Fishing, 1907

I.
Before the immobile Okhrana, police-guards
whose epaulets glitter, whose walrus moustaches
gather snow like train-tracks rust or trees wind,
who have witnessed the fragility of my thoughts
fly into snow-drifts blowing back like locusts ....

Fish approach the hole the day-watch lets me gouge
in the lake with my little shank or walking-stick.
Scales are to fish what dumbness is to peasants.

We cannot see the pearl within,
and don't know if it’s there. Do they wonder
what we make of them? A dorsal quivers,
making ice water, shuddering the hole to life.

II.

How did the rank-and-file get through days
at those oil-fields I organized in Baku?

To a worker's state
they shut half-Asiatic eyes, answering my handbills
with the ruddy enigma of Tamurlane.

Robberies were better, letting me travel--
far cry from being a seminary student
in a dusty town of crippled muzhiks and stale tea
and the latticed windows of the shopkeepers whose hands
jabbed like the forepaws of an organ-grinder's monkey.

I could only watch the sweat stiffen
the beard of the Metropolitan Archbishop.
But secretly I admired his gold and crimson habit,
sticks of incense fogging the chapel (mostly in funerals),
candle auras spinning before bronze tapers could snuff them,
all smoke and mirrors, even better than parades or cinema.
I even thought a cruse of oil could burn a mendicant to ash!

III.

How that bishop's intonations ravished though.
His verse offset my taste for local colorists,
all surfaces diversions, true life being underneath.

My suet-bait sinks through water painful as acid.
And when the fish scare, and new ice webs older water,
holes appear the size in which a man could fit,

through which my mother squints,
a kerchief tucked around her face,
rutted property of whore or saint.
Put out the light of the eye she tells me.