Leo Yankevich Poems

There is more here than mist,
duckweed and spatterdocks.
A bowfin, three-feet long,
lurks amid the stalks
...

Under swooning clouds
you look into the gleam
of a puddle after rain.
And, as if in a dream,
...

(Eastern Siberia)

In a graveyard on a hill near Magadan,
the heavens shed light on the skull and bones
...

My little boat unmoored,
I’ve drifted under stars,
but do not see the Lord,
just Artemis and Mars.
...

I turn the stony corner
where the graveyard begins.
Today I am a mourner.
...

The hooded hip-hop scum
heap up the funeral pyre;
the streets of London burn,
and yet, despite the fire,
...

Here, under the weight of an unknown sentence,
under the lead and the slate of the sky,
someone boozes and babbles to the silence,
but I'm not sure who, though together we die.
...

His head reels—gulls beneath the mackerel sky
prey on schools of pilchards, sprats, and herrings.
He holds the helm fast, tries to catch his bearings
in the mirror of a bloodshot eye.
...

You fly back home, sit at the kitchen table
with the wake cake. The crumbs inside the foil.
Thirty years have passed and you are able
only to stare outside. You watch him toil
...

How romantic they are in his mind,
crouched around the fire singing songs,
their sad emaciated dog behind
them, barking at the moon. He counts the wrongs,
...