Leo Yankevich Poems

(Architect of the Gulag System)
for Robert Conquest

I.
...

At present there’s a mall and a strip show.
Ronald McDonald waves to passing cars.
And yet a hundred million years ago
a forest stood beneath the same bright stars.
...

I fingered the bone, and traced
where the axe had landed,
imagining the face
of the girl, her life abandoned
...

Waiting for our turns at Louie the Barber’s,
we look through porn culled from the coffee table,
at the silicon breasts, the buck green eyes,
and listen to the dirty jokes, each fable
...

To my enrainbowed eyes the trees are walking,
and the hawk is still as headland cliff.
What utter rapture at the end of stalking,
my dear Lord, now that I fly frozen stiff.
...

“To die not knowing why is to die like an animal...
To die like a human being you have at least got
to know why it is done to you.”
—Ezra Pound
...

Praised be the ugly and the beautiful,
the slow decay of leaves, the dew on grass,
the thistles and the apples bountiful.
Praised be the frozen branches in the pass,
...

When the mind melts in the cave of the skull,
forsaken, alas, like everything else,
will some victorious Socrates crawl—
out of the depths, like a most secret self—
...

Coughing, he unlocks the iron-clad door,
and a flock of gold and silver keys
rises like an inverted pyramid
over his little kitchen for the poor.
...

Lost in your catacombs, I’ve uncovered
the dank walls of effaced fishes. Branded
by the infidels above, I’ll never
leave the ensconcing darkness. I’m stranded—
...