I had an afternoon off. Situated my brother with a very long movie, locked down the wood stove good and tight, and stalled, slipped, slid, stalled, skidded, and finally floored the pickup up outta here over the very frozen snow. It was tricky first-gear, no-sudden-moves stuff for the first half-mile (last time I was out I slid sideways rounding a curve and got the right side wheels stuck in a little ditch behind a snowbank; I was very glad to have my shovel with me) but OK for the remaining two miles to the highway. You pay close attention, though. Picked up my packages at the P.O. in Davis Creek, and then met my friend Sally for lunch at Norma's Taqueria in Alturas. We had a very good time catching each other up on our snowbound lives. She lost her beautiful little rooster during the cold snap, and now the hen has gone missing. And the little propane furnace keeps breaking down. Her significant other is in Iraq, so she's doing it all on her own this winter. At least I have my brother to pitch in on the heavy work.
Now I'm settling back in. Everyone's fed (except me; that taqueria beans&rice holds you for a while) and I'm trying to type with Apple on my lap. She's always very distressed when I leave her home, and glues herself to me when I return until she feels secure again.
Today I got in the mail a nicely yellowed, shelfworn, and red-ink-annotated used bilingual 1960 paperback edition of The Bedbug and Selected Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Communist Russian poet who killed himself in 1930. I wish I could hear the poems in Russian. I don't know how to sound out the cyrillic text.
But here's a bit from "Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry":
...Look here--
how much I've lost,
what
expenses
I have in my production
and how much I spend
on materials.
You know,
of course,
about "rhyme."
Suppose
a line
ends with the word
;"day,"
and then,
repeating the syllables
in the third line,
we insert
something like
"tarara-boom-de-ay."
In your idiom,
rhyme
is a bill of exchange
to be honored in the third line!--
that's the rule.
And so you hunt
for the small change of suffixes and flections
in the depleted cashbox
of conjugations
and declensions.
You start shoving
a word
into the line,
but it's a tight fit--
you press and it breaks.
Citizen tax collector,
honestly,
the poet
spends a fortune on words.
In our idiom
rhyme
is a keg.
A keg of dynamite.
The line
is a fuse.
The line burns to the end
and explodes,
and the town
is blown sky-high
in a strophe.
Where can you find,
and at what price,
rhymes
that take aim and kill on the spot?
Suppose
only a half dozen
unheard-of rhymes
were left
in, say, Venezuela.
And so
I'm drawn
to North and South.
I rush around
entangled in advances and loans.
Citizen!
Consider my traveling expenses.
--Poetry--
--all of it!--
is a journey to the unknown.
Poetry
is like mining radium.
For every gram
you work a year.
For the sake of a single word
you waste
a thousand tons
of verbal ore.
But how
incendiary
the burning of those words
compared
with the smoldering
of the raw material. ...
It's a very long poem and becomes richer and richer, better and better, and makes me laugh again and again. The translators were Max Hayward and George Reavey. Now I'm on the lookout for whatever I can find in a more recent translation.
7:11:52 PM 
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