All Change at Zima Junction
For Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1932-2017
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
Changes lives; nineteen becomes twenty-one
With hardly a pause for twenty and then
Everyone asks you questions you can’t answer
And then they say you’ve changed, and ignore you
The small-town brief-case politician still
Enthroned as if she were a committee
And asks you what are you doing back here
And then you go away, on a different train:
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
“I went, and I am still going.”1
1Yevtuskenko: Selected Poems. Penguin,1962
An Apology
I have never visited Russia. I can’t read or speak Russian. Everything in this series is as authentically Russian as a liter of ***** bottled in, oh, Baytown, Texas. Still, I hope you enjoy this dream-pilgrimage.
I never meant to write poems about Russia, but then I never meant to read Russian literature. The United States Navy was parsimonious in its pay to enlisted men in the 1960s, so the base library and the San Diego Public Library were my free entertainment (as was riding up and down the glass elevator at the Hotel El Cortez, and walking the city and Balboa Park with shipmates), and in illo tempore I happened upon a Modern Library edition of Chekhov’s short stories.
Although Tolkien, McKuen, and other English-language authors have always been my favorites (or favourites), I also found that Russian authors (in translation, of course) also have so much to teach the young and reassure the old. Despite seventy years of horror under Communism, Russia never lost the Faith and never lost her love for literature, literature that shapes chaos into meaning. In so many ways Russia is a witness to the world.
The first book I bought upon returning home from Viet-Nam was the Penguin Modern European Poets paperback edition of Yevtushenko: Selected Poems. That 75-cent paperback from a bookstall in the airport in San Francisco is beside me on the desk as I write.
At this point the convention is to write that Yevtushenko changed my life forever, gave me an epiphany, and blah, blah, blah. He didn’t. If one’s life changes every time one reads a new author or hears a remarkable speaker or sees a great film, then was there a life to begin with?
But Yevtushenko, Solzhenitsyn, Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Chekhov, and others came to be life-long friends. And since one writes about friends, I wrote about them too, and one day realized, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, that there might be a book in it.