We didn’t dwell on the streetlights,
Festooned with garland-strewn bells, ersatz nutcrackers,
The odd buoyant and ebullient snowman;
We were crossing the Hempstead Turnpike,
No task for the faint-hearted in bright light of midday,
Outright perilous on a late Friday evening
(Especially for those feeling the effects
Of an afternoon of social drinking
Which had gently spilled over into that good night.)
There were four of us—myself, and a Tehran-born trio
(Fun-loving, borderline jolly sorts,
A group of thin, dark Falstaffs, as it were)
Headed to a nearby off-campus bar,
Low-slung ranch-style edifice constructed on the Levittown model,
As non-descript and indistinguishable as its regular clientele,
Some of whom eyed us warily if not angrily,
Weighing the pros and cons of lobbing a comment in our direction
Before we headed to the “Downstairs Disco”
Which had been added, very grudgingly at that,
As a nod to the times and fiscal necessity.

In between ear-numbing bass lines
And the strobe light’s cornea-threatening ministrations,
We nursed significantly watered *****-and-tonics,
Smiled unsuccessfully at spike-heeled and Jordache-clad local girls
(Every bit as unwelcoming to clear outsiders
As their decidedly less glamorous counterparts upstairs)
And carried on brief, lightweight bits of conversation.
At one point I’d mentioned that I was looking forward to getting home
And partaking in some peace and quiet and home cooking
When suddenly, one of my companions
(A full-bearded sophomore named Anush,
Whose last name I never knew;
As his roommate Mossoud once told me,
Shaking his head and smiling,
You would never be able to pronounce it.)
Gave forth with a wail—full-throated, tear-stained
Pained to the point of being almost *******.
As I stared uncomprehendingly, Mossoud snapped at me
(His eyes thunderstorms, his words blunt as broadswords)
You! What do you understand of any of this?
And as he comforted Anush as best he could
(The music the volume of bombs,
Disco ball spitting light like tracer fire)
I began to suspect my relative uselessness
Was not simply the inability to comprehend Farsi

The song played-- muffled, hesitant,
As if the tabletop jukebox
Seemed unsure of the tune’s suitability,
As out of place and time as ourselves,
It being Wednesday morning three A.M.
At the all-night diner on the Klondike Road
(The mills, going full-bore down the road in Montmorenci Falls
Making such a place viable, indeed necessary),
But we laughed loudly and nonchalantly
Between bites of nearly adequate cheeseburger,
Ostensibly unaware of all those inevitabilities
Which were tangible but unspoken, indeed unspeakable,
This being the last of the last summer not careworn,
Textbooks to be exchanged for neckties,
Plastic sandals swapped for sensible flats,
Other lives to take flight in other places,
A mere handful of evenings remaining
Before the clumsy process of untying
All that which had been loose ends from the beginning.

Would I go back?  In a sense, it does not matter.
There was always a laundry list of reasons
That it could not be, cannot be, will not be:
Irreparably meshed gears of relocations and reconciliations,
Gordian knots of logic and desire.
Still, in my dreams, I often run like a madman,
Chest burning as my sneakers slap the pavement in the darkness,
Back toward the diner, but it has been razed to the ground
(Likely the case, for all I know,
What with the mills silent and padlocked all these years)
And I paw madly, feverishly through the rubble
In search of some remains of those vinyl chanteuses of love songs,
Those epitaphs of our failures,
Those three-minute odes
To our compromised and conditional successes.

She noted, grimly cognizant of though unamused by the irony,
That her likeness, or something akin to that,
Appeared on the poster—a gray-clad strong and vibrant woman
Reaching, in concert with her comrades
(One woman in a white coat, a man in overalls and requisite cap,
Still another androgynous figure in a futuristic ensemble
Resembling some cross of a Western science fiction movie
And some cheap Petrograd-made tin foil)
Toward a hammer-and-sickle adorned moon
Soon to be conquered by a similarly festooned rocket ship.
She is no scientific apparatchik, no technically gifted party functionary;
It is her job to feed the canine occupant of this mission to the cosmos
(Two mutts from the Moscow streets, she confides to Ilysa,
One of the few co-workers who can be trusted with such a statement.)
The dog, she notes without any trace of rancor, eats quite well,
Better than she does in truth,
But it is a series of last meals for the condemned,
For there is no secret as to the dog’s eventual fate
(Poor cur, he has no idea he is doomed,
One of the scientists clucks sadly,
Though she simply shrugs in reply,
Knowing a test or a trap when she sees it,
Though she thinks to herself He is far from alone)
And, after she has cleaned up the remnants of the dog’s dinner,
She heads back to her one-room flat on the Yaseneavaya Boulevard,
Noting ruefully, as she ascends the crumbling, unsteady steps
Leading to her blocky, faceless building,
That the omnipresent klieg lighting of the street lamps
Serves to obscure any trace of the heavens in the night sky.

Mom-Mom cleaned and dried me with a kitchen towel,
Like I was a **** butter dish,
Once I popped out ‘round dusk one day
(My mother’s waters broke, then she crossed them)
And she Sunday-school sing-sang all about the light,
But I found this world all whispers and shadows,
(Hazy grays cast by the tenement buildings and church steeples)
People talking around me and maybe about me,
But never to me as such, and at some point it seemed
That only the greasy old Bronx had some sense in its hiss and burble
(It said to me Child,  you cannot carry over me
Until you give yourself to the water fully, unabashedly, unashamedly.)

He will allow, if you press him on the point,
That it can be a hard go sometimes;
Holsteins have no concept of weekends, he will say,
Or Christmas, for that matter,
But all that being said
With a smile practically gushing contentment.
He has, for thirty-plus years now,
Worked some four hundred head, dairy and beef
In this cold, flat valley where low-pressure systems come to die,
Bringing the detritus of low clouds and snow flurries in tow,
Sometimes even into the middle of May.  
He is not unaware the outlook for his homestead is hazy, at best;
He has consciously blocked out how much he is into the bank
For feed, the re-built corn silos, the new Case tractor,
And both of his sons have long since fled south,
Preferring the comfort of powerpoint presentations and cubicles
To a cold, dark milking house in the middle of January,
But he has seen the future come and go,
Dwelling in the misbegotten debris of the recent past:
Huge, slightly Fifties-space-movie-flying-saucer satellite dishes
Pointing forlornly directly at the horizon
Outside shuttered and foreclosed upon houses
Which litter any number of the back roads,
The yellowing signs promoting cheap internet access
Taped to windows in small, half-empty strip malls in Gouvernuer,
All cause enough for him to opine at virtually every opportunity
I have seen the future, and I can confirm
That it clearly ain’t what it used to be.

He could have, if he had of a mind to do so, gone in another direction;
Unlike most of the farm kids,
Who were packaged as a unit into the General Ed track,
He’d tested himself into the College Prep classes,
Where several of his teachers made it a point to tell him
Virgil, you need to understand that you’re a bright kid.  
You can do other things, go other places,
And one or two of his instructors were downright offended
That he chose to take over the farm immediately upon graduation,
But he knew at an early age—no, had always known
That he would remain in this place, on this patch of land,
Even though he could not even begin to explain
The whys and wherefores of his decision,
Language being the ungainly
And wholly inadequate instrument that it is
(This is why, he would say every Sunday morning
At breakfast with Gerald Glass and Earl Tiefenauer,
The both of them rolling their eyes in tandem,
Knowing exactly what came next,
The Akwesasnes went hundreds of years without a written language;
They were smart enough to know that all words do
Is just get in the **** way)
But he knew that what was in the gentle, serene chugging,
The rhythmic pop of the ancient machinery
At the  Karsten place over on the Heuvelton Road
Flinging another squared-off hay bale into his jerry-built wagon,
Or in the blue sky which stretched, impossibly cloudless and glorious,
From the St. Lawrence up north down to Fort Drum
And onward for several forevers either way besides,
Was greater and weightier than anything in the cloth-bound red Bibles
Which sat in the pews at the Presbyterian church in Madrid
(Not his father’s church, but the blustering, cocksure Baptists,
Sure as death itself as to the absolute inambiguity of the Word
Were simply not his kind of people)
Which he had begun attending some half-dozen years ago,
Not because he was a particularly spiritual man by any means;
He had simply been unable to sufficiently convince himself
That all of this could happen strictly by accident.

My worthy adversaries across the dais would have you believe
That, having fashioned mankind in His own image
And, what’s more, sacrificed His own son
For the sole purpose of its collective salvation,
Our Maker would, in effect,
Simply shrug his shoulders and send it on its merry way.
Free to fall, those arguing the negative will tell you.
Ah, but there’s more than that: not only do they insist
That The Creator has for all intents and purposes abandoned us,
But has allowed an equally powerful and diametrically opposed force
To set up shop on his watch.  
I would ask them--what drabble of Scripture,
What logical premise would you cite to support such madness?

But surely, my learned opponents would purr,
(Oh, every bit as sly as devils themselves!)
You would not deny the existence of evil in this world.  
Morons! Can it somehow be possible
That you are completely ignorant of the work of Augustine?  
Tell me, after you finish your warm milk
And button up your snuggly jammies,
When you flick off the light switch, does the dark come out?
Or is your grasp of physics and philosophy equally inadequate?

I suppose, in a last, desperate attempt to buttress their arguments,
The supporters of the opposite position
Will contend my presence in this lecture hall
Is necessary and sufficient  for their argument to carry the day.
I categorically deny the supposition!
I do not exist, nor can I!  
Hang your forensic skills on that,
You bunch of ******* saintly *******.

(In which there is a boy, a man, and a curious box.)

I can’t imagine what the muzhiks would have thought of this.
They’d probably have me burned
The boy is not listening to the man;
He is, in a mixture of fear, wonder,
And no small measure of puzzlement,
Utterly transfixed by the box
Which sits between him and the man,
Who is fluttering his hands in some pantomime of supplication
Nearly yet never quite touching the strange box
Which sprouts two pieces of wire,
One pointing straight up toward God,
The other looped like a noose.
The man manipulates his fingers in delicate movements,
As if he was playing a pianissimo movement on a piano
Whose keyboard is embedded somewhere in the very air itself,
But the sounds… vaguely familiar, to be sure:
He hears the barking of a small dog, perhaps,
Or something much like the faraway crow of a rooster
Filtered through the half-tones of the last moments of a dream,
Yet not quite of this world or this life,
And, unconsciously, for his mother is of the old peasant stock,
The boy crosses himself, and hears himself say
In a voice not quite his own,
That surely it requires a miracle or some sort of magic
To make such a wonder as this machine.
The man stops his gesturing for a moment to look at the boy,
And then he bursts out laughing.
I didn’t figure out how it works so I could build this;
I built it so I could figure out how it works.