Osip Mandelstam writes his final poem
on stone. Other prisoners in the Soviet
gulag swing leaden sledgehammers
to crush rock. Every hundred pieces
equals one crust of bread. Pulverize
till you drop earns a damp pinch of salt
thrown over your shoulder.

Mandelstam's stomach rumbles. His empty
crime: mocking the great Stalin in verse,
manufacturing metaphors of cockroaches
lengthening the tyrant's mustache:
now a thick, furry barrier to free speech,
now a bristly edge of the black hole that
devours all hope, that ruins all rules of art.

Osip entertains Pasternak with his militant work.
Boris cries, "What you read... is not poetry,
it is suicide." Freezing in thin clothes in a
Siberian camp, Osip vows he will never bow
to the soulless rule of the Bolsheviks. His pen
will penetrate stone, he proclaims, sculpting
anti-symbolist verses as a monument to freedom.

On the icy steppes of Siberia, a political prisoner
named Dostoevsky begins The House of the Dead.
In it we can read the tea leaves of Osip’s destiny.
Shivering, emaciated, he volunteers to carry stones
to a construction site. His thin muscles aching, he
says, “My first book was called The Stone, and the stone will
be my last.” He pitches a pinch of salt over his shoulder.

Others laugh as he gathers his poems in a rock pile
of remembrance. He succumbs to heart failure,
exhaustion. History faintly records that Stalin *****
stones as he lies in state. The dust on his mustache
spells, “Find, praise Osip.” But as soon as he swallows,
the letters vanish into the void, and the endless
parade of lock-step pomp and circumstance begins.