what did the sun feel like

that armed October day
– did your dried skin

breathe between Nevskiy and Liteyny?
did your hair stand on ending when you saw

in those new men a light refracted full

a future danced into a falling web
– and did you really point your arm like that?

did spasm take you as you cleared the gate?
what dust swarmed in your eye when you first felt

the mechanism of time change form and shape?
and did the body now grown ethyl-thick

run through with an imagination of the motion

spilling to causes from its tongue and hands –
my great-grandmother’s ladle swimming

into the wheat and flesh inside her son
her daughter a distended limb, my father

paused to speak between the eared walls, us all

turning away from faces in the street
knowing to look would mean to trust

and trust belongs

to some imagined country that’s not here
– perhaps the same one that you saw,

Vladimir,

when your gaze tore its teeth on autumn sky