1
I woke up with Marina’s silver bell in my mouth. The tin jangle of it, metal on tooth. I sealed my lips tight for safekeeping and carried it through coffee and work, before wandering back to my notebooks to see if it was a “real” bell, a roil of real peels as opposed to a merely imagined one. There —-in an excerpt of Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poems for Blok”, as translated Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine —- dated April 15, 1916 (all those strange timbres coalescing around my birth-date again), Marina speaking to Aleksandr Blok:
“Poets are not born in a country,” Ilya writes. “Poets are born in childhood.” And childhood is a separate country distinguished by its literature, the heaps of Proustian madeleines and Michel Leris’ “once upon a time” sidling up next to Benjamin’s storyteller.
2
According to a 3rd century treatise on rivers and mountains (possibly written by Plutarch), there is a stone in Lydia called argrophylax that frequently gets mistaken for silver. The stone is hard to distinguish because “it is intimately intermixed with the little spangles of gold . . . found in the sands of the river.” What makes argrophylax is “one very strange property” that causes wealthy Lydians to place it right under the threshold of the treasurehouses where they store their gold. The stone is said to protect the gold from theft by emitting a trumpet-like sound whenever robbers draw near, thus causing the thieves to believe that they are being chased. Not only do the thieves run away without robbing the rich, but they also flee and fall over precipices and thus come to a violent death.
3
Sharp click of a cocked gun. Tick-tick of nails scraping the hardwood.
A dance beginning in the light click of hooves at night, accumulating in that desire to run farther and faster over a meadow without pausing to catch my breath. I guise my urge to gallop fastidiously, bury it in my relationship to dance.
Have always buried it in particular gestures—- the cocked elbow of hand on hip, the curl of the fingers, the conviction that speed makes one invulnerable, unbreakable. “Moving too fast is a way of refusing to wait for the duende to rise,” my teacher told me.
4
People say the past is another land you can’t visit. They say this while holding a dragon whose name is Leaf Blower. One gets cul-de-sacked into conversations with people who think the world is the same but different. It stings to say no. Pain extends the distance between what must be done and the doing. Time being a way of making things feel far. Building dimension. Your tramp, my bolero. Theory is repertoire of ways to draw lines through the same land. A palm ties a face to hand.
On the sidewalk with ailing bikes, a dead end I can’t describe.
A chain-link fence worn by the house like a pair of fine cufflinks.
The past dangles from my neck like the highways to hell in marking the hips of nude silver mermaid with outrageous nipples purchased on Coney Island. The past is a mermaid who measures time in twitches. She begins her lascivious dance against my throat least expected. The past is a necklace offensive to nice liberal mothers. But a necklace is not another land. Not for this hand. Holding papers. A hand that fries eggs for breakfast. What’s past is a plural. Moments dangle like aluminum cans from the bumper of narrative bodies.
5
Titled “Scene with Two Pinecones and a Baba” — that silver platter.
Stuck made three versions of Salome, all finished in 1906.
Unlike Stuck, I wrote the one-act plays after staring at his Salomes.
The versions. The left platter is gilded; but the silver platter on the right is the one required by the scene. It is the visible Salome, or the Salome made available for the purpose of the one-act play, even though that Salome is useless to me, since the scene was composed in relation to the golden painting, the horribly jaune-tinged Salome. The way her golden hand waits atop the green, sequin-studded slope of her hip, —- speaks to the dance.
(And besides, I tell myself, argrophylax isn’t pure silver. Argrophylax is silver screwed through with the spangles of riversand gold.)
7
In the sixth minute of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”, the silver ring on my finger melts. No matter where I am when listening to it, this happens every time. In that sixth minute. The melting.
8
It’s not just my hands; though, if forced to describe them I’d confess that they are unladylike— have always been resolutely unladylike, or to quote a young student: “Your hands look like they belong to a small man.” For the world is filled with small men and my hands belong to them. Even a student can see this. A student with eyes like blue bagpipes, summoning something merry from me. How easy it remains to be made merry by music, by bows and strings and percussion dissolving into its deep blue notes. The rest can be ruined—- language, another obfuscatory veil that hardens into velour, gains a sturdiness and heft, when we start to believe it.
9
HE: I found this sheet of paper on the nightstand and wanted to check before tossing it.
ME: It’s a receipt.
HE: Yes, but you wrote something on it.
ME: What?
HE: It says “velvet hangover”—
ME: Don’t look at me like that. I was making a note about something I read. David Williams. “Trümmerliteratur Redux.” Rubble-lit.
HE: (holding paper and waiting)
ME: Toss it.
10
On the train back from New York, 24 hours with no claims upon my time. At first, I laid words next to each other and listened to see if they vibrated differently when the wheels bumped over old bridges. I wanted to make Silver sigh.
After gulping up a bit of night at a station in Virginia, the scent of cold autumn leaves clung to my jacket and accompanied me back to my cabin, where the notebooks waited to be touched with that non-teleological tenderness Leo Bersani described. The notebooks have always been patient. That’s why I kiss them before lifting the pen and glancing briefly at the hand— the sparkling greenish fingernails, the hue and crackle of Salome’s skirt. Alex (who is quite irresistible in her suasions) painted them and for a moment, I am surprised to see my hands, the fingernails colored, possibly even ladylike at a distance. Hands belonging to small men.
11
On March 9, 1915, one day after arriving in Petrograd, the poet Sergei Yesenin visited Alexsander Blok and regaled him with declamations from his own poems. On that night, he was introduced to other poets, including Sergey Gorodetsky, Nikolai Klyuev and Andrei Bely. Blok promoted Yesenin’s poetry and helped start his literary career as a “peasant poet.”
One month later, among the early blooms and late snows of April 1915, Tsvetaeva penned the “Poems for Blok”—- the source of this silver bell.
12
My October train from New York to Birmingham meets a train plunging through a different October, on a continent, in the year 1917. Marina Tsvetaeva is riding from Crimea to Moscow. The Bolshevik Revolution had just taken place; her husband Sergei Efron, joined the Whites as they regrouped for one final stand on Don. Overnight, the money she had saved and inherited vanished, making it impossible for Marina to survive with her two children alone in Moscow as disease, starvation, and war ravaged Russia. But for now, Marina is taking the train back to Moscow, and hoping that her husband will be spared death.
Like any poet on a train (or a bus or a park bench or a dentist’s office), Marina began writing an essay. In this case, the essay unfolded from an opening that directly addressed Sergei, whom she calls Seriozhenka (or S.). "Should God grant this miracle —leave you among the living, I shall follow you like a dog," she began — before veering into a swarm of impressions and words overheard from the Russians riding the train beside her. Notably, the voices are spliced and collaged together without any transition or naming of speakers. It is the babble, the disaggregated masses, a paean to modernism.
What follows is an excerpt from “October on the Train" (Moscow, October- November 1917). Presumably, Tsvetaeva’s own thoughts are indicated by the absence of quotation markets to bracket them:
“Stenka Razin, I'm no Persian princess, but I’ll give you a ring – silver – as a keepsake.”
“Look: a two headed eagle, wings spread, that is: guitarist 10 Kopec piece in a silver frame. Will it fit your hand? It will. My hand isn't lady like. But you… Don’t understand hands: the form, the nails, the breed. You understand the palm (warmth) and the fingers (grasp). You’ll understand a handshake.”
“It’s always comrade, comrade, but people still have their own names, don’t they. Maybe you’ll tell me what your name is?”
"Yes, yes, at all the Kremlin receptions.… Because you know, people are people everywhere. Everyone wants to enjoy himself after work. All these executions and shootings…"
The entire Russian intelligence is in these baskets! I need to think about something else. I have to understand that all of this is a dream. After all, in dreams everything is backwards, so… Yes, but dreams do have their surprises: the handle could fall off… Along with the hand.
(Everyday life is a sack: with holes. And you carry it anyway.)
Anxiety about my foot masks the meaning of the threats. My foot – comes first… Now, when I find my foot… And, oh joy: it’s found! Something hurts — somewhere. I pay close attention. It’s there, it’s there my darling! Somewhere far away, deep… The pain sharpens, unbearable now, I make a desperate effort…
But the oak is uprooted: next to me, like a smokestack (neither stocking nor shoe is visible) is my vital, righteous, 2nd foot.
Yes.
—-“(Everyday life is a sack: with holes. And you carry it anyway.)” Bury me in this line; fold my hands inside its coffin brackets.
12
After the Whites were defeated, Sergei could not stay in Soviet Union. He was a wanted man. So he fled to Europe, leaving Marina to search out his fate in Russia. It was Ilya Ehrenberg who told her that Sergei was alive, and living in Berlin. Marina set out to reunite with him, and arrived in what was now the Weimar Republic, her first stop among many European cities where she would live for the following decade. Berlin, Prague, Paris…. the Efrons built a life in Europe. But Sergei was homesick for Russia.
Maybe it was idealism, maybe it was reckless folly: Efron set out to be repatriated and began spying for the NKVD, hoping to secure a return to his homeland. To shorten a long, complicated story, the NKVD ordered Efron to return to Moscow, where he was held in a dacha under house arrest until his formal arrest on 10 December 1937. It’s not clear how much Marina knew about her husband’s doings with the secret police. Nor is it clear that she knew he was spying for the Soviets and had been compromised.
So, the year reads 1939 when Tsvetaeva and her son board a train to Moscow, hoping to be reunited with Efron and perhaps Adriadna, her daughter.
While sitting on the train, Marina re-read some of the notebooks she had packed, and came across the essay titled “October on the Train" that she had written more than a decade earlier.
“I’ll give you a ring – silver – as a keepsake,” a passenger had said in a different world, the world preserved in her notebook.
Should God grant this miracle —leave you among the living, I shall follow you like a dog. She had written these words. She read them aloud as the wheels moved over the tracks and then, staring intently at this line, Marina lifted up her pen and inked the following note in the margins: “And here I am, following him – like a dog [21 years later].”
13
April 14, 1930. Moscow, an apartment in Lubyansky alley. The final night of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s life.
What would you write if this were to be the last poem your hand offered to a page? What would you say to the eternity that will be April?
She loves me, loves me not. I pluck my hand
and throw my torn-off fingers away,
like the games with stray daisies
you tear up and discard each spring.
A shave and a haircut will show my gray hair;
I want the silver of years made very clear.
I hope and believe I will never attain
the shame of common sense.
It’s past one o’clock. You must be fast asleep.
The silver river Oka in the night
Is just the Milky Way.
I’m in no hurry; no need to send
Telegrams to wake and worry you.
I want the silver of years made very clear, the evidence of what living costs us.
Knock on wood I finish the Ariadna poems. Maybe I’ll clean up the essay that is a sack with holes, sculpt shape that can carry the holes hiding inside Tsvetaeva’s as both speakers are swallowed by the trains returning them to their lives. A bird in my hand— and hers. Your name thrown like a stone into the lake of the things I’ve written and hidden. One more silver river in the night disguised as the cosmos.