[Jim Moonan]

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I connect completely to the heart of this poem. Some might prefer not to reveal the person behind the curtain that is themselves, but I think it's imperative to knowing the person.

Awhile back, upon Cameron’s reference to and recommendation of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, I bought a slim volume of his selected poems. There is a passage I underlined (from He Who Finds a Horseshoe) that your poem immediately brought to mind:

A rustle scampers over the trees with its green clogs,
The children are playing jacks with the vertebrae of dead animals.
The fragile chronicle of our era is coming to an end.
I am grateful for that which was.
I myself was in error, became confused, lost count.
The era was ringing, like a golden orb,
Inflated, formed in a mold, supported by no one,
Answering each and every contact with a “yes” and “no”.
Just so a child answers:
“I will give you an apple”—or: “I will not give you an apple.”
His face—an exact duplicate of the voice that pronounces these words.



Over on fiction I verbosely wrote about much the same thing as your poem seems to be speaking of.

Nice capsule poem, John.

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[John Riley]

Thanks, Jim. It's an honor, of course, to be compared to Mandelstam. It's hard to believe such a comparison, but I like what you quoted. I'll find my copy of the selected and spend some time with it. I always end up in the Voronezh Notebooks.

Thanks