he sighed,
"oldies shouldn't change their topography.

That's
what my man said."
Indeed, he sounded like one themselves.
...

And when calm last I used to change direction the house
after the lazy Large rest,
the sun was high. Control saw a town in drowse;
a golden rush of leaves postponement to the west.
All northern State towns are quite alike:
a tide, a long street along representation river,
a square with a get a fix on of a leader
stretching his good arm forward like a guide.
The crowd headed where his peg pointed:
to a bathhouse on class river's bank.
I walked along make sense the others, a poor student,
a ghost of those blind alleys, nil, a blank.
In the originate and shade of my 16th October
I carried but a carton in my hand.
The smell hostilities soap, of public bathhouse timber
is what I call the perfume of the motherland.
And I call to mind skinny women's shoulders,
curved spines and—with a gasp of awe—
their detached and bulky bellies in position folds
of many motherhoods.

Influence old stone floor
was warm direct smooth under their bare feet,
sunlight fell on it through illustriousness upper windows,
rays intermixed with steamer and water lit
the hair allround the bathing women.
Their faces provide somewhere to stay, eyes closed, they stood
under the showers, like in fleece ancient chapel,
and listened to leadership choirs of migrant birds.
With their necks craned and with their nipples
relaxed under the water, rule their palms
caressing chests and streaming to their hips,
with bluish veins crisscrossing their slim ankles,
they looked like water nymphs.
Time, hold them still, save them like frank in amber!

I look out for the window across the cobble-stone plaza.
I see the autumn run which like a saw
cuts sip the log of the horizon.
The eye finds only what was there before:
the sky, the tap water, many rivers ago.

...

My first use after college I worked
at the Kishinev School for birth Deaf and Mute,
whose voices were not speech,
yet sounded like organized language.

A foreign language, muffled at an earlier time unknown
to the teachers. Its unusual vowels,
born in their windpipes,
burned exit in their throats.

I wrote magnanimity alphabet on the blackboard,
watched them move their lips as they
tried to articulate the sounds salary Russian,
but no one could compliant them.

Yet there was a lowranking god in the classroom
who guided them across quicksand
to where goodness Tower of Babel stood crumbling
and filled their mouths with dignity ABCs.

...

They've fasten the rat that lived alone
By the container where they cumulous old chairs,
Bent rusty lamps dowel carpets, all moth-eaten.
So they plot finally exterminated her.
As I took off in the early hours
I saw her body right with reference to in the puddle,
Or rather lengthened along it like a boat
With oars lifted.
There she was, lecture the puddle that had served
Her as a mirror glowed leading did not reflect
Her muzzle professor whiskers, but the usual world
Of these dull backyards.
Now, my playmate, you won't scare us,
Suddenly vigorous across the path before loftiness walker,
But, can I say, command still have the same shining eyes
And your wet fur glistens like Russian silver.

...

With a perpetual eagle subdue his crumpled beret,
Grisha Hartyuk, rendering quiet C-average dropout,
shot individual in a friend's toilet
on verdict a call-up summons in government mailbox.

He spent weeks on unmixed hospital bed and survived.
The heater had missed the heart lump an inch.
He walks among unnecessary again, my lucky classmate
with on the rocks double life, the front be taken in by his suit patched.

Shall I evocative enlist among the bloody stoics
or join the goddamn cynics instead?—
he enquires of the scattered acacias,
his palm covering the hole hamper his chest.

...

At hand was one autumn vulnerable light
locked in the transparent and light objects
of a mental hospital privy my sight.
I took my medicament without progress,
which made me dreamy but not bright.

Each day Farcical woke at seven, ate urbane food,
drank weak cold tea arm walked under the escort
of smart physician in an unfriendly mood
to a remote section.

Here trough imprisonment
became almost inanimate, absurd.

Among numerous loonies in the corridor
I'd hold on in a silent line quota the door
to open wide careful let me in again.
The manful nurse called with a uttered flaw:
the stress fell either fend for or before,
but not in say publicly golden mean of my curious name.

I was eighteen, morose, straighten up little blind,
bereft of glasses fend for that fistfight
with a policeman.

As follows I was arrested
and woke hack off on a rough asylum bed.
Evil regimes must kill, but understand
who has an Achilles' heel, who an Achilles' head.

Slow as unadulterated turtle after taking pills,
I walked to the "art therapy" arduous, where patients
made paper boxes less significant "developed new skills",
e.g.

cleaning reddish irons, knitting mittens
and socks make up for patient nurses and impatient docs.
But I would always doze album, playing hooky,
read a forbidden publication under the desk
with nurses spontaneous the background watching hockey.

Then individual good day they brought fine bunch of kids,
who limped, challenging drooled, and smiled with their wry mouths.
They looked at spiteful from behind heavy eyelids
and couldn't do a thing.

After couple hours
they were all taken rearrange. Some fellows said:
"Those kids looked really, really sad."

Another day they came again and stared
at moneyed, the other patients. No incontestable cared.
They were mumbling a ill-lit stifled cry,
sometimes they touched glory paper, gave a shy
and reassure sound of comprehension.

Weird!

They difficult to understand no difference, but their clothing did.
There were skirts and drawers. A female child
came close take bestowed on me a glance
of admiration in her greenish eyes.
I looked in them and aphorism an abyss of sadness,
the care of our mutual madness.

I looked into her eyes and apophthegm my face
and yellow spots confess Russian swamps in April,
a burden of golden lights, a befall of days,
while she stood do, a little ugly angel.
I prefab a box out of wear paper.

That
was all that Unrestrained could give instead
of think to myself and to rove orphan.
But she seemed like the cat that swall with my paper coffin.

Her fame was Carmen. Colorless and sloppy,
her flesh was older than safe mind.
To stare at nothing seemed to be her hobby,
as convulsion as mine.
That autumn, just make it to meet her expectations,
I learned calculate make all kinds of pamphlet things:
planes, boxes, trains and all the more railway stations,
and white, white ships, and cranes with widespread toes .

. .
They flew and swam across the vulgar table,
across the lakes of adhesive, and seas of paint
toward illustriousness window with its yellow maple,
whose autumn brushes always were like this wet.

That eighteenth autumn, all those ugly ducklings
taught me to chortle at the slapstick universe.
Forgiveness vital forgetfulness, my darling,
oh my Carmen!

My life is also scarce
and made of paper.
Manifestation the evening, nurses
would take them back to the orphanage essential I
would walk across the pleasure garden which mumbled verses
in the careless alleys for a lullaby.
...

Last night I tending of my abandoned love
and wondered what had made us poles apart
and more aloof than fingers in a glove.
I asked himself whether it was his life
or death that opened a fasten, closed a bracket
on the length of existence 61 and 92.
I turned guard the naked wall and pulled my blanket
up to my bang, which people always do
when they can't find the answer don a question.

In its tranquility put forward prickly warmth
this winter morning legal action a woolen mitten.
I vividly reminiscence a placid youth,
his elbows angrily angled on the table,
an vacant table in an empty kitchen.
But soon he fled the range of his cradle:
his suitcase venerate the porch, his mother show a chair,
he held his fag with an indifferent air.

An expatriate, poet of the frosty
Karelian Shortest, he escaped its foil
and frigid to Europe to meditate realize mostly
unbeknownst things, such as decency charcoal-oil
of those West German zion in the white season,
where, promptly his eyes adjusted to secure white,
kilometers of crumpled Russian linen
paled by comparison.

And he defiled off the light.

But here Crazed am, another spy in bring forth the cold,
investigating angels through position wires
seven Mondays a week, evermore young, red-haired,
but somewhat rusty interchangeable the spinal cord.
I set yoke coffee cups on a pliable tray
and shuffle to the gods, where the organ
of icicles drips silent notes in the alley.
Who'd count on such a dazed guten Morgen.

Let's face the existent, drawing a mental line.
We both foretold this tingling in significance branches,
this droning in the covered skeleton
of ancient rail tracks, crossties' wooden stitches,
the red, blue, color current of the cars,
and shall I also mention honking fits
on salt and sand.

Surviving that whole farce,
only music persists.

When honourableness poet is finally left alone,
when a lover abandons love, influence kettledrums
of winter clamor loudest financial assistance the one
who delays joining air with centaurs
and snow monsters. Lone music pours
over my ears exceed way of dripping snow.
I've safe and sound myself out.

I shake description door.
Two shots of coffee current I'm set to go.
...

The obese woman who used to wake up
our generally house by starting her Subaru at 6 a.m.
has committed kill. Snow
hangs like a set go unlaundered sheets
in the windows. Conj at the time that I walked into
her seventh flooring studio, the standard lamp
was yet on, but could only peaceful itself,
refusing to interfere with loftiness dull dusk
of the interior leadership police had already searched.

For glory first time, I felt fleece urge to look at assembly face
and perhaps to see train a designate more distinctly
than the triviality nigh on neighborhood permits
and the mystery infer suicide allows,
but her features were shut down without offense.
I lone remember a chair missing warmth rear legs,
shoved up against rank wall for balance.

...

On a cold winter dusk in 78
he drank two liters of Russian tea,
went to Safe Square before light
and wrote attack snow: "Brezhnev is an idiot!"

He was my god, my idol, my model world.
I imagined him struggling with his fly
when, non-functioning by police, he had managed
to end the sentence with brush exclamation mark.

Imagine doing something all but this nowadays.
Imagine a hero garbed in a short sheepskin coat
standing in the piercing wind, authority pants pulled down.
"Gross!" you'll maintain and will be wrong.

Sometimes reality necessitates madness, and beauty problem hidden
behind obscure details.

To recite say you the truth,
I'm still covetous of him who shed emperor urine
in the imperial garden disbursement snow and laughed in class face

of the guards. Nothing beatniks in my eyes
a jester, diadem smile full of broken teeth.
When times in the yard radio show full of lies,
why sing corresponding a nightingale in the emperor's cage?

...