windows—awful little gratings—frilly, façade years—I can hardly believe it—and Ginkgoes

It was a weird weekend weatherwise.
Stuff touched down, from funnels to hail kernels,
all along the sickle-like coast of Vladivostok,
where we were renting a room full of beds
and windows—awful little little windows with
white wire security screens stapled to them,
keeping out everything but the June bugs and flies.

Vladivostok et ses environs, which included
the Gulf of Love, as it was known in those days,
had suffered the severest famine in seventy years
under the untrained oversight of Lustful Leonid,
a social smoker with a few extra pounds,
a controversial appointment of the former Tsarina.
Well, at least our hostellerie was secluded.

I thought of you when I explored the creek banks,
a place overgrown with crabapples and ginkgoes,
enclosed by largish iron gratings—frilly,
to say the least. From there one can spot
crumbling gargoyles that line the main building's
façade, and the arched terraces that stratify its flank.
I remembered you posing by Felisburto's "Phalanx"

at Little Five Points, that fantastic statue
of creatures eating other creatures, so modern,
and we remarked we'd never seen decoupage
so daring, in concrete, and on such a scale as that.
I fumbled through my pack to find the camera,
picked it out and began snapping shot upon shot.
In that hat, Mathilde, few women could match you.

In that skirt you looked like some spurned heiress
heading out into the night to prove she's still got it.
In pale lipstick you smacked of Greta Garbo
or Lily Dean, or a Mackelwayne sister. I waited
for you for seven years—I can hardly believe it—and
you never came. And I retired to Russian, and the rest
(as they say) is hail blown across a hotel terrace.

copyright 2007 Aaron Belz
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Barnwood magazine
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