The Resurrection of Trotsky / Adrianne Marcus

Adrianne Marcus is the author of The Moon is a Marrying Eye (Red Clay Press), Faced With Love (Copper Beech Press), and Child of Earthquake Country (New World Press), as well as three chapbooks: Lying, Cheating and Stealing (Pteradactyl Press), Journeys, Destinations (Small Poetry Press, 1996), and Magritte's Stones (Lapwing Publications, Belfast, Ireland).

"Beyond the Garden" featured at VerseDaily





The Rain Is Full of Ghosts Tonight

Sonnet XLII Edna St. Vincent Millay


Dark fog and rain; a hole in the sky
As the night comes pouring in, thick
Silver, and the sound of drops hitting the
Asphalt is the sound of a million coins
Dissolving.

In another country
There are children, begging for coins
On a night the moon turns silver.
We could make love here
But the ghosts between us are real.

Now off the icy coast of
Alaska; the rain, more snow
Than rain, frosts the silver air.
We stand outside on the
Tiny verandah while the glaciers calve
In the fog, hear the small
Explosions as the slivered chunks
Enter the sea.

Later you sleep while
Outside the long twilight of summer
Refuses the dark. That silver streak
In the sky could be anywhere,
Any northern land, nameless,
Where they summon the ghosts of past
Lives, of ancestors and lovers, into
Being, chanting remarkable vowels
Like Kaddish.

How do we remember except with water?
Ferryboats crossing from Bainbridge Island to Seattle,
Bridging lovers, those we have lost
To time and death. Do the dead feel
The dampness we give them, those quick
Tears that come from our deep bodies,
As we call up the faces that are
Permanently silver, stamped like coins
In our memory? Vintage years. The young
Who never imagine growing old
The pillow empty of indention
Wet with damp loss, the body holding
Emptiness just in reach.

And the joy of memory: of thick rain
In the November afternoon, the water sluicing
Down in silver rivers speckled with
Pebbles that mark the gravestones
Of those we refuse to forget:
The thousand names of water.