Yo por soleá
You are not a Russian spy
Telephone 2
For the former genus, see Viola (plant)
For the edges of the road in shadow, see the last day of your childhood
For desire in the form of a dress, see soleá itself
For musician, see music box
For atmosphere, see belief in its particulars (see also: votive)
: :
For the inexpressible, see seen
Because you are stealing photographs of maple syrup canisters.
Because you line up at dinnertime, exactly six p.m.
Because under your clothes you wear a brown scapular.
Because your father is an artist, or your mother is an artist,
because your mother tongue is disappearing and your father
is a drunk. Because you scissored a photograph in six
without making sure before you did just where to cut.
Because your poems do or don't contain the moon, because
you escaped last time with just your life: you are not a Russian spy.
You are not a Russian spy, these days: your ostentatious eyewear
tells us so. Although you never floated on the private river
of the Tsars it's also true you don't care much for what
we'd call The Folk. While you line your iPhone up precisely
to get the shot of syrup that you want, while you dip your toes
in water in a Morse-code kind of way, while you sit and click
your pen a hundred times, a hundred hundred times, a million
times, while bad translations pass through you like semaphore,
we here at Headquarters are forced against our will to say:
alas, it's true: you are not a Russian spy, these days.
At distance repetitive noise meaning
take me, take me. In interwar
years: dust, libraries, silence,
new money, brown cloth, a shoe
that, left alone by the gate, does not yet
indicate Removal. Some people sit there,
in the realm of Before, fading and sizzling
like static on a dead TV, no longer
persons, only the appearance of bodies
going in and out on an imperceptible
tide. That noise is still in the background—
as the years tick over it gets louder,
as if to say I'm at hand now,
I'm waiting for you. From the present,
the past looks inevitable, a wall
too big to go around. The bodies that were here
fit like folded notes into that wall.
The telephone rings and rings and rings
without an answerer, and the TV
flecks with plain blank noise,
and the last trains cross new borders
carrying bodies
that leaf through magazines, transmit
fear by smell, send undated postcards
saying only When are you leaving? And when
are you coming back?
Note: Italics are taken from the correspondence of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.
Éireann Lorsungis the author of Music For Landing Planes By (2007) and Her Book (2013), both from Milkweed, and The Book of Splendor (forthcoming, Milkweed). Other work appears or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, Field, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She lives in Belgium, where she is residency director at Dickinson House (dickinsonhouse.be).
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