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Twin 20-floor Tower Blocks Stand like space-invader screen assemblage Exhaled by soviet revolution Rooted, now, like digital virus In the lungs of Jugla At the shore Devil’s Ezera.
(In graffiteed and abandoned garage, like a thought on a notepad rotting in cellar, is a caravan with empty tyres and mouldy windows. It sports in cheerful italics a declaration of an optimistic party-goer now preserved cryogenically ‘Free Time!”)
Computer monitors Half submerged In stagnant shore Will Not Rot
<<Jugla smird, Cyka!>> Jo this is where All that breath of technology Came to die
An anthropologist Has to understand Like a biologist Understands the lungs
Look, there, someone erected some stained glass In a first-floor window And a Spanish man With blonde wife And son, probably not from His cum Opens the door.
Greenhouse frames rot in neglected back yard, their plēve smothering dead weeds. Opposite a man and a woman, both in their 40s, Fags in hand, Stand either side of a pile of stout, fresh, timber, Laughing with a little heart, Breath flavoured with smoke and eye creases.
In foreground, Russian man Exhalation visible Speaks words to coax response From other Russian man Conversation falls gently Over new generation Toddling from one attraction to the other.
In background, two swans In the eternal mature elegance of animal Grace the water with their beak.
Towards me approaches technocrat man-child Outside By himself He catches my eye And removes mask, Nodding perceptibly. Adds to cloud conglomeration Living and spoken congestion Listfully and wistfully Settling over Devil’s Lake. |