So, he would pay his 'debt to medicine'.
But first he drank cognac by the ocean
with his back to all he travelled north to face.
His head was swimming free as the troikas

Of Tyumin, he looked down from the rail
Of his thirty years and saw a mile
Into himself as if he were clear water:
Lake Baikhal from the deckrail of the steamer.

That far north, Siberia was south.
Should it have been an ulcer in the mouth,
The cognac that the Moscow literati
Packed off with him to a penal colony -

Him, born, you may say, under the counter?
At lеast that meant he knew its worth. No cantor
In full throat by thе iconostasis
Got holier joy than he got from that glass

That shone and warmed like diamonds, warming
On some pert young cleavage in a salon,
Inviolable and affronting.
He felt the glass go cold in the midnight sun.

When he staggered up and smashed it on the stones
It rang as clearly as the convicts' chains
That haunted him. In the months to come
It rang on like the burden of his freedom
To try for the right tone - not tract, nor thesis -
And walk away from floggings. He who thought to squeeze
His slave's blood out and waken the free man
Shadowed a convict guide through Sakhalin