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| j. patrick lewis |  | 1. The Death of Poetry Poetry lay there in the still dark, bleeding verbs and rapture. She had been jogging before daybreak in Central Park, bothering no one. Men in blue chalked the body where it fell. There were no witnesses, no leads. Unnoticed, General Lassitude leaned into the yellow tape, gloating. Bereft of metaphor, the trees dropped leaflets in protest. A detective cliche' read Poetry's ID bracelet- an apartment in Chelsea, phone number, next of kin. She lived with a sister named Desire. He got the answering machine: If I cannot stop for D-[garbled]. He'll kindly stop for me. Dash it all. Leave a couplet. The cliché shook his head. Mr. D., whoever he was, would not be vigorously pursued much less apprehended Because the death of Poetry was nothing more than a misdemeanor. 2. The Properties of Beryllium? he asked me, pinching his nose to keep from laughing. Or was it to assure me he knew I was out of my league in his postgraduate seminar: minimum requirements: two semesters of abject contrition and a B.A. in gravitas. He thought he had me cornered, but I casually explained to the hotshot chaired professor of chemistry that Beryllium is found only in the residue left by rainbows, the misty precipitation in the glow globes of fortune tellers, the decades-old middens of unicorns, and even then can be conclusively identified under electron microscopes not yet invented. But we can be certain that the unique properties of Be include: verisimilitude, obliquity, and wit. Otherwise, Herr Professor, you will have to be satisfied with dullards like Rutherfordium (Rf) or, heaven forfend, irascible vowel hog, Unununium (Uuu), neither of which can ever be reached, even at the boiling point. 3. Poetry Is... the tunnel at the end of the light. an anagram for "Yo, esprit!" commotion in the left field stanzas. the great flywheel of metaphor. prose, bent out of shape. the idiom of the djinns. experience's armor against oblivion. the midwife at the birth of the alphabet. verbs hunting for anemic nouns. an antidote for adjectivitis. words on a busman's holiday. a greased pole to the castle in the air. the sound of silence...amplified. 4. Only in Russia In Irkutsk the fish are whitecap-happy In Yakutsk truck engines run endlessly to keep from freezing In Volgograd young girls favor mauve and purple In Krasnoyarsk salt is a minor deity In Moscow bus drivers earn three times more than doctors In St. Petersburg Catherine's Palace is ridiculously blue In Omsk sacks of potatoes tattoo the backs of old women In Tomsk swimming in radioactive lakes cures warts In Baranikha the family car is a reindeer In Vladivostok Amur tigers glow in the dark 5. In A Fifth Floor Moscow Walk-up, Waiting for the Plumber Relentlessly the week-long leak from my sink angers the Grebnikovs below me, Misha coping with joints so painful the concert violinist has forgotten how to saw a bow; Lydia banging on her ceiling, my floor, the broom handle, futile against the drip, but the rat-a-tat-tatting's a startling imitation of a militia issue Makarov. Moscow never learned how to reverse the law that insists water seeks its own level, but it has tried. Two who remember Stalin, two who endured a lifetime of Soviet insanity now inherit the new Russian lunacy, accepting it all so stoically, an imprint on the Muscovite genome. Like bugs in amber, the Grebnikovs, complaining for fifty years to the Duma of the Wall, the Ministry of the Ceiling, expect no action, expect nothing, and are duly rewarded. They enjoy no other sport as much as Olympic indoor cursing. I phone them. Dear Misha, I say, please know that I share your distress. Chto delat'? What is to be done? Lydia has put on some tea, he tells me. She has made your favorite dessert-napolyon. Come down, Vanushka. The mystery of the pipes. We'll discuss it further. | |
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