THE BRIDGE Poem by Nicolae Coande

The most beautiful Russian girl in the world lives in Germany
tucked in a safe with a Cyrillic cipher. The Germans still bang their heads
against a wall over it. Even so, her hands weave a bridge to me, her blue eyes
break the code that holds her hostage. The sapphire holds its breath
awhile. An epidemic of kisses.
Her mouth drinks in the white wine left in a glass on Böll's veranda,
in forests where the bear cuts honey with a crosscut saw,
those hands still search for me, as on New Year's Eve, 2004,
when I went through three endings and as many rebirths.
Solzhenitsyn regards us pensively from a photograph: our Russian comrades
remain the world's most prodigious drinkers.
She is Rasputin's woman, but can't forget me. Her heart
is the grass in which reindeer's graze
then eaten in the finest restaurants in Paris.
The art, of course, is to bind together three countries that can't stand each other.
Her dancing lights up the hidden warheads in Siberia, but her hands
quickly choke everything. For her it's winter, when the meteorites fell.
For an entire night I watched her smoking and singing
for two years. A Bundeskanzlerin with Romanian moving
in her hips,
her back the bow dropped from Rostropovich's hand
in a room where the heart listens back turned hears how
the Baikal's sphincter begets crises in Asia.
I sit in a cellar and write how I can miss
a bridge
the Volga beneath and a ship pulled downstream by two tiny breasts.