Anna Akhmatova Spends the Night on Miami Beach Poem by John Balaban

Well, her book, anyway. The Kunitz volume left lying on a bench, the pages a bit puffy by morning, flushed with dew, riffled by sea breeze, scratchy with sand - the paperback with the 1930's photo with her in spangled caftan, the back cover calling her 'star of the St. Petersburg circle of Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Blok, surviving the Revolution and two World Wars.'

So she'd been through worse... the months outside Lefortovo prison waiting for a son who was already dead, watching women stagger and reel with news of executions, one mother asking, 'Can you write about this?' Akhmatova thought, then answered, 'Yes.'

If music lured her off the sandy bench to the clubs where men were kissing that wouldn't have bothered her much nor the vamps sashaying in leather. Decadence amid art deco fit nicely with her black dress, chopped hair, Chanel cap. What killed her was the talk, the empty eyes, which made her long for the one person in ten thousand who could say her name in Russian, who could take her home, giving her a place between Auden and Apollinaire to whom she could describe her night's excursion amid the loud hilarities, the trivial hungers at the end of the American century.