I. Letter 1
You write of sitting in the cold
of anxiety about your grant
not coming & how you lonely
you are & how you'll send the money
for those jeans of yours she paid for
not wanting to come between
her & her mother
& of the growing
distance between you
such a poor, proud country boy
unwilling, still to give up
on what all see as a crazy dream
& talking of emigration
& how you couldn't find
the book she wanted
in the shops, for it was sold out
A letter to your English girlfriend never sent
& poignant all the more for it
I.I Letter 2
You write of your concern
for us, my mother & me,
praying we have enough to eat
saying you wish you were there
to stand in hopeless Russian food queues
for us and how hard it is to be so helpless
You talk of shouting on the phone
& how you didn't mean to do it
& of how love and pain are two sides
of the same coin & how when
you & my mother talk you never
say anything much, just talk about the Museum
& dinosaur bones & how mad this is, how wrong
my mother would say those bones
were your reason for your so-called love
that she should have seen the naked ambition in your eyes
that of a man used to poverty, reaching for more
aiming for notoriety, whilst lying of love
I.I.I Letter 3
You call my mother ' Princess'
(my mother doesn't know this is cliche)
& talk of British superstitions
such as black cats being unlucky
& ask why Russians think
asking for photographs
of people is unlucky
a superstition my mother doesn't recall
when I ask her about it now
Black cats, is that why I ended
up in hospital in Britain
in a land of the free robbed of my freedom
because we had a black cat?
I always thought them lucky,
adhering to the Russian superstition
I guess I might have been wrong
back then you talked of emigration
of wanting to move to Russia to be with us
I.V Letter 4
I can mostly only imagine it
from my mother's words
your letter to her who was 23
named ' Lily' after the flower of death
bringing the death of our family
She calls you ' Day-Day'
like your youth's English girlfriend
in your mid-life crisis
you've turned into a poet
& are talking of your secret
love & nursing memories of love-bites
all else is dust & forgotten
you'd later cry on the Chinese hotel
bed in front of your wife, my mother
' how can I refuse these offerings'
& eleven years go by
occasionally we talk on the phone
it's something you don't deserve
Based on the letters my English step-father wrote to a) his first, English girlfriend b) my Russian mother c) his Chinese mistress, now his new partner.