Achilles in Love
by Stephen Dunn

There was no getting to his weakness.
In public, even in summer, he wore
big boots, specially made for him,
a band of steel reinforcing each heel.
At home, when he bathed or slept,
he kept a pistol within reach, loaded.
And because to be invulnerable
is to be alone, he was alone even when
he was with you. You could sense it
in the rigidity of his carriage, as if under
his fine-fitting suits were layers of armor.
Yet everyone loved to see him in action:
While his enemies were thinking small
Advantages, he only thought end game.

Then she came along, who seemed to be all
women fused into one, cheekbones and breasts
evidence that evolution doesn’t care
about fairness, and a mind so good, well,
it was like his. You could see his body soften,
and days later, when finally they were naked,
she instinctively knew what to do—
as smart men do with a mastectomy’s scar—
to kiss his heel before kissing
what he considered to be his power,
and with a tenderness that made him tremble.


Stephen Dunn, “Achilles in Love” from What Goes On. Copyright © 2008 W.W. Norton. (buy now)

It's the birthday of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (books by this author), born in a suburb of Odessa in 1889. She was a beautiful, fashionable, 22-year-old woman when she published her first collection of poetry in 1912, but it became a sensation. The book was filled with love poems inspired by her affair with the then-unknown Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. At the time, no Russian woman had ever written so frankly about love, and Akhmatova became a celebrity overnight. Women all over Russia want to be like her and men all over Russia fell in love with her.

But within a few years, life in Russia became much more complicated, and Akhmatova had a lot more to write about than love affairs. In her poem "In Memoriam July 19, 1914," about the start of World War I, she wrote, "We grew a hundred years older in a single hour."

After the Bolshevik Revolution, most writers and intellectuals tried to flee the country, but Akhmatova and her husband decided to stay. She wrote, "No, not under an alien sky, / Not protected by alien wings, — / I was with my people then, / There, where my people, unfortunately, were." Her husband was shot in 1921 for allegedly participating in an anti-Bolshevik plot and the following year the government told her that she would no longer be able to publish her poetry. She began working on translations and more or less stopped writing her own poems.

Then Akhmatova's son was arrested by the government. For 17 months she went to the prison in Leningrad every day to try to get news about him. There were crowds of other women there, doing the same thing, and one day a woman recognized Akhmatova as the formerly famous poet, and whispered in her ear, "Can you describe this?" That woman's question helped inspire Akhmatova to begin writing her 10-poem cycle "Requiem" which many Russians consider the greatest piece of literature ever written about Stalinist Russia.

By the end of her life, she had gained more freedom and she'd become one of the most renowned poets in the world. She died on the 13th anniversary of Stalin's death, on March 5, 1966. A complete collection of her poetry didn't come out in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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