THE VISITING DIGNITARY

The day is crisp. Spring air, which still wants
a hat and jacket. Plus the smell of salt.
I call out, Volodya! and he smiles when he sees me
wave. A reserved expression, but pleased.
He looks like my uncle, both before and after
that uncle inflated himself with vodka,
skin puffed and pink as a buoy.
Today, he squints in the sun and I invite him aboard
my boat. A small sailing vessel, which sinks
and bobs in the waves, moving under Volodya's weight.
The water is calm. You can see to the bottom
of the harbor, where the red starfish are
glinting.
Volodya looks around and nods
at the evergreens, the unusual blue
of the sky, the slate grey water. Just as I do.
We're headed out past Orcas to John's,
a small island dense with cabins and trees
which I have been visiting since I was a child.
On the beach, I will teach Volodya to feed the tame deer,
putting pancakes into their velvet mouths.
Here he is not the man he is.
I want to ask him, as I want to ask all men of his kind,
if he does not realize that he will someday die.
Beneath his pink skin he wears the skull
that he will wear for all eternity.

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THE VISITING DIGNITARY II

In person, as in photographs, Volodya is surprisingly gentle with the animals.          
When he mounts, he lands light on the horse's back
so as not to alert the prey drive,
and turns his horse without wrenching the reins,
using the force of his own attention.
This is pure horsemanship.
I am less certain, being several years out of practice,
and wonder if the horse will rear and snort if we scare a bed of quail
from beneath the creosote.
Ahead of us, I feel Volodya's impatience with my fear.
He bends his horse's neck to gentle him and
to remind me that my thoughts are just thoughts.
I click my tongue, and together we trot down the road.
Our path goes through the hills, over the slate
and past the century plants shooting up from the agaves—
the stalks, which are both their bodies and their graves,
wave slightly in the breeze.
On the drive here, I hit a rattlesnake with my car
and turned back to see it writhing in the road, a snake as thick as Volodya's arm.
When I stopped at a coffee shop afterwards, shaken,
they congratulated me on the death and said
Another one bites the dust.
So there are some things you're meant to kill, some
that are simply meant to die.
Volodya is so tall in the saddle that he wants me to use his title,
wants me and the horse to both call him Sir.
But behind him I see a bobcat slink out from behind a bush
and regard us both with amber eyes,
unaware that we had believed ourselves to be on the safer path.

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THE VISITING DIGNITARY III

Jumping off the dock, my feet are reluctant at the last second,
but they aren't given the option to stop.
I fly
and right behind me Volodya flies too,
his cannonball knees pulled up to his chest.
He whoops before hitting the water
and it is such a natural sound—
unselfconscious and free—
that for a moment we are the same person
but I reach the water just before him, and
it swallows me up like a cool womb.
My cheeks are immediately cold, also my thighs, which is no bother,
and is absolute.
I am all face,
and then I am kicking through the void,
and when I break the surface, I laugh. Volodya
should have emerged just after, but the water
stays quiet as I tread in place,
long enough for me to imagine—
            his neck snapped, or his head slammed
            on the dock; a mistimed breath; the
            plying fingers of the weeds that lay on the pond's
            dark floor—
but then cold hands grasp my leg, and I
scream! Volodya!
As he pops up laughing.
I spit out some water, which tastes eternal, like granite.
Volodya is still smiling at his little joke.
He lays onto his back and floats; above us,
the clouds are round-cheeked as infants.
My skin prickles with the water's cold, and
I begin to move, just slowly, back to
the dock. A frog crawl. A backstroke.
Volodya sees me and swiftly follows,
not wanting to be left behind.
When we heave ourselves onto the warm boards of the dock
he is beached and satisfied, as am I.
If you came to my country, Volodya tells me, I could make you
a billionaire. I could give you power. And my face must betray
my interest in this, because he laughs, and I laugh too,
as the light falls around us like gold.
My lips are cold, and the sun is hot.
There is nothing to buy here with any amount of money
but we will not always be here.

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Things you can find online with very little effort: video evidence of Vladimir Putin kissing a young boy's stomach at a press conference outside the Kremlin. Photos of Putin in cheesecake-glamour style, shirtless astride a horse, shirtless fishing in a Russian river, hugging a polar bear (shirtful), patting a comatose tiger (also shirtful). An image of Mussolini's body strung up by the feet in Piazzale Loreto on my birthday (39 years before I was born). Napoleon Bonaparte's death mask. Things you can not find: actual proof of eternal life.