SURVIVAL OF EQUATIONS
He spoke with a thin,
breathy, Russian nasal-eze,
as though a child's balloon
deflating slowly through his teeth
had eroded the roof of his mouth,
scoring his tongue, its stream
redirected into minor harmonies.
Physiological. Learned
at his mother’s knee.
A trick of long Russian
winters spent with freezing
outsiders and their old
troubled intimacies. Recalcitrance
born of historic paranoia, squeezed
into his trachea one swallow
at a time. Mostly, we wonder
at the coal black sparrow
of his certainty.
.