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Illuminating poetry since 1959

Posted on | Poetry

Two Kings

by

One day, walking past
his old apartment complex
on campus, I stopped
& watched
the late Professor’s furniture
piled into a junk removal car


The king bed
could barely fit
The king bed
gave the workers
a hard time


I’m here, I said to the Professor
Together
we can watch
what happens
in this world & in that world


In this world & in that world
you built an enormous tower
of scholarship, a vast
knowledge of the beloved:
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky


So that, after a long life
in academia, you heard one last
Dostoevsky remark, a calling
from the great man himself:
Let us meet


& to that meeting, did you wear
your favorite baseball cap, with
Crime & Punishment on it?
& did you two laugh?


When your books
were given away
after you passed away
I carried home
two heavy boxes

Svetlana Turetskaya grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the former USSR, before she immigrated to the United States. Her poetry and fiction appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, The Florida Review, Wigleaf, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholarship. She has ABD in Philosophy from UC-Riverside. Svetlana now lives in the Bay Area and works at the Stanford Humanities Center.

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