Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

Journal of Italian Translation
The Death Of Mayakovsky
Philadelphia, the historic downtown,
April 14, 1930.
My father sits down at the little desk
in his hotel room overlooking an airshaft
to begin a letter home: “Dear Essie,”
he pens, but the phone rings before he can
unburden his heart. The driver from Precision Inc.
has arrived. Alone in the backseat, hatless,
coatless, on this perfect spring day,
my father goes off to inspect aircraft bearings
that vanished from an army proving ground
in Maryland, bearings he will bargain for
and purchase in ignorance, or so he will tell Essie,
my mother, this after he takes a plea
in the federal courthouse in downtown Detroit.
I knew all this before it happened. Earlier that
morning storm clouds scuttled in across Ontario
to release their darkness into our gray river.
Hundreds of miles east my father rolls down
the car window; the air scented with leaves
just budding out along Route 76
caresses his face and tangles his dark hair.
He lets the world come to him, even this world
of small machine shops, car barns, warehouses
beside the Schuylkill. The child I would become
saw it all, yet years passed before the scene slipped,
frozen, into the book of origins to become
who I am. I’d been distracted
in the breathless dawn by a single shot—
the Russian poet’s suicidal gesture—
that would crown our narratives, yours and mine.
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