for Dmitry Golynko
You are leaving with all these poems. You are leaving. An over-the-shoulder bag is over your shoulder.
And the river is leaving. It is making its unwavering way to no longer being a river.
It is moving among façades that are neither moving nor moved.
They are repeating like stanzas in a serial poem where one of the lines is constant.
You have covered your face with glasses. Your face is in back of your glasses and the beautiful façades are in front of them. This says you are leaving.
What an artificial word is beautiful, how moving it is in its awkwardness, in its etymological reflection of violence and occupation.
Ours is a city that used to exist fully, for it was populated by shades and reflections like Facebook.
It stands to reason that you too will become a shade for those who are to come. Because you are leaving and the river is leaving, sweet Never run softly.
It is said that the nymphs are departed, the tritons are departed, and those who had lived in these apartments and also those who had lived in those apartments.
Only the sphinxes stand guard vainly over the rivers, which are leaving, and the lions and the griffins.
And the cyclopic surveillance apparatus of the sun on a midnight in June, and the fabulous animals cast brazenly in the public gardens of Leto…they all stand bereft, for it is said that esse est percipi, to be seen is to be.
They all stand riven, feeling you leave in your glasses through the stairwells and courtyards of this criminal and terminal city with your over-the-shoulder bag.
Please you put this poem in your bag also. Maybe you can read it later.
There are many beautiful reflections being left in my Facebook feed because of your leaving. You are covering your face with glasses in almost all of them.
It is said that there is water everywhere and that we too are water or rather water—in cursive—and that the reflections upon its face are not things that exist.
