July 2022
Robert Wexelblatt
wexelblatt@verizon.net
Author's Note: This wintry poem could hardly be more out of season. It is a reminder that a chilly loneliness can constitute a season of its own, also that Russians can produce good poetry and care about it enough to exile or execute those who produce it. A Russian scholar told me that there was a time when you could stop anybody on a street in Petersburg and demand they recite fifty lines of Pushkin without once being disappointed. Lovers of liberty who are denied it may understand freedom best.

You Might Just Think Of Me

when silence doesn't fall but
like the happy dead rises ex
nihilo to mazurka
through the Russian novel
propped against your pajamaed
knees under the maroon quilt,

when the last Trans Am pulsing
its jetblack backbeat ego
dopplers down the dim divide
of your drab suburban street
humming on wet macadam
past the world's final streetlamp,

when billions of besieging
flakes bar your door, rasping
menaces against the sash
with hateful hearts, a wicked
deluge of thought police
silently riding the night,

then you might just think of me
stamping through wet graveyards,
a Nevsky protagonist
in a sodden greatcoat beneath
a freezing lamp, battling the
affronting snow; you just might.
A version of this poem first appeared in South Dakota Review
©2022 Robert Wexelblatt
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