FRIDAY, APRIL 17
Circumstances of the day determine where my mind goes wandering. Let’s see if I can figure out why the following poem came to my mind today. First, every day for the past couple of week I have visited a close friend in hospital who, at least one doctor at first feared, might have osteotuberculosis. Although he is desperately ill, he apparently doesn’t have that problem. The Russian poet Viktor Aleksandrovich Sosnora almost died of the disease when he was a child in Leningrad. Second, I was not on a beach in Egypt today, but I was surrounded by sea gulls at one point this morning when I was setting up my tripod and camera on the little beach in the coastal village of Laguna Beach. I didn’t get a single picture of sea gulls (lots of brown pelicans and cormorants in today’s photo), but for some reason I remembered a special poem, “Leaving the Seaside,” and searched for it and found it when I got back home to San Diego.

It would take more words than I have today to explain why I like the following poem by Viktor Sosnora. His poems couldn’t be mistaken for the work of any other Russian poet. Although much less famous than Solzhenitsyn in the Western World, Sosnora is a man of equal courage. Although a contemporary of Alexander Kushner and Joseph Brodsky, Sosnora chose to experiment with words rather than follow the more familiar patterns of the Petersburg poetic tradition. As a child he survived the German seige of Leningrad (блокада Ленинграда) while I was enjoying a safe, secure childhood in America. While I wandered through my childhood, Sosnora was captured three times by the Gestapo when he was just a kid; because of his youth he was released each time. He survived a German attack by pretending to be dead after a bullet had grazed his skull.

LEAVING THE SEASIDE
by Viktor Aleksandrovich Sosnora

You, you don’t need to cry,-we’ll be like seagulls from Egypt...
My thoughts are silly--I can’t figure them out.
My thoughts have no abode-not even in the sky.
Sleep, oh, sleep, pan-pipe, like beasts,--your echo has frozen.
You, woman, are the love of a childish Don Juan!...
Sea gulls, more sea gulls, And the sea in a wet soutane.
The salted sun crawls, tickles the cheeks,
or are these my blood-drops from the sea?
Fog. A familiar sign of the moon in the ocean,
a warm shadow of the last desert pine on the sand.
You, you don’t need to cry,--this is my face at the bottom of the goblet
in that buffoonery sea, blood-drop of wine.
Fog-the running of a white-hoofed horse.
The third bell will also pass. Time to makethe sign of the cross.
(There was a buffoon-become a monk. Revenge on fashion).
Where’s the fourth? It isn’t to be. We won’t hear it.
You, woman, you don’t need to cry, we both are only embraces...
Maiden-Fish
You walk like a fish on its tail. The floor is red.
We have a room, but in communal rocks.
A chocolate cupboard. The desk in coins.
The window is electric oil.
Fish, I’m your brother; we’re both sea beasts.
You’re stretched out on a blue blanket.
Embracing bellies and blindness of amorous
ravings!. . . Our lamp will go out.
Is it despair? Or is it jealously marching through
the lymph like the Alexandrian cavalry? We’ll leave
these pastures. . . We have a room; we are fish,
there are two of us. We will choke here. . .
For tomorrow, the labor of hooves and Pegasus’ wings,
Censorship, and coldness of bread,
we will clink kneecaps in toasts,
have champagne ripples of a fish-scale!
Oh, the howl of a fish! We need tails, as in combat,
Muscles in nodes, and a yell and prattle,
we need fingers-five and five on waists!
I kiss. . . Hickeys on nipples
from both fingers, and responding kisses
and gills stuck to face-gills.
And in between leg flaps,
we’re sucking mucus with tongues
sinister. . . To learn is to hate.
To love is not to know. We recall-knew all:
there’s no intuition, not a single capillary
that hasn’t caressed somebody’s loins;
we can untangle neither all the hair of all the bodies,
nor dishonorable ships nor the evil of a buss;
Or simply-no sin in a sin, no temple in a temple.
A boom from the moon. Petersburg avenues.
Fish, we swim away into canals and it’s easier
for us to lap the life of others, the bodies of others,
to vomit, no matter under or on top of whom.
So labor will pass. So the world will pass. So will my kin.
I, the last, soundlessly bless you, last ones!. . .
There are two mottoes in a monk’s cell:
a smile and the lips of the snake.