Ilya Kaminsky - Dancing in Odessa

Ice, Mouth, Song by Rachel Contreni Flynn Selected by Stephen Dunn Red Summer by Amaud Jamaul Johnson Selected by Ray Gonzalez Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky Selected by Eleanor Wilner Dismal Rock by Davis McCombs Selected by Linda Gregerson Biogeography by Sandra Meek Selected by the Tupelo Press Editors Archicembalo by G. C. Waldrep Selected by C. D. Wright Severance Songs by Joshua Corey Selected by Ilya Kaminsky After Urgency by Rusty Morrison Selected by Jane Hirshfield

T UPELO P RESS North Adams, Massachussets Dancing in Odessa. Copyright 2004 Ilya Kaminsky.

All rights reserved. Print ISBN: 978-1-932195-12-5 EBook ISBN: 978-1-936797-31-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2003115523 Cover and text designed by Bill Kuch, WK Graphic Design. First paperback edition: 2004. Other than brief excerpts for reviews and commentaries, no part of this book may be reproduced by any means without permission of the publisher. Please address requests for reprint permission or for courseadoption discounts to: Tupelo Press P.O. Box 1767, North Adams, Massachusetts 01247 Telephone: (413) 6649611 / Fax: (413) 6649711 Tupelo Press is an awardwinning independent literary press that publishes fine fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in books that are a joy to hold as well as read.

Tupelo Press is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, and we rely on public support to carry out our mission of publishing extraordinary work that may be outside the realm of the large commercial publishers. Financial donations are welcome and are tax deductible. for my family

If I speak for the dead, I must leave this animal of my body, I must write the same poem over and over, for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender. If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man who runs through rooms without touching the furniture. Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking What year is it? I can dance in my sleep and laugh in front of the mirror.

Even sleep is a prayer, Lord, I will praise your madness, and in a language not mine, speak of music that wakes us, music in which we move. For whatever I say is a kind of petition, and the darkest days must I praise.

In a city ruled jointly by doves and crows, doves covered the main district, and crows the market. A deaf boy counted how many birds there were in his neighbors backyard, producing a four-digit number. He dialed the number and confessed his love to the voice on the line. My secret: at the age of four I became deaf.

When I lost my hearing, I began to see voices. On a crowded trolley, a one-armed man said that my life would be mysteriously linked to the history of my country. Yet my country cannot be found, its citizens meet in a dream to conduct elections. He did not describe their faces, only a few names: Roland, Aladdin, Sinbad.

Where days bend and straighten in a city that belongs to no nation but all the nations of wind, she spoke the speech of poplar trees her ears trembling as she spoke, my Aunt Rose composed odes to barbershops, drugstores. Her soul walking on two feet, the soul or no soul, a childs allowance, she loved street musicians and knew that my grandfather composed lectures on the supply and demand of clouds in our country: the State declared him an enemy of the people.

He ran after a train with tomatoes in his coat and danced naked on the table in front of our house he was shot, and my grandmother raped by the public prosecutor, who stuck his pen in her vagina, the pen which signed people off for twenty years. But in the secret history of anger one man's silence lives in the bodies of others as we dance to keep from falling, between the doctor and the prosecutor: my family, the people of Odessa, women with huge breasts, old men naive and childlike, all our words, heaps of burning feathers that rise and rise with each retelling.

What is memory? what makes a body glow: an apple orchard in Moldova and the school is bombed when the schools are bombed, sadness is forbidden I write this now and I feel my bodys weight: the screaming girls, 347 voices in the story of a doctor saving them, his hands trapped under a wall, his granddaughter dying nearby she whispers I don't want to die, I have eaten such apples. He touches her mouth as a blind man reading lips and yells Shut up! I am near the window, I am asking for help! speaking, he cannot stop speaking, in the dark: of Brahms, Chopin he speaks to them to calm them. A doctor, yes, whatever window framed his life, outside: tomatoes grew, clouds passed and we once lived. A doctor with a tattoo of a parrot on his trapped arm, seeing his granddaughter's cheekbones no longer her cheekbones, with surgical precision stitches suffering and grace: two days pass, he shouts in his window (there is no window) when rescue approaches, he speaks of Chopin, Chopin.

They cut off his hands, nurses say he is doing OK in my dream: he stands, feeding bread to pigeons, surrounded by pigeons, birds on his head, his shoulder, he shouts You dont understand a thing! he is breathing himself to sleep, the city sleeps, there is no such city.

In a soldiers uniform, in wooden shoes, she danced at either end of day, my Aunt Rose. Her husband rescued a pregnant woman from the burning househe heard laughter, each days own little artilleryin that fire he burnt his genitals. My Aunt Rose took other peoples childrenshe clicked her tongue as they cried and August pulled curtains evening after evening. I saw her, chalk between her fingers, she wrote lessons on an empty blackboard, her hand moved and the board remained empty. We lived in a city by the sea but there was another city at the bottom of the sea and only local children believed in its existence.