When Akhmatova Met Mikhail Bulgakov, Under Condemnation Poem by Leialoha Apo Perkins

He knew. A summons glues all. The air sucks itself dry,
then dies. There’s little time to write a note:
“To the country for the day -Don’t wait.'

A summon unsticks too. Relatives, friends, foes stand back.
He said “Let’s walk.” To the river. His wife’s hair
burnished iodine gold in the sun that morning.
His infant son kicked the irreverent air.
It was cold, cold out.
A summons arches like a scimitar.
He said nothing about the Commissar’s note.

Everyone knew. The Bureau smells – that old, familiar fear.
An odor permeates – the newspaper, the wooden benches.
Even steel does not resist clean, acrid wash of Lysol.
Behind one odor another is steeped, stronger than the latrine’s.
Only the incoming breeze rallying from off the Baltic Sea
cleans, but does not sweep away the clenched fist
of prisoners’ sleep. There is the yaw of the waiting rooms.

We walked. The trees declined. The streets waggled away.
Beautiful houses waited naked, their grounds bare,
the garden statues - scratched, chipped, redolent
of a far off day - their histories bound in books in archives.

We talked. He noted the brilliant peacock blue, patching
the sky. He recited a poem. He says nothing he didn’t mean.
He joked. He laughed, lightly, like a kite, gently, riding high
looking for Spring. When it came to earth again,
he would be ready, it seemed. It would come. It is not locked up
in an iron safe by the Commissar and his Committee of Friends.
The Muse, he says, is as we are. He smiled, wanly.

We walked. We talked centuries past the clock’s
Time keeping hands. From a makeshift road stand,
we bought a plate of Borscht. We ate it at a pier, on the piles
- gulls wheeling above us, like a crowning, and finer.
Above them, still, a flock of geese honked their traffick,
Pulled by the gravity of stars, pulled by the earth’s iron clad
heart, fired, then, and singing. We watched: birds diving, rising,
crossing orders of powers - skating their lives across the deep sky.

We stood there, the baby cooing; he, shading his eyes
(with a bandaged hand) , captive, clearly seeing the Beauty
that lay still, if like stone – that is the Purity of the earth, sky, land..