The Former Tenants
The town-house where the group home was
isn’t selling. Perhaps it’s the recession;
perhaps the barred windows, odd in this neighborhood.
Or an echo of screams in the walls.
Except that such effluvia don’t exist.
Paint cures what it covers; people live
dreamlessly where prisons were, and torture.
Which probably didn’t happen here.
The caretakers were mostly big and ponderous,
not patient so much as having
their disgust under control, accustomed to it.
They seemed, when outside, leading their charges
to the van for visits to specialists
or day-trips, like bison herding people.
Pale, nervous, stooped and hooting
people. People who stopped and cried
and had to be convinced to move.
A few, judged harmless and unlikely to be harmed,
ranged freely: the sunken-eyed and somehow
mouthless man who inched his way
to the corner. The youth
of forty who strode with an empty backpack,
shouting in whispers. The small
man-mountain. The earnestly,
shapelessly gabbling, crew-cut one,
visible only from certain
angles as a woman, who wanted to be friendly
but wanted above all a cigarette.
Gone now – mysteriously, but not really.
For years across the street I tried
to grasp what they saw, failed. Now only the bars
remain. And stained cheap walls
awaiting the revival of the market,
young upscale couples, children;
preserved meanwhile by a thin coat of pity.
Floating World
We didn’t know it was over
till we gathered as usual
in the office of Boris Borisovich
for political analysis
of the coming week’s production goals.
This ritual was no longer even
a joke – a blanker stretch of time
than drunkenness.
We liked Boris Borisovich,
that failed cake of a man,
because he no longer expected
anything from us
but politeness. But that Monday
work had apparently stopped
in the plant. A steam whistle wailed.
Boxes were being dollied
along our corridor, and some of our desks were gone.
“The State has detached itself,”
he said, “from the Party,
which must give up all property.
My future here is uncertain
and this is our last meeting.
Be seated.” His tone was as usual,
dull and perfunctory,
if anything calmer. “Our failure was assured
by the defeat of revolution in
the West, by habits of servility
and authority, and by the sheer weight
of the opposing system.
We shall be regarded as premature.
That is all.” In the corridor
an ill-made door had swung open,
and through it we could see
a well-dressed man
shoving a thick envelope across
a desk to our Director, Akaky Akakievich.
Some time later, to our surprise,
we gathered – those who remained –
at the graveside of Boris Borisovich.
It was late autumn, and the usual
ash of poems and people drifted down;
hardly noticeable, lost in the first snow.
He would have a simple stone,
not one of those extravagant crosses
that distinguish the capitalist dead.
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