A poem sequence in six parts about the writer and philosopher
Lou Andreas Salomé

1. Russian Dolls in a Calfskin Valise

I can see them now. I see
nine Russian dolls.
They say I’m too clever, they say
I should never have left,
they say I need Russia,
then the image is gone.
I do nothing all day.
My cerebral cortex sweats 
with an amorphous fear. 

My solitary bag on the platform
bulged where I squeezed them away,
really just as an afterthought. 
But their hex was on me. 
The valise split and I lost my ticket. 
By Paris they were gone,
I’d thrown them from the train.
But reborn in the gilded cage
on the back of my eyelids, 
inside my head,
they confirmed my concept of Rückwirkung.
It’s the back-effect,
the tyranny of icons.

I was no longer Louise.
Pastor Gillot renamed me Lou, arranged a passport
at a small Dutch chapel. I prayed
he would forgive my letter,
already sealed,
my Todesbitte: he could only have my body
in death, there was no other way.
It would have been like incest.

I can see them now. I see
nine Matryoshka dolls.
It’s their pregnancy I hate,
like fat fertile Maltese goddesses.
It’s the second time I’ve been back 
to Russia in two years.
The image still hasn’t gone.
My companion complains:
how could I have left?
Surely this is my Rodinka?

I’m doing nothing all day.
 

2. “he was a poet when he shaved”
Lou Andreas Salomé describing Rainer Maria Rilke

Quaint Nizovka, blunt country Russia,
and us two trying to go native,
lodging with some god-forsaken provincial poet,
his turnip and paprika soups.

Smoothed, my companion is poor René again.
His chin had raked at the pale skin on my breast
drawing an allergic flush.
No woman gets both poet and man.

I sluice cold metallic water round the basin,
white enamel speckled with his anti-poetry,
those vicious needles,
rinsing them away.

In the course of a single ablution 
he’s switched uniform for lingerie, 
his newly cool calfskin cheek is almost convincing,
like a doll’s. But I won’t be his babushka. 

Poor René is losing his war,
his father’s eagle and military academy
overcome by a rampaging sacred cow:
little Miss René after all,
masturbating over his Ding-Gedichte,
those black cats and blind women.

It’s too clichéd, textbook Jewish Science. 
It’s over except for his lapdog entreaties,
and the intense letters he leaves for me
that’ll remain like columns at Pompeii.

Well my little puppe, place you head here,
here on my lap.
I will tell you a story. It’s a story of,
of a cat and a lapdog.

Telling him my story, 
stroking a scalp like the belly of a crow,
here in demonic Nizovka’s silence,
I think of once before in Italy…

Foetal, buckled up on a mattress, Friedrich 
when I left him, like a damn jack-russel
yapping Louloulouloulouloulouloulou.
 

3. Horsewhipped
after a photograph of Salomé being drawn in a cart by Nietzsche 
and Rée

Two men roped to my cart, with a twig and flower whip
I made an unlikely teenage dominatrix.
It proved an uncanny game, camera divination.
One man’s suicide and one like Aristotle
seduced and ridden by Alexander’s mistress
round love’s narrow pound.
It was in Turin, piazza Carlo Alberto.
The coachman was beating and beating the horse.
It was as if the empathy was too much,
as if when I politely turned him down
he identified too much, as if
the fetish porn of that photograph,
two men roped to my cart,
was too monumental, pregnant
with that scene in the piazza.
 

4. Watching You Sleep

If we all lived happily ever after
wouldn't you feel cheated? Wouldn't you
shake your head in wonder at it?
When reunited protagonists live on you ask
so what? Does nothing happen next?

Have them live out natural lives.
Grow old and ugly and die.
Can a hero be hero still
after the ever after,
adrift and storyless?

No, put an X across the end,
some gruesome deification.
Convert their living flesh to stone 
and place them up among the stars
at the peak moment.

Or maybe freeze them forever in the kinesis
of their unconsummated desires.
Otherwise, sated in the afterglow,
they will grow bored, perhaps alcoholic,
and come to represent nothing.

Then there’s always coitus reservatus.
Retain fluids like the Yellow Emperor
to increase longevity,
and die bloated but slightly disappointed.

Stay sleeping, please, we’ll circumvent 
this denouement, bypass the climax.
No apotheosis, please, stay sleeping:
I have my bag.
 

5. Philosophy of Departure

It’s a Russian custom to sit before you depart
(it could be on the stairs by the door)
and take some tea from the samovar.
In leaving, the traveller becomes a monument 
to herself, 
and the tears are the meaningless tears of departure.
There’s philosophy for leaving, each travel book 
is a secondhand jigsaw, one piece left behind.

You called me your black cat, your eyes given in
to sentimentality and the sweet lute of forgetting.
I think of your hands (I loved your kaolin hands),
I watched as they moved a loitering book from the bed.
My cheek rested on your cheek-warmed pillow.
Then dousing the light we drew a blanket round
to protect us from the cold spinning globe.

But each night the dolls inside dolls
went on forever.

I quietly close the door behind me
alone and looking up into the cathedral of dawn.
 

6. Ressentiment

I’ve found a leaf pressed in this book
like a message to the future.
And now as I blankly turn
the brittle copper paper
of a maple’s ancient autumn,
I can’t remember who placed it here
and why, or what it meant. 
Who caught that crisp confetti
falling one October in Nizovka?
Who slotted it 
between these particular pages 
of this certain book?
I replace it, waiting for future wisdom.
 

In Nizovka, we made love under the stars.
I can’t remember why or what it meant 
but we opened such mutually exclusive appetites 
in each other.

That kind of love was new to me and you were 
always the hypochondriac.
Now your pale soul will be wandering Russland 
like a Bohemian Christ.
Meanwhile your delicate sexual disposition 
releases its diseased blood into Muzot soil.

I left you as the leaves fell for small reasons.
Why are small reasons so compelling? 
 

I take my finger from the book
and see the page I saved
blending until it’s lost
to the most exact eye.
I am thinking of the time
when once our glances touched,
each umwelt intersecting,
and it was as if crowds parted
for our spotlit dance.

I couldn’t say what it is I’ve just been reading.
I was thinking of you, 
though your face has merged like the page
and is lost.

Lou Andreas Salomé was a writer and philosopher who lived from 1861 to 1937. She was brought up in Russia but spent most of her adult life in Europe. She is often remembered for refusing Nietzsche’s offer of marriage when she was 21. It is sometimes suggested that this contributed to his later madness, triggered by an incident in Turin.

During her enduring but unconsummated marriage, Salomé began an affair with Rainer (originally René) Maria Rilke, who was then in his early twenties. They visited Russia twice together. By the time they made their second visit in 1900 their relationship was coming to an end. Salomé left Rilke in Nizovka and travelled on alone to stay with her brother in Finland.