Shadowboxer

Shadowboxer

Nikita used to shadowbox
Frazier, Foreman, and Ali
in the basement of his tenement
in Belgorod. All winter icicles
banged against the pipes
that shielded the windows.

Those afternoons of rationing
and discontent he’d weave
and sweat until his mother
called down, her voice
a bitter ache and terrible:
your father will be late.

Trunked and weary,
he'd stroll to the depot
to shovel out their mound of coal—
the measurement memorized,
the measurement a different art
than defeating Ali.

In summer he could swing
the high bar at Shevchenko Park,
his arms bursting
with delight, the ease of it.
In summer Marina stood
at a distance, quietly applauding.

But in winter the heroes
of America became more real,
bleeding through his jabs
and taunting him, singing
through their Pennsylvania accents,
demanding he recoil.

Later it was Leonard and Hearns,
their black sleek bodies
so quick he believed them
swiveled and inhuman, not men
but stars fallen and seething,
more flexible than light.

Each of his hooks they procured
as their own; each restless moment
prior to sleep they waved at him,
toothy and daring in the easy
American style he despised and loved.
And so he dreamed of them.

He dreamed of Philadelphia
and nemesis Balboa. By then
it was 1985 and his father a statistic
in a Muslim land. By then what mattered
was his uppercut, a white
and unforgiving flash that failed.

After all, he was only a Nikita, twenty-
seven, too slow, too tired
to listen to the sounds of Gorbachev.
Had he been a Cuban, maybe.
Had he been a Bolshevik,
he would have been forgiven.

But Belgorod did not forgive.
They put him on a turbine line
and gave him soup at 4 p.m.,
some bread, a tin of sardines.
They watched him fight machines
that would never fight back.

They watched him grow thin
and dissolute and never asked him
of the things he used to dream of.
At night he drank his tea
in the dark kitchen, his mother
asleep in the next room,
his posters frayed, his arms
trembling. When the Union fell,
he fell down with it. They called it
exhaustion, timidity, but the truth
was worse. He fell because
even standing had become a sin.

An Hour In Kherson

For an hour in Kherson
we strolled the train platform
in the night heat. Even then
the city that stretched around us was—
like the image in a history book,
black and brown and gaunt and weary—
reckoning its doom.

Inside the station former Soviets
sold tea from makeshift counters
and their sons pornography
in halls in the back. I spoke to a man
in the bathroom weighed down
with potatoes, another whose wife
had crumbled the Monday before.

Kherson in miniature,
the station smelled of urine,
turpentine, and boiled eggs, the rot
and phlegm of a dying empire.
I held Yelena’s hand. It felt cold in the heat
and full of sorrow I couldn’t know.
It was her country, her hand

attempting to convey the unsayable:
I’m sorry or we’re sorry or
there might be flowers later
and Coca-Cola with ice. I wish
I would’ve been a man then
in Kherson, a man who knew war
and the misery preceding it.

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