IV: The Man With Bushy Eyebrows

Did Brezhnev brush them up to flair
in a fierce fur ridge from his eyes?
What evolutionary dust storm,
what effluvial fall would select
for such fat caterpillars on his face?
He kept doves in a cage which he
would rattle for a laugh and did
the same for Gorbachev, promoting him,
taunting him, and murdering his
mentor. Three centuries and more ago
while the French and English enmeshed
the Wyandot and Iroquois in their
violent hunger for fur, the Russians
over terrain at least as frigid, at
least as difficult, were doing the
same until the world was clutched
in a frozen hug where European
met European around the Bering Strait.
Brezhnev was the King of Winter, rich,
fat, and comfortable on the convenience
of a widespread terror. While it is
always startling to imagine an old man
young surely he learned in his youth
the sweet odour of corrupted power from
Stalin who had, in turn, his own long
lineage. We whites are only the most
recent avatars and not the only modern
practitioners of these arts and every day
we are reminded of the commonplace
inevitability of crime.