libertine

have been treating myself like shit, though am not at all hedonistical. am nearly dissolute. which is the whole point, i guess. i feel like the milkweed that's climbed up on the rose bush's back and strung his white tendrils all over her, her hips and leaves.

there is the recurring dream--i'm in gorky, at the train station with masha. she's seeing me off to irkutsk, and before i step on the train, i hand her a bottle of windex, then find my seat. she follows me from the platform and cleans the outside of my dirty window, so i'll be able to see the country on my journey. three days and four hours. alone, with a few books and a bag of bread and apples. at irkutsk, i catch the ferry boat up the angara into lake baikal, deep into the middle of the lake. i jump overboard and dive. i can see the bottom, clear water, more than a mile deep, and i go down and come apart like a clod of dirt as i go.

.

.

.

for twentynine years now

the body

has been trying

to outshed the soul

dead skins

attaching themselves

to even the softest wind

yet the soul

has been outmaking

post-script

have been unusually haunted by mariengof's novel less the lying, and esenin's cruel transgressions. his refusals, first to know, and then even acknowledge his children by zinaida, first wife whom he never managed to divorce despite a number of later marriages. his first abandoned child, the one time he meets him, doesn't warm to esenin. the second one, years later, he sees unexpectedly at a train station with the mother. he says the kid is too dark to be his and walks away.

another anecdote from the book that broke my heart--there is a neighbor in moscow, a widower with a young son, maybe four years old. he tries placing him in a state boarding school, or an orphanage, but ultimately resorts to sitting with the boy on a train up north until he falls asleep, then slipping out and getting a ticket back to moscow alone. problem solved.