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  Cupid’s arrow – a scissors’ beak I’ve stuck into my thighs, thirty kilometers from                                Minsk, sunstruck   The sun – ‘Chernobyl’ radio station Broadcasts its radiation; is always on The                sun speaks into the tulips’ microphones   Microphones – Viktsya sits by the cow’s udder like in a recording studio   Record – Yanina (blind) copies sheet music from my teacher’s songbook, Beethoven (deaf) for Accordion, into my notebook   Xerox – unavailable in the empire, prized like a spacecraft   Musical staff (according to the music teacher) – not Yanina’s kitchen shelves Unacceptable to reshelf at liberty, to adjust music pitch like spices   Music teacher – a beautiful woman, furious like Beethoven’s hair   Musical staff (according to Yanina) – rows of plank beds in the northern barracks ‘Notes are the bodies Rounded and flattened by day’s labour, either utterly dark or  insanely empty inside This is what makes music so poignant, so painful’   Notes, also (according to Yanina) – ladles   Beethoven: ‘Music should strike fire in the heart of man, and bring tears to the eyes of woman’   Yanina to Beethoven: ‘So music is a family brawl?’   Notes (according to the music teacher) – ladles full of water Yanina dumps onto Beethoven’s fire   My heart – on fire with fury every time the music teacher trashes Yanina’s blind copying I despise and secretly envy Beethoven for having nothing to do with plank beds in the northern barracks   A daily source of Beethoven – ‘Chernobyl’ radio station Also, the joy of summer rains   My mission: I combat gamma rays with music scales   Yanina tucks notes into the plank beds of music staff On one of them, she recognises                                       her old husband Her blindness           blurs all features          into the ovals          of notes   The cow chews rib-grass but there is no cow   Birds shred the clouds          with their dull beaks The woods are thin like soup