Do not begin with a date of birth. Remember we are discussingthe man who smashed the glass of the hall clock so that thehands stopped in 1938. Then the minute hand and the hourhand bent themselves into another form -- a compass or anavigational instrument -- so that his words sailed on to anothercentury.
Now spread the years apart so that the facts fall free of the manas he strides to the podium, the poems opening like a roomamong the ruins, the light crawling out of the veins of rock andonto the altar, the artifacts and the large squares, thosemysteries where you placed your thoughts and returned towatch them be blessed or beheaded by a power that propelledthe darkness through the day.
Then remember his breath was a flame and a fountain, thesecret police were tortured by what they could not catch or kill,the poems were free and stalking the country, the peasantsharvesting nouns when there was no wheat.
Death. All we can say for certain is no one ever saw him dead,there is no grave or marker, the poet’s words continued to work,mingling with the common language, hammering at the knee ofan idol.
Second last sighting: January 1990. After fifty-two years of livingin faded notebooks and whispers that circled throughimmigrant cafés his voice was officially heard in Moscow.Last sighting: two nights ago. The streets were dark anddeserted. The storm pounded my windows. I gripped the wheeland saw a man without an umbrella or a hat. His pace wasunhurried and he did not delude himself by holding a jacket ora newspaper over his head. He did not stop or take notice ofme. He just kept walking.
