Read Nothing by Design for Free Online Page A

fuzzy American classroom. Coeds cried.
    You shrugged and tried again: identified
    lines where native speakers missed the poem.
    “Ms. Salter? Andrew Marvell. Tell the class.”
    I heard my heart pound loudly in my head.
    Tell them what? Declaim “An Horatian Ode
    upon Cromwell’s Return …” perhaps? What an ass
    I was—or maybe you were; I wasn’t sure.
    Now it occurs to me: the poem of his
    to recite into these flower beds would be less
    “The Garden” than the twining “Eyes and Tears,”
    where “all the jewels which we prize,” he wrote,
    “melt in these pendants of the eyes”; and “happy they
    whom grief doth bless, that weep the more, and see
    the less.” Lovely; but the tears stayed in the throat,
    or were meted out in rhyming drops of ink.
    Lament was Russian, roughly; in the English
    of Marvell, Hardy, Frost, you got your wish
    for irony’s containments. You could think.
        3. Border Crossing
    You had them in your head—Pushkin, Gogol,
    Dostoevsky. Best memory I ever met.
    Nobody learns by rote now; quotes come out
    from under the patchwork overcoat of Google—
    a development you’d have found unnerving,
    at least until you found some figure for it.
    In Venice, you wrote, “a gigantic china teaset”
    was heard vibrating when church bells were serving
    “on a silver tray” their peals to the “pearl-gray sky.”
    Your mind, a gondola on the lagoon
    of time, skimmed the reflections in your own
    outlandish, errant, metaphysical eye,
    as if everything in the world could be amassed
    on a single page in white with words in black,
    although a tear might drop to it, a “throwback,
    a tribute of the future to the past.”
    Somebody boarded up, because they could,
    the door from your parents’ room to yours. Or yours
    to your parents’; but to me it hardly matters:
    the living border crossing to the dead
    is what I’m after. I stepped onto a plane
    because I could, and joined your friend who’d taken
    snapshots of your departure; though I’m shaken
    to be standing in their one room—mute and plain,
    erased of bed and table, of evidence
    of birthday parties, songs at the piano,
    piled-up cups and saucers, the radio
    from which state “drivel” flowed like water once—
    I don’t need much, only to turn and walk
    down warped linoleum in the communal hall
    where the black phone still cowers on the wall,
    to see you—overheard—pick up and talk.
        4. Watermark
    The Foundation’s conference room. Tea and coffee,
    biscuits, sugar, brisk handshakes, respect,
    and quick interpreters for the select
    Americans invited to a country
    some of us know little of. Academician
    Likhachev, they tell us, would have liked
    to meet us all. Your fellowships, in fact ,
    our conversations here, were his late mission ,
    he whose life would closely coincide
    with the twentieth century; who bore the stamp
    of public servant, scholar, and of camp
    prisoner. A miracle he hadn’t died
    at Solovki, where he heard three hundred gunned
    down as he hid, three hundred on the dot—
    he was to be among them, but was not ,
    which meant that someone else… The thought-of sound
    reverberates on walls washed with the sun.
    This was his radio. Mid-century relic,
    midsized, ordinary, somehow orphic.
    Likhachev marked it—see the painted line
    dripping down the tuner? That’s the Voice
    of America. Others marked the BBC.
    This was a sign we wanted you to see…
    The hardened teardrop holds its frequency.

ENGLISH COUNTRY DOLLHOUSE
    Which scholar among the dolls
    that stepped out from this room
    (in volume, like one volume
    of the O.E.D. )
    needed spectacles?
    A wire-rimmed, folded pair—
    like a glossy insect
    crushable in one swat—
    lies lenses-up, not seeing
    but wanting to be seen
    as a letter, a giant B
    for Book , upon a tiny,
    leather-bound, gilt-edged tome
    in which the words must be
    unthinkably minute.
    Are there really words in there?
    The book, after all, is shut.
    If I could step through the