Selected Poems

I was washing at night in the courtyard,

Harsh stars shone in the sky.

Starlight, like salt on an axe-head –

The rain-butt was brim-full and frozen.

The gates are locked,

And the earth in all conscience is bleak.

There’s scarcely anything more basic and pure

Than truth’s clean canvas.

A star melts, like salt, in the barrel

And the freezing water is blacker,

Death cleaner, misfortune saltier,

And the earth more truthful, more awful.

To some, winter is arrack and a blue-eyed punch,

To some, a fragrant wine with cinnamon,

Some get their salty orders from the brutal stars

To carry back to smoke-filled huts.

A little still-warm chicken dung,

Sheep’s muddle-headed warmth:

For life, I would give everything –

For so-much-needed care, for a match to warm me.

Look: in my hand there’s only an earthenware bowl;

A chirping of stars is tickling my thin ear;

Through this pitiful down I have to admire

The yellowness of grass and the warmth of the soil.

Quietly to be carding wool and tedding straw;

To starve like an apple-tree in its winter binding;

Senselessly drawn by tenderness for everything alien;

Fumbling through emptiness, patiently waiting.

Let the conspirators, like sheep, speed over the snow.

Let the brittle snow-crust crack.

Winter – to some – is a lodging of wormwood and acrid smoke,

To some the stern salt of ceremonial wounds.

Oh to raise a lantern on a long stick,

Under the salt of stars to follow a dog,

And, rooster in pot, enter a fortune-teller’s yard.

But white, white snow scalds my eyes till they smart.

Rosy foam of fatigue on his sensual lips,

The bull furiously paws at the green breakers;

A ladies’ man, no oarsman, he snorts,

His spine unused to its laborious burden.

An occasional dolphin leaps in an arc,

A sea-urchin comes into view. Hold in your arms,

Tender Europa, all his worldly possessions:

Where could a bull find a more desirable yoke?

Bitterly she heeds the mighty splashing:

The corpulent and fertile sea is seething.

Aghast at the water’s oily brilliance,

She would like to slide down those hirsute cliffs.

Ah, she would prefer the company of sheep,

The creak of rowlocks or the lap of a spacious deck,

And fish flickering beyond a lofty poop. –

But the oarless oarsman swims with her further and further!

As the leaven swells,

So the housewife’s thrifty soul

Is possessed by the heat of the loaves,

As if Sophias of bread

Raise cupolas of rounded ardour

From a table of cherubim

And to coax a miraculous surplus

With force or caresses, the kingly herd-boy –

Time – seizes the bread, the word.

Even the stale stepson of the centuries

Finds his place – as the cooling makeweight

For loaves already lifted from the oven.

I climbed into the tousled hayloft,

Breathed the hay-dust of the mouldering stars,

The dishevelment of space,

And on the ladder pondered: why

Wake up a swarm of sounds, the miracle of Aeolian order,

Athwart this everlasting squabble?

Once more I want to strike a match,

To shove the night with my shoulder –

To wake it up.

The huge and shaggy load sticks out above the universe,

The hayloft’s ancient chaos

Begins to tickle as the darkness swells.

Mowers bring back

Goldfinches fallen from their nests.

I shall wring loose from these burning lines,

Get back to the order of sound where I belong,

To the blood’s grass-like and ringing connection,

Nerving myself for the dream beyond reason.

My time, my brute, who will be able

To look you in the eyes

And glue together with his blood

The backbones of two centuries?

Blood, the builder, gushes

From the earth’s throat.

Only parasites tremble

On the edge of the future…

To wrench our age out of prison

A flute is needed

To connect the sections

Of disarticulated days…

And buds shall swell again,

Shoots splash out greenly.

But your backbone is broken,

My beautiful, pitiful century.

With an idiot’s harsh and feeble grin

You look behind:

A beast, once supple,

Ponders its paw-marks in the sand.

We look at a forest and say:

Here is a forest for ships and masts,

Red pines,

Free to their tops of their shaggy burden,

To creak in the storm

In the furious forestless air;

The plumbline fastened to the dancing deck

Will hold out under the wind’s salt heel.

And the sea-wanderer,

In his unbridled thirst for space,

Dragging through damp ruts a geometer’s needle,

Collates the rough surface of the seas

With the attraction of the earth’s lap.

But breathing the smell

Of resinous tears oozing through planks,

Admiring the boards of bulkheads riveted

Not by the peaceful Bethlehem carpenter but by that other –

Father of journeys, friend of seafarers –

We say:

These too stood on the earth,

Awkward as a donkey’s backbone,

Their crests forgetful of their roots,

On a celebrated mountain ridge;

And howled under the sweet cloud-burst,

Fruitlessly offering the sky their precious freight

For a pinch of salt.

Where shall we begin?

Everything pitches and splits,

The air quivers with comparisons,

No one word is better than another,

The earth hums with metaphors.

And light two-wheeled chariots,

Harnessed brightly to flocks of strenuous birds,

Explode,

Vying with the snorting favourites of the race-track.

Three times blest he who puts a name into song;

A song adorned with a name

Survives longer among the others,

Marked by a fillet

That frees it from forgetfulness and stupefying smells,

Whether proximity of man or the smell of a beast’s pelt

Or simply a whiff of thyme rubbed between the palms.

The air dark like water, everything alive swims like fish,

Fins pushing aside the sphere

That’s compact, resilient, hardly heated –

The crystal in which wheels move and horses shy,

The moist black-earth every night flung open anew

By pitchforks, tridents, hoes and ploughs.

The air is mixed as densely as the earth –

You can’t get out, to get inside is arduous.

Rustling runs through the trees like a green ball-game;

Children play knucklebones with the vertebrae of dead animals.

The fragile calculation of the years of our era ends.

Let us be grateful for what we had:

I too made mistakes, lost my way, lost count.

The era rang like a golden sphere,

Cast, hollow, supported by no one.

Touched, it answered yes and no,

As a child will say:

I’ll give you an apple, or: I won’t give you one;

Its face an exact copy of the voice that pronounces these words.

The sound is still ringing although its source has ceased.

The horse foams in the dust.

But the acute curve of his neck

Preserves the memory of the race with outstretched legs

When there were not four

But as many as the stones on the road,

Renewed in four shifts

As blazing hooves pushed off from the ground.

So,

Whoever finds a horseshoe

Blows away the dust,

Rubs it with wool till it shines,

Then

Hangs it over the threshold

To rest,

So that it will no longer have to strike sparks from flint.

Human lips

which have nothing more to say

Preserve the form of the last word said.

And the arm retains the sense of weight

Though the jug

splashes half-empty

on the way home.

What I am saying at this moment is not being said by me

But is dug from the ground like grains of petrified wheat.

Some

on their coins depict a lion,

Others

a head;

Various tablets of brass, of gold and bronze

Lie with equal honour in the earth.

The century, trying to bite through them, left its teeth-marks there.

Time pares me down like a coin,

And there is no longer enough of me for myself.

Whoever has been kissing time’s tortured crown

Shall recall later, with filial tenderness,

How time lay down to sleep

In the snowdrift of wheat beyond the window.

Whoever lifted the sick eyelids of the age –

Two vast and sleepy eye-balls –

Hears everlastingly the roaring of the rivers

Of false and desolate times.

The potentate-era has orbs like sleepy apples

And a lovely earthenware mouth.

But it shall fall, expiring

On the overwhelmed arm of its ageing son.

I know life’s exhalations weaken everyday:

A little more, and the simple songs of palpable injury

Will have been cut short,

Lips sealed with tin.

An earthenware life! A dying era!

What I dread is this: that you will be understood

Only by someone whose smile is helpless,

By someone who is lost.

What anguish – to search for a lost word,

To lift sick eyelids,

And with lime-corroded blood

Gather night grasses for an alien tribe.

What an era: layers of lime in the sick son’s blood

Harden; Moscow sleeps, like a wooden box,

And there’s nowhere to run to from the tyrant-epoch…

Snow, as of old, smells of apples.

I want to escape from my own threshold.

Where to? The street is dark

And conscience shows up ahead of me, white,

Like salt scattered for pavements.

How could I ever betray to scandalmongers –

Again the frost smells of apples –

That marvellous pledge to the Fourth Estate

And vows solemn enough for tears?

Who else shall you kill? Who else extol?

What lie invent?

The Underwood’s cartilage – quick, wrench out its key

And you’ll find the little bone of a pike;

And, layers of lime thawing in the sick son’s blood,

Blissful laughter shall splash out…

But the typewriters’ mere sonatina

Is only a shadow of former, mighty sonatas.