Old men die in the snow
you once wrote
keening in the dead field
winter light sharpened by frost
we were young, then
just boys examined, serious
about Goethe and death in
the Fontanka, the tensile strength of ice
poets who died of gunshot
broken hearts left with debtor’s slips
and tea, good for the constitution
on glacial days without sun
your poems were imitative
leaving no trace, the way
copies do, sodden in romanticism
that later critics could not retrieve
they say you assumed the cassock, and
wear it still, preaching to a tavern door
in a time of dry bread, in the distant regions
of Kharkov Province, where birches cry in pain
as if your audience heard you
things closed are no longer open, and
I think of you only as much
as the coal dust, fine
nights when the stove blazes
and your immolation is complete.
Only just saw this. As per the old hackneyed but nevertheless emotionally sincere expression, DEEP!