RED SHIFTING (IV) - [Dream on the eve of G's arrival Poem by ALEXANDER SKIDAN

Dream on the eve of G's arrival.

I meet A. at the airport, we are riding to the city.

Insouciance bordering on insanity.

Later on a bench near a pond or some kind of gully in the park, and at the same time as though in a tiny garden on the corner Dostoevsky and Razyezhaya Street. To my left is A. To my right Vasya Kondratiev in a black motorcycle jacket, pants and shoes, and behind him—someone else. And Vasya is constantly falling forward, "nodding off", bending in half like a gutta-percha boy, and we have to lean his body against the back of the bench as if he were drunk or falling asleep.

It's unclear how we came here with him at all.

With the back of the head I can feel the proximity of the street separated from us by a (rather illusory) thicket. It can't go on like this much longer, one has to do something. With the body that is.

At a certain moment I notice that a wall glimmers ahead. Little by little it becomes more definite, as if reality itself were moving closer and closer to us. It's the wall of the telephone station. The place suddenly starts to feel familiar. (Before we were "nowhere".)

It's as though the lens I was looking through was brought into focus.

I don't feel horror. It's just that V. needs to be straightened up from time to time.

Now A.

As always her appearance is an unbearable happiness. I thought, we all thought that you died, but it turned out you were just away. For a long time. Why. It had to be like that. But this without words, with gazes only.

Adoration.

As if the very contact hides a barrier.

And again, as if the dream used my knowledge for its own benefit, since my knowledge consists precisely in that touch is impossible.

I have two dead people on my hands.

Do I want the resurrection of A.

Judging by the persistence with which she returns to me - absolutely.

Therefore it's a miracle that I want.

Madness.

However this madness, this miracle has a prototype.

A.'s nocturnal phone call from America.


'Nothing else remains besides the desire of the organism to die according to its way. And not partially in its own and partially in someone else's. Only in its own way.'

I thought I didn't have the power to say it out loud.

(For a second it seemed that I had touched her.)