Issue 15, January/February 1998
Philip Havey - Poem

“We were in the first train to wind around Lake Bakal.
  The locomotive decked out with flags and lanterns
  And we left the station to the sad sounds of  ‘God Save the Czar’.
  If I were a painter I would splash lots of reds and yellows over the
end of the trip
  Because I think we were all crazy.”-
				   Blaise Cendrars


How I envy you and your little whore, Jeanne, so young and wildly
demented,
Highballing from Moscow upon the first rolling stock to the great
revolution,
Throttle thrown opened wide, hotbed stoked, tearing away in sprays of
cinders,
As the city’s cupolas fell behind, gilied and silvern like rows of
buttered cakes,
Acquiring their penultimate glaze of fiery ice under the burnished rays
of dawn.

Gantry balls realigned as you passed through Kazan, just another normal
train,
Until carillons from the monasteries in the hills oozed their noon’s
rich honey,
Telling your Comrade Comandir, posed conductor, to rip open the yellow
letter
That would sent you far to the East where pistons stroked Perm’s lead
horizon 
Like hammers while bells, more brazened blue, crystallized the chill
winter air. 
Where the Urals rose, the tricolors were ripped off engine mounts and
fenders, 
For flags to wound the sky a bloody red as sure hands traced a radiant
thread
Acrossed maps of Omsk and Irkusk, extending the route to Baykal and Urga
In a headlong rush to cut off the Allied column marching North to join
forces
With Admiral Kolchak’s White Army and the last regiment of  Cossack
guards.

Around you, armies gathered, embracing each other in dazzling squalls of
snow.
Militias marched and counter-marched, skilled orators spoke, toasts were
drunk,
Bunting hung as crimson beacons, bands played, valves freezing on their
breath, 
While confetti gusted with pelting snow to pile up high around fences
and poles. 
Corps of conscripts stood disembodied in pothered plumes of phantasmal
mists,
Each face more oriental than the last as you strove from one station to
the next
To close upon the rising sun, then, Tomsk, Novonikolayyevsk and
Khabarovsk-
Before hooking to Manchuria where the army drove guidons in the frozen
earth
And tented rifles into stacks, letting you paused to record all that had
taken place.

From your page, I hear, a music press from peaked cylinders of thrusting
steam,
Prodding the clockwork, engine to a fevered pitch-
So unlike my own moment of history, when all of that came abruptly to a
halt
With some doughy apparatchik stuffed into a slate-gray gabardine
business suit, 
Or skirt, like sacked suet (probably just outside of Vladivostok)
strained mightily 
Upward to tug on the chain of the last overhead light before turning the
last key
In the lock of the final door, quite unaware of how by simple twist of
his or her
Wrist alone one of the most god-awful moments in the history of our
world was
Unhappening.