Tolstoy in America

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy found himself
in Wichita, Kansas, one evening with
a simple Kansas farm girl, partaking
of the bounties of the Lord.  He was
thinking of his wife Sofia back
home and what he would do if that
scoundrel Ivan were to lay his hands on her.
Would he have to kill her?  Or would he
turn the other cheek?...  As he lay
there in bed with another woman (like
every good Christian), he was suddenly
disturbed by some smart aleck college kid
that turned up his stereo really loud in
the nearby house.  So Tolstoy opened the
window really wide, you see, because
he had that Russian soul that needs
plenty of space and freedom, and he saw
the sun, the grass, the valleys, the wheat fields,
reminiscent of mother Russia, and he thought of
good ole Walt Whitman—his American
counterpart—weeping somewhere in the
cornfields, while partaking of the glorious
pleasures of the flesh, with that genuine
rustic smile that has not been adulterated with
tractors and bulldozers—and then he yelled
at the top of his voice at that house
where his neighbor was playing the
Dead Milkmen on his stereo—that house
with a perfectly trimmed lawn and that
awful buzzing metallic sound that Americans
call moo-zick, meow-sick, or a strange
mix of a sick cat’s meowing, a cow’s mooing,
and a frog’s croaking,
or something resembling the clank
of knives or the screeching sounds of tires...
“Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay!  Yeeeeek!!!
You dirty corporate muzosickosexoffender!
Turn off that noise, you godless hoodlum!
Then there was dead silence,
followed by gunshots, and then
dead silence again, and more gunshots,
and more of the same horrible
dead silence...


  June 27, 1991
--Alexander Shaumyan