Russians

For Russians the stars are always incontinent, ejaculatory

smears across the squalor of a boundlessly

unhygienic sky. You’d scoff, Marina, at how I go at them

with a tiny plastic shovel and my litter box

technique, scooping up the sidereal splooge while trying

to wipe down the universe. You’d say

I tug at God’s Old Testament beard, praying the prayers

of a coward. You’d confide to your diary my eyelashes

don’t bat sootily enough. Such a lummox

could never rumple the sheets of Paris! You’d jot down

my ugly shoes, my idiotic jokes, reproach

my skies for lacking splendor, bleached

by electric lights and the haze of a dying atmosphere ... 

What else could I do, Marina? You and your comrades

vanished long ago, exiled, shot, or pensioned

off by the End of History. So I inch through your legacy

with my groundling’s fears, my glut,

my botched American upbringing: I can’t imagine your

heartbreaks, but you’d never comprehend

how life for me arrived precanceled. Tonight, Marina,

the mercury streetlights will make us

ghastly: you can see only Venus from here, a drunken

queen’s pearl dissolving into the crescent moon’s

tipped-over goblet. Or perhaps I just fucked that up too.