Proposal for a Monument to the Third International

‘All that is solid melts into air’

SOLO
I was dreaming in a station of the Metro.
The railbeds were freezing rivers of blood
With bergs of fat, where millions knelt
To eat and drink,

CHORUS
                        and it was good.

SOLO
What are they singing,

CHORUS
                                    the crowd

SOLO
That is never the same from moment to moment,

CHORUS
The crowd

SOLO
                 whose faces vanish
And re-form, that have no names,

CHORUS
The crowd with its mouthful of blood,
The crowd

SOLO
                In which the million you and I are lost
Like information buried in an archive?
What is that song?

CHORUS
We are buried alive.
We are not what was meant.
Let history finish.
Let stones become stars. Let the stars speak.

SOLO
Let those inside the walls of adamantine
Ice-cream reply in a deafening whisper
As ice writes its name in the river again.
History, history, what are our names?

Little sister, tell me, can you see
Hosts of steam-angels, racing away
Down the blue Moskva at wavetop height
To confer their industrial blessings
On fur and glass, on felt and skin
And the old man who wearily enters
The forest of coats at the end of the day
To come back with ours? Likewise the babushka
Sweeping dead steam from the underpass
Is blessed and when the state withers will stand
With her brothers and sisters
On the wintry glacis by the Kremlin wall
By the site of executions.

CHORUS
The city runs like science fiction backwards.
Putin in his sheet-steel chariot
Is brandishing a grail of blood and vlaast
On a stem of twisted dragon-tails.

SOLO
I rode to the twenty-ninth floor
Of the Hotel Ukraina, then climbed the last steps
To the last locked room
Where a camera obscura portrayed the night city
As Stalin might dream it himself
From one of the seven dark stars he cast
So high that the heavens themselves
Were extinguished.

I turned to descend and there by the door
Was a wizened old man, sitting smoking.
A red fire-bucket was full of his ash.
He wore two watches and between his eyes
A bullet hole.
He looked indifferently through me.
Brothers, this is all I can recall.

CHORUS
The Tambov wolf shall be your comrade now.
This is your station now.
Press to the doors.

SOLO
Let us walk over the bridge
By the pool where the steam-angels
Spend their retirement.
Let us walk over the snow
In the field of dead statues.

We shall hand in our coats
To the dear old dead couple
Who add our black coats to the forest of coats
In the province of coats
And the bear Mikhail Semyonov
Presides in the court of the coats this day.

Shall we go in
And look at the art?

CHORUS
Up here is the modest proposal
A tower
A furnace
A children’s amusement
Babel
And the key to all economies
When Eiffel took a potion he made this

SOLO
What is it made of?

CHORUS
Of matchwood and wire
Brown paper and misunderstanding.
This is no longer historical.
Art
And no longer historical,
Art
And can never remember the time.

SOLO
What does it tell us?

CHORUS
Oh, nothing.

SOLO
What shall we hope for?

CHORUS
To come here and see.
To have your curious half hour.
To go back through the crowd,

SOLO
To take our coats from the forest of coats
And tip the babushka
And walk to the Metro
And stand in the crowd between trains
When the blood is not running.

CHORUS
To know
We are buried alive,
To know
We are not what was meant.
Let history finish.
Let stones become stars
And let the stars speak.

from The Drowned Book (Picador, London, 2007)