MY VRONSKY

He told me, repeatedly, that

people considered him

the most intelligent person

they’d met; that he was not

more successful was a conspiracy

of minorities, lesbians, blacks, and gays,

and a coterie of cliques

that sucked up all the grants.

He visits me; his handsome features,

now marred by fat, peer at me.

“What are you reading?” he asks.

(A hundred pages a day, to live.)

He is an expert on Nabokov,

international relations, modern art

David Foster Wallace, Heidegger,

and the poets I translate.

(And yet he never understood Karenina,

any more than Nabokov did,

as they focused on the crevices

in her carriage train,

in that foreshadowed bier,

but not on the abortions,

nor the Vronsky of her death.)

Before him,

I remember feeling beautiful,

and those times people said

I was the smartest woman they knew.

"My Vronsky" appeared in the St. Petersburg Review