Five March, Березень, пятый, these
clouds, butterflies, this old anger and
this rotten coffee ***. Mold and clouds.
The insufferable beauty of potholes, we walk Yulitsa Kikvidze
and note buildings blotched with satellite dishes
(mushroom sprouts from Soviet brick) concrete
proof that we exist. Yesterday, I say
I will not be a prime squared again
for seventy-two years: happy birthday, маленькая кошка! Snowlit
clouds, ice and broken asphalt, springtime in Kiev is all
disappointed dogs, life after love.

In an otherwise quiet snowlit night
the chelloveck ahead has shuffle-skitch shoes.
I have clock clock boots.
The fog train to Voksal at this distance
hoots like a toy. Some meters trailing
someone’s step is a sticky squick-squick.
As I turn left, I think of nothing
save cognac, cognac and koshka (Marusya),
the mild entertainments of loneliness so far removed
from my mother tongue:

through snow-covered courtyards the dogs hours ago abandoned.

What good is it to be fluent in one’s own language
when the mashrutka slush and hiss
down Yulitsa Kikvidze in the distance?
At home, the cat chews the cords to the blinds
of the kitchen window, her wants
more important than mine.

Small berms of snowice and cigarette
butts line beneath the awning sidewalks
of Yulitsa Pushkinska, impenetrable.

We have yet to decide
how to slice ourselves open, how to
conspire for casualties. Desire
lingers like four days’ melt mid-winter.

Who really feels day to day that
nothing will change? This faith
in schedules, taxes, credits, furtive
moments with a familiar lover, this
lack of spasms and undramatic intent
can suffice for half a lifetime, but you’ve
become an unreliable narrator in your own
novel, prone to
wild speculation and impulsive looks
at other women.

Outsiders, we have our own exiles, and
the terrors of walls and fences.
The human touch
electrifies, convulsively. Shock. Wash
your hands of it all, the beggars, the crows, the
dispirited continual winter. We want
nothing more than an island

a ditch to dive into

an unmarked grave.

I have sat beside a number of snow-numbed
train stations. I am the smoking man, invisible
in my ivy hat and grey wool coat.

I have been thinking of you
for decades occasionally
sipping coffee from a paper cut.

The cats have more sense than to loiter
where the dog with the compound fracture
begs scraps among the cigarette butts and slush.
It would break your heart a thousand times
in quick succession, create a fluttering
like a cold pulseless breeze. The old women
on the wet stone steps sell onions, parsley
potatoes, pickles, spices and wooden matches. The
veteran of the old war sleeps ******* his
shoulder, and I think of you again
**** it.