Somehow we got through the miles of Moscow,
left the Sparrow Hills, and found the small, familiar church.
Our open sled was filled with straw, and roughly hooded
with coarse, frozen cloth that hurt us.
Then in Uglitch the children played knucklebones.
When we drove through it, I reached for my lost hat,
the air smelled like bread left in the oven,
three candles were melting in the chapel.
They were not three candles but three meetings —
one of them had been blessed by the Lord Himself.
There couldn’t be a fourth Rome was so far away,
and the Lord had never really been Himself there.
Our sled stuck in a black rut,
and people shuffled by us to stare.
The men were all bones, the women were crows.
They gossiped and wasted time by the door.
Birds blackened the bare distance with spots —
his tied hands were icy. The Tsarevitch’s
body was like a frozen sack when they drove him in,
and set fire to the reddish straw.