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Lenin’s bones

In Russia, everyone talks about Lenin

(who says

you can’t lie in poetry?)

Lenin lies in his tomb and visitors mass like pigeons

in Venice, a calmer place, to his square

squat & clay-colored

monument (I won’t lie:

I never went in to see the bones

I felt it sufficed to see Russia.)

(Of course, that isn’t

fair. the old woman I saw

by the summer-colored Summer Palace

sprawl, pulling handfuls of sticks from

fistfuls of snow, may have as easily been the pinkie toe

of C. the Great)

Pinkie toe

pinko

why didn’t Russia

just say no?

My father has traveled to:

Britain

France

Mexico

Israel

Costa Rica

Guatemala

The Queen Charlotte Islands

Never Russia,

though he was a Trotskyite at

Chicago

nowadays, he and my brother

who studied history and government

with a convert�s zeal in college argue

about Stalin

he brought industry he stood up to Hitler

he was brilliant he was crazy

twenty-million dead.

Lenin has a tomb

He can be understood

or at least stood over, and

examined

Russian vendors hawk Stalin

to tourists

on streetsides, on clifftops, by the

hundreds, along with Matrushka dolls

and liquor flasks flagged with hammer’n’sickle.

Not one of our tour guides

would speak his name

the hunched bundled woman pried branches

from the snow outside the Summer Palace where

C. the Great once flooded a ballroom

and left the windows open. C. came back

to ice skate. now tourists shod in plastic booties

slip delicately from room to room. Their feet

never touch the ground.

Trotsky had an affair / (is an ice pick

with Frida Kahlo. How bad / an absolution? Stalin

could he be? / just died)

our tour guides would mention

the Great Revolution, perhaps V.I. L

then skip to 91 and say, Russia opened! they would talk

about hotels. one pointed out

the first McDonalds, for which, at lunchtime,

people mass like pigeons to Venice, a calmer

place, even today.

Venice, I found

uninteresting, and smelly. From Moscow,

I contracted a parasite. Like a tattoo, it fades

but never goes away.

My mother saw Moscow in the sixtees

When she left her hotel room, people would come

dig through her bags, tap her phones

She expected this

My trip went smoothly, but I never saw Lenin

Only from the outside, only his trackmarks, never

the bones, which I hear they have to bury now

after all. What I regret is not buying

a Matrushka doll

My boyfriend�s Russian father

received one from a neighbor, filled with vodka,

and laughed and laughed and laughed.