art from the artist
Whose self is bigger than their body
whose self:the wooden panels of the podium
from which the big self speaks.
In all our idioms,
the bigger person
is the one that’s quiet,
who lets the circular current
of ocular data train on without a glitch.
Two blocks from my mother’s
Moscow apartment
on a rare pedestrian street,
a bar dresses in red regalia,
hammers and sickles, pours
peach vodka out
of the samovar.
An inlay of an unreal era
can be preserved and delivered
for the grace of a tourist’s sip.
My great-grandmother’s names,
dates, assignments, lie in the classified
archive I cannot touch.
She is not special, not more
than a million others long gone.
Without the state’s permission,
where do you train your eyes:
on the undressed present or the tongue
of the biggest person left alive?
Haven’t I sat in classrooms in the freest of nations?
Haven’t I seen its export, haven’t I learned my lesson:
only aesthetic pleasures deserve a living frame.