Jacket 34 Contents page
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This piece is about 6 printed pages long.
It is copyright © Philip Metres and Jacket magazine 2007.
This bus will take you
Throughout the city
*
This window to the West
This work of progress
*
I hate to be the head
People have to look through
*
A benighted daydream
A Venice in ice
*
So let’s begin:
This is the Winter Palace
*
Six selves sleeping on the Neva
Their dreams the frames
*
Of the History of Western Art:
Two thousand eyes open
*
Have you been sleeping?
I can’t catch up my body clock
*
To 1762, the people called to take
What they wanted on the Square
*
Of construction rubble: in hours
Not a single stone brick or splinter
*
Out of my eye
Say, can you see
*
Is this the
This is not the bronze horseman
*
The other bronze horseman
Is the bronze horseman
*
Look above the first floor
To the watermark
*
The canal climbed
Where that scaffold worker
*
Scrapes, unable to look
Extending his hand
*
A just-lit cigarette
To another not turning
*
Who reaches his hand
To the burning sweet smoke
*
1905 Bloody Sunday
They wanted an eight hour day
*
Fire was opened on them
1000 people were lying dead
*
Get up, you’ll miss everything
You’ve already missed
*
The 19th century: where
Raskolnikov axed his landlady
*
Where Dostoyevsky wrote Crime
and Punishment but we did not see
*
Where he was hauled years before
In front of a firing squad
*
& asked his last words
& would have shot him
*
Except the tsar had staged
A last-minute reprieve & decreed
*
Exile to Siberia instead...
He returned to “Peter,” like a dead letter
*
Here was the largest cathedral
The Soviet Army bivouacked
*
Carving a hole in the altar
For soldiers to shit in
*
Splitting icons with axes
To feed the splintered faces
*
To the dying fire
Does the sun ever set here?
*
Come back in winter
When the street’s the color of slush
*
& interiors beckon gold
Meantime I’ll spare you the Blockade
*
Corpses face down in the frozen street
The buttocks flesh scooped out
*
See the two punks holding beers?
This is the monument to the Second War
*
The eternal flame was lit in 1957
This is the first eternal flame in Russia
*
If I were not myself, but another,
I’d hang around there every night
*
When Romanov family was shot
Their bodies were never founded
*
Is that a pay toilet?
Sorry we could not be seen with you
*
To the left, the KGB building
Prime Minister Putin began his career
*
In this fear
This sphere
*
We’ve come to the end of tour
This is where we started
*
The Church of the Savior
On Spilt Blood
*
No, it’s not metaphor
It’s where anarchist killed tsar
*
Enjoy your stay in Piter
Don’t forget to tour river
*
Say address please
The Neva never stays the same
*
What did he say?
*
The Neva never stays the same
*
What is the name of the river?
*
Do you have to hear everything twice?
Philip Metres
Philip Metres is a poet, translator, and scholar whose work has appeared in numerous journals and in Best American Poetry (2002). His books include Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront, Since 1941 (University of Iowa Press, 2007), a study of the interactions between American poets and the peace movement, Instants (2006), Primer for Non-Native Speakers (2004), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (2004), A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2003). Forthcoming is a book of poems, To See the Earth (2008). He is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. See http://www.philipmetres.com and http://www.behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com for more information. He can be reached at «pmetres[ât]jcu.edu»
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