Mortmain

‘No es el amor quien muere,

somos nostros mismos’ Cernuda

Here I am

shrouded in family.

Did Plath love her babies?

Did Stevens love his wife?

I know

Akhmatova loved her son,

watched for him every day outside the gaol

that long winter in St Petersburg which was

Leningrad by then,

though in the end it was Tsvetayeva,

two babies down, now just the son,

her husband dead

and hungry,

all the lovers,

loose-leaf touch, long gone

who tied the filthy noose

around her neck

in that dingy shack

in that deep

black

wood.

I watch her swing,

Destiny,

a deciduous leaf in the wind,

a gorgeous vegetable forest frost

untainted

by the mortmain

of family.

I sometimes wonder whether Plath

even noticed the petrifying lump of coal

that was her Ted spouse.

Stalin made it necessary

to write a poem on a scrap

and read it and burn it

and pass it on,

like the word of God,

a tongue inserted into the

mouth of the living dead

for Ahkmatova and her friends

in the silver age

when Stalin was a family man.

He saved the man of clouds,

crossed out his name on the execution list,

condemning him to the despot’s wrinkled kiss.

Poor Pasternak of the Arab horse’s face

would have preferred I think

a longer phone call

or a scrap of paper, read and burnt

to watching his Osip rival’s end.

Did Anna and Marina ever forgive,

do you think, his

incoherent stammering?

Is it love that dies

or us?

Each poem a scrap

read and burnt,

burnt and read

on our coal tongues,

whispered through our blackened lips,

grit.

Grit and bite and

pass it on so that the living dead

know to breathe,

to spurn

the rope

and wait,

sewn up in white,

on the failure of a heart

in a lovely dacha,

in Komarovo

in the midnight light.

Mortmain was first published in Some Other Damn Rainbow -Unsanctioned Writing of the Middle East, ed. Hind Shoufani (Beirut) 2012