Looking for Chekhov
Somewhere near Odessa
In 1900, I think it was,
But possibly not,
You know how
In memory’s paper bag
Everything gets jumbled together
And when you smack it with a stick
It all comes spilling out
Willy-nilly and higgledy-piggledy.
Anyhow, somewhere near Odessa
In perhaps 1900 or thereabouts
I boarded a midnight train
My portmanteau stuffed
With collarless shirts
And shirtless collars
One silk neck scarf
And my fine wool suit.
I was hoping, as you might not
Be surprised to learn,
To run into dear old Anton Chekhov
Who, it was rumored,
Frequently frequented
The midnight train running every other day
Between somewhere near Odessa
And somewhere near Moscow
In the neighborhood of 1900-ish.
You see, I wanted to tell Antosha
(If I might be so bold)
How very much I admired
All of his writings
And in particular how the shocking moment
In his story “In the Ravine,”
Soon to be published
(If it was indeed 1900)
When Aksinya pours a bucket of boiling water
Over the infant Nikifor,
About how that soul-shattering moment
Exploded and expanded in my head
Like a hydrogen bomb and its mushroom cloud
Until it became the size
Of all space and time
And how it remains thus within me still.
With no sign of Anton Pavlovich anywhere
I did some asking around and learned
That 1: He spent very little time in Odessa
And 2: He never once traveled on the Gorky Express
Between somewhere near Odessa
And somewhere near Moscow.
Deeply disappointed
I sagged into my first-class berth
With a snifter of brandy
And watched forlornly out the window
As occasional lights in the vast countryside flashed by
And snow began to fall all over Russia.
Somewhere in Moscow
The carriage driver Iona Potapov
Was telling his passenger
About the death of his son
As snow flakes settled into his beard
And tears froze on his cheeks
While the passenger remained oblivious.
Somewhere in Moscow
The exhausted servant girl Varka
Was trying to calm a colicky baby
When finally, desperate for her own sleep
She strangled the infant
Then sank deep into slumber
On a dreamless Russian winter night.
Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poems have been published widely in both print and online journals. His most recent book is Crows with Bad Writing. His podcast of poems reflecting on aging, memory, and mortality, “Third Act Poems,” can be found here.