Astapovo

In his last years, Tolstoy believed

in a dreamed-of innocence and tried

to unburden himself of property,

sacrifice his art to every good cause.

Each day's work never lightened

a weight he could not explain. Always

a rush of words coupling in his head

for a mass of details that would not

add up. At the end he dressed himself

in peasant clothes (though rubles weighted

his pockets) to slip from his house,

lived in since a child, to slip from

his wife of forty-eight years.

He got as far as Astapovo, a few stops

on the railway, a few miles into

the country. There he collapsed.

There a stranger's bed soon surrounded

by disciples who waited for what

he could tell them of another world.

He told a son, "I am always composing,

I cannot go to sleep." His children

waited and his wife who remembered

how he once entered one peasant

woman after another trying to leave

himself. Remembered how all these

years he could not wash them from himself.

He remained in Astapovo, a newsreel

camera at the window. All he could do

was lie there, a wet sleety snow

ticking at the window where faces,

half-shadowed, half-lit by the little

orange flames of the gas lamps,

pushed up to the glass and waited

as if for some final explanation,

something they could read in the words

forming on his lips, holding him there.