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The girl, The Baltimore Girl, she was strange in a way Ilya liked, at first. When she stopped him outside the stadium door, offered him a little folded booklet of drawings and said, "I had to draw you."
She was a good fuck, too. Enthusiastic. Flexible. She took him back to her apartment and made a cup of tea before she took off her dress and her sweats and rode him.
Not his favorite kind of girl, but then, who was? Svetlana with her generous nature, unattached, taunting. The Boulder Girl, thick-hipped and whimpering, who begged him to bend her in half and gave him her number, and pretended she was asleep when he left.
The Baltimore Girl, with him still inside her, his hand wrapped around the base of his cock so the condom didn't leak, said, "Oh, do you know this one?" and reached over to the table next to her bed, slid off of him, and folded back the cover of a magazine.
"In villages God does not live in corners
as skeptics think."
He’s everywhere.
He blesses the roof, he blesses the dishes,
he holds his half of the double doors.
He’s plentiful. In the iron pot there.
Cooking the lentils on Saturday.
He sleepily jigs and bops in the fire,
he winks at me, his witness. He
assembeles a fence, he marries some sweetheart
off to the woodsman. Then for a joke
he makes the warden’s every potshot
fall just short of a passing duck.
The chance to watch all this up close,
while autumn’s whistling in the mist,
is the only blessed gift there is
in villages, for the atheist.
(Ilya is peeling the condom back, his come still warm in its tip, he ties it off and sets it on the table, where the girl picked up the magazine.)
"He’s everywhere.
He blesses the roof, he blesses the dishes,
he holds his half of the double doors."
She has a nice voice, quiet. It's the strangest pillow talk Ilya has ever experienced, and Svetlana is almost always immediately on to the next thing once she's let him bring her off a second time.
"I do not know it," he says as she takes a breath, but she shrugs and keeps reading until she's finished.
"It's Russian," she says, "Joseph Brodsky."
He looks at her, and she looks back, then she shrugs, and lays back down on his chest.
"I love your moles," she says, her fingertips tracing across the spots speckling his chest. He's almost recovered enough from fucking that he wants to get up. He feels impatient with the energy of what comes next, of the need to be somewhere else. Somewhere not here. "I would love to draw you again."
She leans over to the table again, and he rolls her off of him, reaches for his boxers.
"No."
The girl pouts, or maybe shrugs. He's not looking, he's pulling on his trousers, looking at his phone, slipping his shirt back on and buttoning it up.
She stands, wraps a blanket around herself and follows him to the door.
"Here," she says as he opens it, and shoves something in his back pocket.
In the cab, he pulls it out.
The New Yorker. The cover is all drawings of faces of famous people. He looks at his phone.(💬︎ Jane 1 unread message) He opens the magazine.
Stupid drawings, too many words. A couple laying on the floor under a blanket with a joke he doesn't have to translate to understand.
The poem the girl read him, and then a few pages later, another one. This one is shorter. But the title is long.
I cannot not see
the blight everywhere.
Taking a Walk in the Woods After Having Taken a Walk in the Woods with You
By Maureen N. McLaneI cannot not see
the blight everywhere.
Ilya reads the name of the poem again. Then he closes the magazine. Leans his head back against the headrest of the cab.
In his hotel room, Barnes is asleep with his white noise and face mask on, and Ilya searches for Iosif Brodsky and деревне. He reads it, back and forth, with the English.
It's in the lobby of Svetlana's hotel. It's a fancy one, with a wall of books, and plenty of pillows, and things across the table that he would have thrown away.
The cover is bent, and he's learned that no one asks questions in places like this, so he picks it up. A different drawing, a different face. In the cab, he looks through it.
This one takes some translation, but not much — wetness must mean for cooking, but then, no. He reads, he searches how do horses sleep and looks again at the words on the page. He looks back at his phone. (💬︎ Jane 1 unread message)
I Wanted Only a Little
By Jane HirshfieldI wanted, I thought, only a little,
two teaspoons of silence—
one for sugar,
one for stirring the wetness.No.
I wanted a Cairo of silence,
a Kyoto.
In every hanging garden
mosses and waters.The directions of silence:
north, west, south, past, future.It comes through any window
one inch open,
like rain driven sideways.Grief shifts,
as a grazing horse does,
one leg to the other.But a horse sleeping
sleeps with all legs locked.
He reads about how horses sleep.
But then, no.
The next one is easier still.
please go on showing me
faces you led me to
To These Eyes
By W. S. Merwin
February 3, 2013You only ones
I ever knew
you that have shown me
what I came to see
from the beginning
just as it was leaving
you that showed me the faces
in the realms of summer
the rivers the moments of gardens
all the roads that led here
the smiles of recognition
the silent rooms at nightfall
and have looked through the glasses
my mother was wearing when she died
you that I have never seen
except nowhere in a mirror
please go on showing me
faces you led me to
daylight the bird moment
the leaves of morning
as long as I look
hoping to catch sight
of what has not yet been seen
He closes the magazine.
The pile is not tall. He can't read poems every day, and some of them he doesn't even like. Some of them rub him like sandpaper. He throws out most of them. A few he cuts out and puts in a drawer of the desk where he opens his mail.
He unlocks his door, keys in the security code, toes off his shoes. The house-sitter separated out the magazines: two, one of them old. He opens a protein shake and falls into the sofa, flips through to the first poem.
Threshold he types in to translate. Then, hewn. (💬︎ Jane 1 unread message)
Fortress
By Yusef Komunyakaa
May 5, 2014Now I begin with these two hands
held before me as blessing & weapon,blackbirds in fierce flight & instruments
of touch & consolation. This sign meansstop, & this one of course means come forth,
friend. I draw a circle in the red iron clayaround my feet, where no evil spirit dares
to find me. One’s hands held at this angleover a boy’s head are a roof over a sanctuary.
I am a greenhorn in my fortress in the woodswith my right eye pressed to a knothole.
I can see a buzz in the persimmon tree,its ripe letting go—a tiny white cross
in each seed. The girl’s fiery jump ropestrikes the ground. I see the back door
of that house close to the slow creekwhere a drunken, angry man stumbles
across the threshold every Friday.I see forgiveness, unbearable twilight,
& these two big hands know too muchabout nail & hammer, plank & uneasy sky.
Hewn stone & mortar is another world,& sometimes a tall gate comes first.
Then huge wooden barrels of grain,flour, salted meat, & quicklime before
twenty-eight crossbows in four towers.
He leans his head back and closes his eyes.
He flips through too many words and boring, provocative pictures. He shouldn't, but he wants to. There's something to the feelings, glancing off of him, something cleansing about it. He wants that cleansing, wants to get up, wants what comes next, wants to be somewhere else.
Somewhere not here.
Somewhere not—(💬︎ Jane 1 unread message)
I
Can see you, beautiful and wry as you draw near,
And I am reassured you are not coming. Yes.
Café De L’Imprimerie
By Sean O’Brien
May 5, 2014I wait for you inside a glass beside
The long dim window of the Café de l’Imprimerie.
I see you, beautiful and wryAnd not yet here, and yet not here,
While this late-summer evening never ends
And never ends but is infinitesimallyDimming on the street beside Les Halles, where I
Can see you, beautiful and wry as you draw near,
And I am reassured you are not coming. Yes.All night I wait for you at the Café de l’Imprimerie.
Your absence makes you beautiful and wry
And this late-summer evening never ends,Nor does the beautiful intolerable
Music, where the truth is cut
With sentiment and surely fatal.Come now. Do not come. Come now. Do not,
And lead me to a room where you undress,
A bare white room at an untraceable addressWhere we will stay forever. Come now. Do not. Yes.
It doesn't need translation. Or, he doesn't care.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. There are creases in the poem from The Baltimore Girl's magazine. Not the one she read him, the other one.
Ilya tells himself he thinks of her when he looks at it. The way she left him inside of her while she reached for the magazine. Her casual facility with fucking, her confidence. The way she didn't care where he was anymore, the way he saw her stop thinking of him as a person, the way she let him do the same.
The way it's different with Hollander. The way Hollander is never less himself, the way he never tries to get Ilya to be smaller. The way he asked "Really?" when Ilya told him what he'd been reading. The way he'd let Ilya lie. The way Ilya knew he saw through it. The way Ilya likes being seen until he doesn't. The way Ilya sees things differently now—The Baltimore Girl, The Brooklyn Girl, The Atlanta Girl—the things he doesn't want anymore.
(💬︎ Jane 2 unread messages)
The things he does.
(💬︎ Lily typing…)