Ilya Kaminsky reading Maestro live at Bowdoin College, February 2, 2006. What is memory? what makes a body glow: an apple orchard in Moldova and the school is bombed— when the schools are bombed, sadness is forbidden —I write this now and I feel my body’s weight: the screaming girls, 347 voices in the story […]
Ilya Kaminsky reading Aunt Rose live at Bowdoin College, February 2, 2006. In a soldier’s uniform, in wooden shoes, she danced at either end of day, my Aunt Rose. Her husband rescued a pregnant woman from the burning house—he heard laughter, each day’s own little artillery—in that fire he burnt his genitals. My Aunt Rose […]
Ilya Kaminsky reading My Mother’s Tango live at Bowdoin College, February 2, 2006. I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows— she rides a wild pony for my birthday, a white pony on the seventh floor. “And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!” the pony neighing on the balcony […]
Ilya Kaminsky reading American Tourist live at Bowdoin College, February 2, 2006. In a city made of seaweed we danced on a rooftop, my hands under her breasts. Subtracting day from day, I add this woman’s ankles to my days of atonement, her lower lip, the formal bones of her face. We were making love […]
Ilya Kaminsky reading Dancing In Odessa live at Bowdoin College, February 2, 2006. We lived north of the future, days opened letters with a child’s signature, a raspberry, a page of sky. My grandmother threw tomatoes from her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket over my head. I painted my mother’s face. She understood […]
Ilya Kaminsky reading Musica Humana live at Bowdoin College, February 2, 2006. [an elegy for Osip Mandelstam] [A modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow searched across one sixth of the earth’s surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in case they were found […]
Ilya Kaminsky reading from Natalia live at Bowdoin College, February 2, 2006. On the night I met her, the Rabbi sang and sighed, god’s lips on his brow, Torah in his arms. —I unfastened her stockings, worried that I have stopped worrying. She slept in my bed–I slept on a chair, she slept on a […]
Ilya Kaminsky reading Envoi, from the Natalia sequence, live at Bowdoin College, February 2, 2006. “You will die on a boat from Yalta to Odessa” — a fortune teller, 1992 What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts, the birds force themselves into my lines— the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats. I bless the boat […]