Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa, which was published by Tupelo Press in 2004 and editor of Ecco Anthology of International Poetry forthcoming from Harper Collins in 2010. His translation of Polina Barskova's This Lamentable City will also be forthcoming in 2010. He lives and teaches in San Diego.

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 As Her Husband Sleeps, Sonya Tells a Story

  

…right in front of the approaching train

a woman and a man fuck in the snow.

 

Consider, my soul, this texture of stubbornness and quiet:

as she falls and rises

 

above him in the air,

he wants her and he does not want her—

 

Consider this approaching train

in which the conductor whistles, rings the bell and shouts

 

as if refusing to believe in their deafness.

Consider, my soul, the deafness

 

which seems to have chosen the man

as its earthly vehicle.

 

The train stops, the conductor whispers

 

The woman straightens her coat, and laughs—

“One of us had to stop first, sir. I couldn’t.”

 

 

 

 …who kissed Abraham who kissed Majda, who kissed Kareem who kissed Tali

 

although she was a dozen years his senior (and Kareem’s

bicycle turned at the factory where two kissing women

 

played the secretaries). Bright patrol of kisses! The epidemic we knew it

was true from the way the newspapers denied it, and we were made afraid. Toni said

 

she saw her former husbands standing in a line, arranged by penis size. And in June

we made love outside to the great happiness of mosquitoes. And we saw

 

the policemen march, our crazy Abraham running after them, shooting at the police horses

with a toy water gun! I remember the illness: splashes of water, water everywhere!

 

And we drank and laughed like barefoot peasants and also drank quietly, damned

only the earth and quietly made vodka from cherries, made vodka from wooden chairs, and

 

William began to compare the governor’s face to his grandmother’s naked ass. And now

we enter the city that used to be ours

 

past the theaters and gardens, past wooden staircases and wrought iron gates

where we waved on the doorsteps, waved

 

when the president rode in a white limousine, followed by a two-night-long procession

which was followed by trials and executions, as we waved on the doorsteps, waved.

 

Be courageous, we said, but no one is courageous. Where my soul waits for you

grant me God this city of inaudible music.