Here, even fire gorged with wood burns low.
Blue flames nip at the sky like wounded dogs.

Everyday we begin at the
northernmost point of endurance,
hiking like ghosts toward Kolyma;
afternoons of anemic silence,
black nights spent shivering,
listening to the screams of madmen.

Petersburg seems more beautiful now
than I thought it at the time,
spring days with Akhmatova and Nikolai,
wine as endless as a child’s wishes.

Should you receive my letter, Nadezhda,
think of me, on the outskirts of Vladivostok,
snow packing like a coma, my dreams
still as dazzling as wild flowers.
Oh God, Nadezhda, the sun
is an old friend whose name I have forgotten.

The Pendulum

Night passes like black thread
through the eye of my insomnia.
Over coarse hours, a methodical blindness is stitched;
by dawn, I see nothing, and am almost manic.

Deaths as protracted as a bad movie,
marriages ending like a corporate lay-off,
the saga of the bottle and the pipe,
I carry seeds of doom and divinity
on the tip of my tongue.
I have lived long enough
to see yellow roses sprout from cow dung
and diamonds turn to urine in my hand.

I know the trumpet blasts toward silence,
corpses conduct the symphony of rebirth;
everything is destined to become its own enemy,
to die the way it was born,
with lightning splitting its heart in two.

All Poetry by John Amen