the fossil record
#7
Another Lenin (in Seattle)
Another deposed Lenin strides
in front of the fish-taco stand,
caught between hip junque shops
and garden knick-knack stores.
His coat stopped mid-flap,
bronze eyes squint westward,
gleaming in the sunset.
His goatee holds no hint of bullets, blood
or beatings. That forceful jaw betrays not one
of tens of millions disappeared.
Frozen in the open, he misses his policemen -
no one wipes pigeon shit from his lapels today.
Taco-eaters bring to mind
the lines of futile peasants
denied bread, starving in the purges.
He wants snow, sub-zero nights of
clarified vodka, crystallized thinking
in a city that is nothing if not
cool shades of grey.
Long-rotted bones in the Ukraine groan,
the people over turn and melt his toppled kin.
Saved somehow from the slag heap,
he escapes humiliation. His brothers change
decorate the proletariat as
belt buckles, cogs and car parts.
Metallic atoms never chose to take this form
to mime destruction's devotee.
Denied the forge, a better cast postponed
though melting would not purge one
murdered soul from Lenin's own.
It may be fitting for the one who drew
blood lines to spend
damp afternoons confined
on a square not of his making
between S.U.V.s and bicycles
as kitchen help shred lettuce,
pierced-lipped women order lattes,
and men in pastel polo shirts
sporting green-tipped hair and nose rings
queue up for fish with salsa.
—Elise Bowditch