"Resolution" [by Boris Dralyuk]

Resolution

i.m. J.C.

That night you chose to open and to close
your long anticipated show of shows—
a solo act, for no one at that stage
could match you in your sorrow, your cold rage.
Or so I think, old love. I can’t be sure.
You made no playbill, mailed out no brochure,
wanting no fanfare and no audience.
You knew that nothing could be left to chance.
All the rehearsals I myself attended,
year after year, had always, always ended
before the dénouement. Your hapless plot
had lingered, tangled, tense, a tender knot
lodged in the throat—not only yours, but mine.
It takes my breath to feel that knot undone.

-- Boris Dralyuk

from the current issue of Poetry London.

Born in Odesa, Ukraine, in 1982, Boris Dralyuk  is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), and translator of volumes by Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. 

Comments

[Beth Tenny]

Wonderful poem.

[David Schloss]

Yes, wonderful: evocative yet dense with meaning, so gracefully controlled.