Selected Poems

– How the splendour of these veils and of this dress

Weighs me down in my disgrace!

– In stony Troezen there shall be

A notorious disaster,

The royal stairs

Shall redden with shame

…

…

And a black sun rise

For the amorous mother.

– Oh if it were hatred seething in my breast, –

But, you see, the confession burst from my own lips.

– In broad daylight Phaedra burns

With a black flame.

In broad daylight

A funeral taper smoulders.

Hippolytus, beware of your mother:

Phaedra – the night – stalks you

In broad daylight.

– With my black love I have sullied the sun…

…

– We are afraid, we do not dare

To succour the imperial grief.

Stung by Theseus, night fell on him.

We shall bring the dead home with our burial chant;

We shall cool the black sun

Of its savage, insomniac passion.

We shall die in transparent Petropolis,

Where Proserpina rules over us.

We drink the deadly air with every breath,

And every hour is the anniversary of our death.

Goddess of the sea, dread Athena,

Remove your mighty helmet of stone.

We shall die in transparent Petropolis:

Here Proserpina is tsar, not you.

This night is irredeemable.

Where you are, it is still light.

At Jerusalem’s gates

A black sun has risen.

The yellow sun is more terrible –

Hush-a-bye, baby.

Jews in the bright temple

Buried my mother.

Bereft of priests, devoid of grace,

Jews in the bright temple

Sang the service

Over this woman’s ashes.

The voice of Israelites rang out

Over my mother.

I woke in a radiant cradle,

Lit by a black sun.

Disbelieving the miracle of resurrection,

We wandered through the cemetery.

– You know, the earth everywhere

Reminds me of those hills

…

…

Where Russia stops abruptly

Above the black and deafly roaring sea.

From these monastic slopes

An ample field runs down.

As it was I didn’t want to travel south

Away from spacious Vladimir,

But to stay there with that occluded nun

In the dark wooden village of god’s fools

Would have spelled disaster.

I kiss your sunburnt elbow

And a wax-like patch of forehead –

Still white, I know,

Under a strand of dark-complexioned gold.

I kiss your wrist whose turquoise bracelet

Leaves a band of white:

Here, in Tauris, ardent summers

Work their wonders.

How quickly you went dark

And came to the Redeemer’s meagre icon

And couldn’t be torn away from kissing –

You who in Moscow had been so proud.

For us only a name remains,

A miraculous sound for a long time to come.

Take from me these grains of sand:

I’m pouring them from hand to hand.

Out of the bottle the stream of golden honey poured so slowly

That she had time to murmur (she who had invited us):

Here, in sad Tauris, where fate has led us,

We shan’t be bored. – She glanced over her shoulder.

Everywhere the rites of Bacchus, as if the world were only

Watchmen, dogs; you’ll not meet anyone:

Like heavy barrels the peaceful days roll on;

Far-off voices in a hut – you neither understand them nor reply.

After tea we came into the great brown garden,

Dark blinds lowered like eyelids on the windows,

Past white columns to see the grapes

Where airy glass has sluiced the sleepy mountain.

The vine, I said, lives on like ancient battles –

Leafy-headed horsemen fight in flowery flourishes:

The science of Hellas in stony Tauris – and here are

The noble golden acres, the rusty furrows.

Well, in the white room silence stands like a spinning-wheel.

It smells of vinegar and paint and the cellar’s new wine.

Do you remember, in the Grecian house, the wife dear to all

(Not Helen – another) – how long she spent weaving?

Golden fleece, where are you, golden fleece?

The whole journey a thundering of the sea’s weighty waves.

And leaving his ship, canvas worn out on the seas,

Odysseus came back, filled with time and space.

Spring’s transparent-grey asphodels

Are still far away.

For a while yet sand rustles,

Waves seethe.

But here my spirit, like Persephone,

Enters the insubstantial circle,

And in the kingdom of the dead

Delightful sunburnt arms don’t exist.

Why do we entrust to a boat

The weight of a funeral urn,

And celebrate the black rose festival

On amethyst-coloured water?

My spirit aspires there,

Beyond the misty headland of Meganom,

And a black sail shall come back from there

After the burial!

A shadowy column of storm-clouds

Quickly passes,

Under a wind-driven moon

Black rose-flakes scurry.

And memory’s huge flag –

Bird of death and mourners –

Trails its black borders

Over the cypress stern.

And the sad fan of years gone by

Opens with a rustling sigh

Where the amulet was darkly buried

With a shudder in the sand.

My spirit aspires there,

Beyond the misty headland of Meganom,

And a black sail shall come back from there

After the burial!

I have studied the science of separations

From nocturnal laments when hair flows loose.

Oxen chew, waiting lengthens,

This last hour of vigil in the city.

And I honour the rituals of that cock-crowing night

When, having lifted the journey’s burden of grief,

Tear-stained eyes gazed into the distance

And the singing of Muses blended with the weeping of women.

Who can know from the word goodbye

What kind of parting is in store for us,

What the cock’s clamour promises

When a light burns in the acropolis,

And at the dawn of some sort of new life

When the lazy ox chews in his stall

Why the rooster, herald of new life,

Flaps his wings on the city walls?

And I like the way of weaving:

The shuttle runs, the spindle hums,

And – flying to meet us like swan’s down –

Look, barefooted Delia!

Oh how meagre life’s weft,

How threadbare the language of rejoicing!

Everything existed of old, everything happens again,

And only the moment of recognition is sweet.

So be it: a translucent shape

Like a squirrel’s pelt

Lies on a clean clay dish

And a girl stares, bent over the wax.

Not for us to foretell the Grecian Erebus;

Wax is for women what bronze is for men.

On us our fate falls only in battles;

Their death is given in divination.

Sisters: heaviness and tenderness bear the same insignia.

Wasps too suck the lungwort heavy as a rose.

Man dies, the hot sand cools.

Yesterday’s sun is borne on a black litter.

Oh, heaviness of honeycombs, tenderness of nets:

It is easier to raise a rock than to say your name!

I am left with one care only, a golden one:

To free myself from the burden of time.

I drink the turbid air as if it were dark water.

Time is turned by the plough, and the rose was earth.

The heavy-tender roses, in their slow whirlpool,

Are plaited into double wreaths.

Return to the incestuous lap,

Leah, from which you came:

Instead of Ilium’s sun

You chose a yellow twilight.

Go, no one shall touch you.

On the father’s breast, at dead of night,

Let the incestuous daughter

Bury her head.

But a fateful change

Must be fulfilled in you:

You shall be called Leah – not Helen –,

Not because imperial blood

Flows heavier in those veins

Than in your veins.

No, you shall fall in love with a Jew

And dissolve in him. God help you.

When Psyche – life – descends among shades,

Pursuing Persephone through half-transparent leaves,

The blind swallow hurls itself at her feet

With Stygian affection and a green twig.

Phantoms quickly throng around their new companion,

They meet the fugitive with grievings,

In her face they wring weak hands,

Perplexed by bashful hope.

One holds out a mirror, another a phial of perfumes –

The soul likes trinkets, is after all feminine.

And dry complainings, like fine rain,

Sprinkle the leafless forest with transparent voices.

And uncertain what to do in this tender hubbub

The soul doesn’t recognize the transparent trees.

Psyche breathes on the mirror, slow to hand over

The lozenge of copper to the master of the ferry.

I have forgotten the word I wanted to say.

On severed wings, to play with the transparent ones,

The blind swallow flies back to her palace of shadows;

A nocturnal song is sung in a frenzy.

No birds are heard. No blossom on the immortelle.

The manes of the night horses are transparent.

An empty boat floats on an arid estuary

And, lost among grasshoppers, the word swoons.

The word slowly grows, like a tent or shrine,

Now throws itself down like demented Antigone,

Now like a dead swallow falls at one’s feet,

With Stygian affection and a green twig.

Oh, to bring back the shyness of clairvoyant fingers,

Recognition’s rounded happiness!

I am so afraid of the sobbing of the Muses,

Of mist, of bells, of brokenness.

They who are going to die can love and see,

Even sound can pour into their fingers,

But I have forgotten what I wanted to say

And a thought without flesh flies back to its palace of shadows.

The transparent one keeps on repeating the wrong thing:

Always swallow, my love, Antigone…

And on my lips the black ice burns,

The recollection of Stygian bells.

For the sake of delight

Take from my hands some sun and some honey,

As Persephone’s bees enjoined on us.

Not to be untied, the unmoored boat;

Not to be heard, fur-shod shadows;

Not to be silenced, life’s thick terrors.

Now we have only kisses,

Like little furry bees,

Which perish when they fly from the hive.

They rustle in transparent thickets

In the dense night forest of Taigetos,

Nourished by time, by honeysuckle and mint.

For the sake of delight, then, take my uncouth present:

This simple necklace of dead dried bees

That turned honey into sun.

Here is the pyx, like a golden sun,

For a splendid moment hanging in the air;

Now only the Greek tongue should resound,

Holding the whole world in its hands like an apple.

The exultant zenith of the service has come round,

Light under the dome inside the circular temple in July,

So that with nothing held back we sigh, beyond time,

For that green pasture where time stands still.

And the Eucharist hovers like an eternal midday –

All partake, play and sing;

Under the eyes of everyone the holy vessel pours

With inexhaustible rejoicing.

Because I had to let go of your arms,

Because I betrayed your salty tender lips,

I must wait for dawn in the dense acropolis.

How I abhor these weeping ancient timbers!

Achaean men fit out the Horse in the dark,

They hack into the walls with their toothed saws,

Nothing can quiet the blood’s dry murmur,

And you have no name, no sound, no copy.

How could I think you would come back, how could I dare?

Why did I break with you before it was time?

The gloom hasn’t lightened and the cock hasn’t crowed,

The hot axe hasn’t yet split the wood.

The walls ooze resin like a transparent tear,

The town feels its wooden ribs,

But blood has rushed to the ladders and taken it by storm,

The men have been enticed three times in dreams.

Where is dear Troy? Where the imperial, where the maidenly house?

Priam’s lofty starling-coop shall be a ruin.

And arrows fall like dry, wooden rain

And other arrows grow from the ground like hazel-nut trees.

The last star-pricks are dying out painlessly,

As morning, a grey swallow, raps at the window.

And lethargic day, like an ox waking in straw,

Stirs on the streets, tousled by long sleep.

When the city moon looks out on the streets,

And slowly lights the impenetrable town,

And darkness swells, full of melancholy and bronze,

And songs of wax are smashed by the harshness of time;

And the cuckoo is weeping in its stone tower,

And the ashen woman descends to reap the dead world,

Quietly scattering huge spokes of shadow,

And strews yellowing straw across the floorboards…

When, on my lips a singing name, I stepped

Into the ring of dancing shadows

Stamping on the tender meadow,

A mist of sound was left of what had melted.

To begin with I thought the name was ‘seraph’

And I fought shy of such a light body,

A few days passed and I blended with it

And dissolved into that dear shadow.

And again from the apple-tree wild fruit falls,

And the secret form flickers in front of me,

Blaspheming and cursing itself

And swallowing jealousy’s hot coals.

Then happiness rolls by like a golden hoop

Fulfilling someone else’s will,

And cutting the air with the palm of your hand

You chase the sweetness of Spring.

And it is so arranged that we do not dance away

From these spell-bound circles.

The expansive hills of virginal earth

Lie swaddled away.

I like the grey silences under the arches:

Public prayer, funeral processions,

The affecting obligatory rites and requiems at Saint Isaac’s.

I like the priest’s unhurried step,

The winding-sheet’s expansive bodying-forth,

Lent’s Galilean gloom, like an ancient fishing-net,

And smoke of the Old Testament on glowing altars,

And the priest’s orphaned cry. And royal meekness:

Unsullied snow on shoulders, wild purple vestments.

Hagia Sophia and Saint Peter’s – everlasting barns of air and light,

Storehouses of universal goods,

Granaries of the New Testament.

Not to either of you is the spirit drawn in years of grave disaster:

Here, up the wide and sullen steps,

The wolves of tribulation slink; we’ll never betray their tracks:

For the slave is free, having overcome fear,

And in cool granaries, in deep bins,

The grain of whole and perfect faith is stored.