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from Deaf Republic: 14

By Ilya Kaminsky b. 1977 Ilya Kaminsky

Each man has a quiet that revolves

around him as he beats his head against the earth. But I am laughing

hard and furious. I pour a glass of pepper vodka

and toast the gray wall. I say we were

never silent. We read each other’s lips and said

one word four times. And laughed four times

in loving repetition. We read each other’s lips to uncover

the poverty of laughter. Touch the asphalt with fingers to hear the cool earth of Vasenka

Deposit ears into the raindrops on a fisherman’s tobacco hair.

And whoever listens to me: being

there, and not being, lost and found

and lost again: Thank you for the feather on my tongue,

thank you for our argument that ends,

thank you for my deafness, Lord, such fire

from a match you never lit.

NOTES: These poems are from the unfinished manuscript Deaf Republic. This story of a pregnant woman and her husband living during an epidemic of deafness and civil unrest was found beneath the floorboards in a house in Eastern Europe. Several versions of the manuscript exist.—IK

Source: Poetry (May 2009).

Biography

Poet Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union city of Odessa. He lost most of his hearing at the age of four after a doctor misdiagnosed mumps as a cold, and his family was granted political asylum by the United States in 1993, settling in Rochester, New York. After his father’s death in 1994, Kaminsky began to write poems in English. He explained in an interview with the Adirondack Review, “I chose English because no . . .

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