Two Poems

Timothy Kercher

Brain on a Train

I'm at my desk searching
for words when
I feel my mind being carted away
by the distant sound of a rattling train
across the Mt'k'vari River. Imagine knowing
your brain riding on the same tracks
that Stalin once rode, tracks on which
so many were sent away. To sit in front
of a blank sheet with no brain
is not a bad approach to writing, I'm told,
but this happens far too often. My brain speeding
away and I don't know whether it's off
to do hard labor in some far East prison camp
or headed to my Moscow
to pin medals on my own chest
while secretly scratching out
names of those within me
who threaten my iron fist.

***

The Pluto's Palace Hostel

Vague faces asleep in the dark like asphodels,
the ghostly flower. The bed creaks. My bunk mate
breathing & gnashing his teeth above me, only
the void & a mattress separating us. A window is
open above him where clouds huddle, dripping rain
on the cobblestone of Old Riga. I imagine a sky I had
seen on the plane just a few hours earlier, divided
by a distinct line where the dreariness was surmounted
by the heavens' collective clean-blue. The door opens
& heavy footfalls of someone drunk plod down the stairs.
I count the steps & try to imagine the beds
in the room—fourteen, I guess, & most filled. What
dreams does he barge in upon? A Polish-American
woman's dream of climbing a ladder to her grandfather's
village? A Korean man's dream of an Indian lover? A Bosnian
girl's dream of flying above the earth in a robe? In any case,
when he enters the bathroom, paradise is lost—pissing
creates an arc of noise above the rain, a releasing
of the river Lethe. What of the dreams of others:
a tsunami to one, a dog lapping water to another,
a boat moored to river Styx to someone else?
As far as I can tell, I'm Charon on the river Cocytus.
I'm ferrying alone in my bed, my wife in a war zone, our
invaded Georgia over a thousand miles away, me awake,
trying to keep my own dreams from crossing over.

Originally from Colorado, Tim Kercher now lives in Kyiv, Ukraine after living in the Republic of Georgia for the past four years, where he had been editing and translating an anthology of contemporary Georgian poetry. He teaches high school English and is working in his fifth country overseas—Mongolia, Mexico, and Bosnia being the others. In August, the number of his traveling companions increased twofold; he and his wife are now accompanied by newborn twin daughters, Ani and Ketevan.

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