[Exit From Uncle Vanya]

Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2/22/03

Philip Fried

Now they’re leaving us as the light
goes down and never goes out . . . Vanya
and Sonya totaling accounts . . .

Each night the watchman sings and the stars
descend to the fieldsthe summer is  never-
endingand cannot be counted. The trees

diminish from year to year. In a thousand
years, the happy people will never
remember us who sit breathless

before the applause begins, not wanting
this firefly era to end, its smell
of hay and tango of groveling,

bang! of misaimed love and odor
of gunpowder rising like morning mist . . .
Telegin, play, we’re perspiring, high

in the rafters, limbo’s fellowship,
remembering how the doctor paced
out the summer a thousand miles

that way and this and sat in a chair.
There’s no other way for us to be born
into pre-birth’s motherland

where we were so bored oh god we put on
trousers and shaved, trying on selves,
sipped into dresses and tried devotion

o betrayal . . . It was always us
wthout Providence, dearest illusion, how funny!
bodiless souls taking pratfalls

or curling up on the table like cats,
lapping vodka as if there were no 
tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in

in the dying clip-clop of the accounts . . .
We rise reluctantly from wide
Russia on the state, a pin-

point of light now only a star . . .
We’re leaving them for life in the new
Empire and the prospect of war.