Mandelstam's Ghost Returns Too Early

[to Osip Mandelstam]

someone has turned the moon's wick down

so that I no longer see where the

vague wolves gather.

there's tar on the breeze

a perfume from Space

but I'm not the same one

I can't keep it straight

why Song is still caught in

my windy throat

and your smile is ravishing yet snows

on these familiar scenes

the moon's turned up, the earth

less featureless now

is this where we escaped the moat

dripping like trees in the green of summer

by winter canals?

mary angela douglas 16 june 2014

Note on the poem:Whether or not Akhmatova hears him I do not know. Whether or not she is still on earth herself I do not know but I think this is true.  That is the meaning, one of them, of his "returning too early".

I imagine her in one version writing at her desk a few years after he has died.  But like the notebook variations of , Dostoyevsky, the many pathed woods of possibility, some or all of these versions are true in the labyrinth of Time as long as you do not forget: these poets were on the earth and left their words for you to find...

P.S. the happiest secret of this poem that I am telling only you is that Mandelstam, although confused in the poem does not remember his pain on earth.  That is one reason the wolves are vague to him or the wolves are vague because Russia has altered in that way.  And Mandelstam has forgotten almost all of his pain on earth, at least, the details as well as Akhmatova's pain, Nadezhda's pain, the pain of all Russia.  He remembers escaping although, in the end, he did not.  At least, on this side of the equation.

The escape from the moat, a fairytale image.  He must have longed to escape so much in reality.  But some vestige of pain or the memory of pain remains which is why, there is the image of the summer trees after soft rains by winter canals.

He has not yet forgotten everything.