In the Odessa market,
the women stand
like wrinkled monuments
weighing out
their buckets
of sour cherries.

The onion domes
glitter in the blue sky;
the Black Sea
bobs
with corpulent tourists,
who have been eating
blini since the end
of the war.

Even the women
well past bearing
are bearing bellies
full of borscht.

& you my darling,
my dangerous shaygets,
my sweet rascal,
what do you think of
my having come
to this old country
in search of
a dead man
when I have
such a lively man
at home?

This is the final
mourning
for my grandfather--
that damned old Russian Jew
with his melancholia,
& his sad Russian songs,
& his dark paintings,
& his fear,
his fear, his fear.

I come back
to Odessa
to know
there is no going back.

The dead
are dead.

What lives of them
we bear within--
as those fat Russian women bear
their four decades
of blini.

I am as Russian
in my soul
as Pushkin--
yet as American
as Emily Dickinson.

I am finally as Russian
as you, my love--

there is
no going
back.

The poets
all over the world
know that exile
is home
& home is
a sort of exile.

Perhaps the music
we make
from hip to hip
is more hysterical
& rich
for being borne
from Jew to WASP
from WASP to Jew.

But it is, after all,
the music
of the spheres--
& our genitals
are nothing but
the lyre.

Fuck all our
ancestors!

Let them lie buried
in Odessa,
in Kiev, in Minsk,
in Virginia
& in goddamned
Darien.

We are, at least,
alive.

I wept over
the bones of the dead
at Babi Yar,
but when a little child
toddled
over the green, green grass
(greener for all the bones & blood
that fertilized
the soil),
I thought of you
& how I would like
to fuck like mad
over the dead
at Babi Yar.

Blasphemy
or holiness?
Who's to say?

History is hideous
& we are swept
into it
as with
an old twig broom
wielded by a Russian hag.

But I am done
with this mourning
my darling.

& done
with this dolorous
history.
I start anew
with you.

I bless my grandfather
for having fled
this country
of wrinkled women,
& the pervasive smell
of mildew & of sea.

I bless your grandfather,
for whatever he did
to bring you
to me.

But most of all
I want to be
your refuge
in the exile
which all of us
share.

© Erica Mann Jong

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