Today's poem is by Matthew Rohrer

Poems for Anna Akhmatova
       

Your door opened into the heart
of the summer but I had to leave
your place, your husband,
your son, soon they would return.
What were we doing.
You were a tease. We saw Shakespeare
in the Park. Your perfume was too much.
Now I wouldn't even be able to prop
myself up that long, on the cool grass,
waving off with a nod
the little ushers buzzing around
who knew who we were

*

There is a lost time
when I wore enormous clothes
and all of us triumphed
as Z. said, by not studying
for the test, and staying out
all night drinking,
and acing it, we triumphed,
this was just a metaphor for our lives,
and in a bar in the daylight
arguing about Keats,
I spoke the dread words
that pinned that afternoon
to the wind, and it recedes,
it recedes, and now is so far away
who can really say
if those were the days

*

The evening turns blue out.
Childhood is never very far away.
These Russian poems
in translation are proof.
And they are too heavy
to hold up. I have to put them down.
And when I look in the mirror my god
the weight of all these pointless days.
I'm shivering, but I will never
be as cold as you
standing in line
outside the prison
for nothing.

*

According to my watch
I cannot have a drink
yet, instead I breathe
deeply.
The horror of living
in this world of men
is softened by reading books
about the Eternal Struggle.
And by sleep. To wander
in the crowded bazaars
of a dream, and miss a flight,
and lie in bed with a poet
whose poems I cannot read.
But tossing and turning.
The world is not right.
The river runs softly in the night.

*

Reading her book all week
I've had dreams—
that I was anyplace but here.
Wearing ermine capes.
Waking up feeling sore.
While the world swirls around me
and the wind suddenly
alters its voice
I look out over the city
to see the clouds
have surrounded us

*

You were even too dark
for the day. When the sun
saw you it hurried past.
And you lay there listening
to the river calling you
out of your bedroom,
into the street, to perch
like a sick bird
on the bridge in the rain.
And you were too goth
for me. I like frisbees.

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Copyright © 2023 Matthew Rohrer All rights reserved
from Conduit
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission