You were no man for evangelical discomfort,
no ascetic of the Sermon on the Mount:
so what drove you to the limit, yours and Russia's,
and made you, briefly, prison inspector?
The carriage that took you was unspringed.
Novosibirsk, Yenisey, Baikal, Amur:
dry feet (you commented) were the highest good;
distance in the taiga lived on and on.
Opening the door directly on the Milky Way
you surprised yourself, recognising
desolation's deepest ore in a convict's speech.
(Better said: your body recognised it, craving sleep.)
Was that what it took to be inspector
of the bare-faced? The only voices in the island
were the wind's. Eskimo wisdom
out of Diogenes: vastness far from human.
The centenary of the death of Anton Chekhov falls on July 4 2004.
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2004.
