Darin Ciccotelli

SECOND RIVER

after Osip Mandelstam
 
 
 
Dead poet with a chandelier
for a name, I’m not him.

I’m not the bone ringing
itself in linseed oil, a forehead,

a leg crushed, iron techniques
moving out of a sexual

thought—a trance isn’t
anything to explain.

I haven’t been sent to
Voronezh. I haven’t died—

this Mandelstam I can’t
have to live in, this chapped river.

I’m sure that I’ve belittled
his soft name each time,

shaking it baldly, breathing
it down to cracked

fruit. There’s no step
in this auditorium. Messages

ash in a copper bowl. Individual
men starching their game

of sleep, I’m not anything ever.
If I rise up from the dead

at all, all I’ll think to say is
his name again. Beg from

him. Sag lungfuls of air
at whatever he is.
 
 
 
 
 
 

TO OSIP MANDELSTAM

 
You rise up before
a thought has time
to germinate, wind scuffing
the balcony dirt.
A line glowing titian
on cigarette paper—
the woman noticing how
a safe man isn’t safe
anymore, how his
avoidance scratches across
her. People walk beneath.
They know all the songs—
bodies floating over
tire ruts, the dripping
hoses. There will never
be enough control—
light shedding from
her face. Were you at
least decent? Did you
have affairs? Did you
disgrace each fabulation
I put on you?

DARIN CICCOTELLI has recently published work in BOMB Magazine, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Hobart,  Subtropics,  and West Branch. He received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and his PhD from the University of Houston. In 2017, he received an Individual Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts.