Why is there something rather than nothing
when nothing’s good enough for me?

It is the morning after
the fog lifts
the empty city retains even more beauty
if you imagine that no one is there.
It is gray to the core, as it always has been.

The sculptor who labored for years on the dictator’s statue
killed himself a week after his job was done.
The nation tore down the likeness soon enough,
that’s how it is with politics:
no one can trust a face for too long.
The country can purge itself and still live.
The artist was not so lucky.

To call someone a philosopher is to pin him down
to demand not answers but an endless stream
of just the right questions—
some discipline, fervor is never enough.

He meets an ancient friend in his old neighborhood:
a woman, back then, who must have been just a girl,
it was so long ago and they both were there.
There were tears in her eyes, for they both had survived.
Afterwards, I have no idea, he then confides,
No idea who she was at all.

Footsteps on the faux marble floor
the stone blocks in the sidewalk survived for years
under Russian asphalt
lift concrete away, let rock face the sun.
The poet has no reason to be civil anymore.  [10]