I hear the lyric voice of this gruesome beauty in your free verse. which is why I love it so.

John High 

2:57 PM (7 hours ago)

to John

Taking off a tattered dress worn by the dead & dancing in mud

the girl glanced over the snows of an empty

field— the horse stood by the edge of a cliff

& the voices circling about their wandering

all of this time she had thought that she

& the boy were following them, that there was

some purpose & destiny in their pilgrimage, & now

she sensed in the night that we were

following her here in night, she & the boy trailed by

monks and ghosts & birds & trees & all of

the others, and in that moment in a perfect silent

pitch—we are here.

John Bailes 

10:53 PM (0 minutes ago)

to John

Destined to be here,
eyes open
or
not...

There's something about 
an American poet 
who loves Russians 
and is a Buddhist.

There are all these boys and girls 
blind and dumb 
running around on the steppes, 
down to creeks 
and 
all that land and sky 
so alive from before time 
and even during; 
butterflies and bugs, 
mosquito swarms, 
clouds, horses, swords and slaughter: 
some kind of 
destiny.

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, the Czar; 
Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Mayakovsky; 
Stalin, pogroms, and Pushkin; 

Finn's starving north of Leningrad, 

St. Petersburg;
 Solzhenitsyn's archipelagos: 
Not one ever returns 
as in the river, 
Neva. 


Who is paddling now?

I hear the lyric voice 

of this gruesome beauty 

in your free verse 

which is why 

I love it 

so.

Did I send this one to you already?

Almost the end of April