Stephen Burt

Stephen Burt grew up in Washington, DC, lived in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Oxford, and now teaches at Macalester College in Minnesota. His book of poems is Popular Music (CLP/ Colorado, 1999); he is also the author of Randall Jarrell and His Age (Columbia University, 2002). He writes about poets and poetry regularly for Poetry Review, TLS, Boston Review and various other journals in Britain and America, and wishes Thumbscrew hadn't closed. 'Moscow for Teens' originally appeared in Barrow Street. 'Against Fertility' first appeared in the Yale Review.

Moscow for Teens

Our borrowed kitten, black and white like ice,
Chases full bottles of aspirin and makes no sound.

Summer is hard to see through: slags of dust
Deform the coppery air. Orioles in the elms?

St. Michael roams the curbs and perezhods,
Handing out his weapons of bruised fruit;

Here pushcarts vend fresh water, sausages,
Blackcurrants, figs my uncle refuses to touch.

Below the university, every evening,
The etiolated business districts shine:

A scowling boy splays over the high railing
Where no one wants to watch. Late that same night

We see the lit domes in the brief dark, but read instead
About the great comedian Behemoth,

The black cat from The Master and Margarita,
Whose toothy swagger cuts the concrete sky.

Against Fertility

         This summer or Indian summer, with its tall
                  or palely-loitering, blurred
greens over drive-through banks,

         like any summer, is anxious: it is a test,
                  from which the careful boys
hold back, preferring the bookish ice

         of earlier or
                  lesser, later
days. Untoward squirrels

         in mazy stripes chase one another around
                  our grocery store; asphalt in heaps,
and outdoor steam, and piled-up, yellowing

         melons in their way, set no
                  distractions from their
trail of un-

         reserve? Because there are
                  no new things under the sun, because we can't
make anything else of these, only more

         of the same, this summer turns
                  uneasy. In whose name
was all this settled on us? Can't we stop

         and take
                  good care of what we have? The riotous
French basil Jessie planted still explores

         its own sharp outer reaches; in
                  midair, our landlord's spider-flowers'
lunar-lander platforms lend their bees

         sweet targets for their last
                  warm days. That none of them
may come to any harm,

         let school begin today; let everyone pass
                  without increase. Let things stay as they are.