Selected Poems

In the raised head, a hint of wing –

But the coat is flapping;

In the closed eyes, in the peace

Of the arms: energy’s pure hiding-place.

Here is a creature that can fly and sing,

The word malleable and flaming,

And congenital awkwardness is overcome

By inborn rhythm!

I was only in a childish way connected with the established order:

I was terrified of oysters and glanced distrustfully at guardsmen;

And not a grain of my soul owes anything to that world of power,

However much I was tortured trying to be someone else.

I never stood under the Egyptian portico of a bank

With ponderous importance, frowning, in a beaver-fur mitre,

And above the lemon-coloured Neva

No gypsy girl ever danced for me to the crackle of hundred-rouble notes.

Sensing future executions, from the howl of stormy events

I ran to the Black Sea nymphs,

And from the beauties of that time – from those tender European ladies –

How much confusion, strain and grief I embraced!

Why does this city still retain

Its ancient rights over my thoughts and feelings?

Fire and frost have made it more insolent:

Self-satisfied, doomed, frivolous, youthful!

Perhaps it’s because I saw in a picture-book

Lady Godiva with her ginger mane hanging down

That I still secretly repeat to myself: Lady Godiva,

Goodbye… But I don’t remember now…

Help me, O Lord, to get through this night:

I am afraid for her life, your handmaiden’s. –

Living in Petersburg is like sleeping in a coffin.

For the resounding glory of eras to come,

For their sublime stock of people,

I was deprived of the cup at the elders’ feast

And my happiness and honour.

Our epoch’s wolf-hound grips my back

Though my blood is not wolf’s blood;

Squeeze me, rather, like a hat up the sleeve

Of the Siberian-steppe-fur-coat,

In case I see any trembling or mire

Or blood-splashed bones on the rack,

So for me blue polar foxes may shine

All night in their original beauty.

Take me into the night where the Yenisey flows

And the pine-tree reaches the stars,

Because my blood is not wolf’s blood

And only an equal shall kill me.

I drink to the blossoming epaulette,

To all I’m reproached for and won’t forget:

Asthma and lordly fur-coat,

The bile of the Petersburg climate,

The singing pines of Savoy,

The jug of cream – Alpine joy,

And the oil paintings in Paris. I also rejoice

At roses in the Rolls-Royce,

Champs-Elysées benzine,

Proud English red-heads, quinine.

To the waves of Biscay! I drink, but what with I’m not sure:

The Pope’s Châteauneuf, a happy Spumante, or…?

The painter portrayed for us

Lilac’s violent swoon

And laid on the canvas, like scabs,

Colour’s sonorous gradations.

He knew the density of oil –

Its pastry summer

Baked with violet marrow,

Dilating in its oven.

Even more violet is that shadow there:

A whistling or whip dying like a match,

So that you’d say: chefs in the kitchen

Are preparing plump pigeons.

Veils merely sketched,

A swing you have to guess,

And in this disorder of dusk,

Already a bee keeps house.

It’s cold in Europe, Italy is dark,

And power barbarous like the hands of Peter the Great.

Oh to throw wide open, as soon as possible,

A vast window on the Adriatic.

And I delight in his frenzied leisure:

Babble of sweet and sour, lovely oyster-sounds –

The whirr of a hundred whips. With a knife

I shrink from exposing such a pearl.

Through his window he smiles at the butcher’s stall:

The child, asleep under a net of blue flies;

The soldiers of the Duke now drunk

On wine and garlic and on plague.

Dear Ariosto, maybe a century shall pass –

And we shall pour your azure and our black together

Into one fraternal, vast, blue-black sea.

We were there too. We too drank mead.

We exist, without sensing our country beneath us,

Ten steps away our words evaporate,

But where there are enough for half a conversation

We always commemorate the Kremlin’s man of the mountains.

His fat fingers slimy as worms,

His words dependable as weights of measure.

His cockroach moustache chuckles,

His top-boots gleam.

And around him a riff-raff of scraggy-necked chiefs;

He plays with the lackeydoms of half-men

Who warble, or miaow, or whimper.

He alone prods and probes.

He forges decree after decree like horseshoes:

In the groin, brain, forehead, eye.

Whoever is being executed – there’s raspberry compote

And the gigantic torso of the Georgian.

1. The body of King Arshak is unwashed, his beard runs wild.

2. His fingernails are broken, and wood-lice crawl across his face.

3. His ears, grown dull with silence, once listened to Greek music.

4. His tongue is scabbed from jailer’s food – which once pressed grapes against the palate and was adroit like the tip of a flautist’s tongue.

5. The seed of Arshak has withered in his scrotum and his voice is sparse as the bleating of a sheep.

6. King Shapukh, thinks Arshak, has got the better of me and, worse, has taken my air for himself!

7. The Assyrian holds my heart in his hand.

8. He commands my hair and fingernails. He grows my beard and swallows my spit, so used has he become to the thought that I am to be found here – in the fortress of Aniush.

9. The Kushan people rose up against Shapukh.

10. They snapped the frontier at an undefended place like a silken thread.

11. Like an eyelash in his eye, the attack pricked King Shapukh.

12. Both enemies screwed up their eyes, so as not to see each other.

13. Darmastat, the most gracious and best-educated of the eunuchs, encouraged the commander of the cavalry from the centre of Shapukh’s army. Darmastat wormed his way into favour, snatched his master, like a chess-piece, out of danger, remaining all the while in public view.

14. He had been governor of the province of Andekh in the days when Arshak’s velvet voice gave orders.

15. Yesterday Arshak was a king, but today is fallen into a crevice, huddles like a baby in the womb, and warms himself with lice, enjoying the itch.

16. When the time came for his reward, Darmastat’s request tickled the Assyrian’s keen ears like a feather:

17. Give me a pass to the fortress of Aniush. I should like Arshak to spend one more day, full of sounds, taste and smell, as it used to be when he entertained himself at the chase and saw to the planting of trees.

Your narrow shoulders are to redden under scourges,

Redden under scourges and to burn in frosts.

Your child-like arms are to lift heavy irons,

To lift heavy irons and to sew mail-bags.

Your tender soles are to walk barefoot on glass,

Barefoot on glass and blood-stained sand.

And I am here to burn for you like a black candle,

Burn like a black candle and not dare to pray.

Over-esteemed, too-black, all in peak condition,

Everything groomed withers, everything aired;

Everything crumbling, coming together like a choir –

Wet clods of my ‘soil and freedom’!

In the days of early ploughing – black, almost blue.

And this is the foundation of unwarlike work –

A thousand mounds of furrowed language:

And something unbounded within these bounds!

And yet the earth is – a blunder, a blunt axe-head;

One cannot implore the earth, even if one falls at its feet:

Still it whets the hearing like a mildewed flute;

It ploughs the ear with a chilly, morning clarinet.

How pleasing fatty topsoil is to ploughshare,

How silent the steppe in its April upheaval!

Well, I wish you well, black earth: be firm, sharp-eyed…

A black-voiced silence is at work.

Yes, I’m lying in the earth, moving my lips,

But what I’m going to say every schoolboy shall know by heart:

The earth is at its roundest on Red Square

And its unchained curve is hard,

On Red Square the earth is at its roundest

And its curve, rolling all the way down to the rice fields,

Is unexpectedly expansive

While there are still any slaves on the earth.

You took away my seas and running jumps and sky

And propped my foot against the violent earth.

Where could this brilliant calculation get you?

You couldn’t take away my muttering lips.

My country conversed with me,

Spoiled me, scolded, didn’t listen.

She only noticed me when,

Grown-up, I became an eye-witness.

Then suddenly, like a lens, she set me on fire

With a beam from the Admiralty spire.

For those hundred-carat ingots, Roman nights,

Those breasts enticing the young Goethe,

Let me be answerable, but not lose all my rights.

There is a multifaceted life beyond the law.

A wave advances – one wave breaking another’s backbone,

Flinging itself at the moon in slavish yearning.

And a young janissary of a whirlpool –

In its untiring tidal metropolis –

Raves, slant-eyed, digging its ditch in the sand.

But through the flaky gloom

An unbuilt wall’s pale teeth rise up.

The soldiers of suspicious sultans

Fall from foaming stairs – dismembered, spattered.

Cold eunuchs bring the poison in.

I shall perform a smoky rite:

In this opal here, in my disgrace,

I see a seaside summer’s strawberries –

Cleft cornelians

And their brothers, agates like ants.

But a pebble from the sea’s depths,

A simple soldier,

Is more dear to me:

Grey, wild,

That no one wants.

I shall not return my borrowed dust

To the earth,

Like a white floury butterfly.

I will this thinking body –

This charred, bony flesh,

Alive to its own span –

To turn into a street, a country.

I can’t make sense of today –

A day somehow yellow-mouthed.

Dock gates stare at me

From anchors and mist.

Through faded water a convoy of battleships

Moves quietly, quietly,

And the narrow pencil-box canals

Look even blacker under ice.

Like a belated present,

Winter is now palpable:

I like its initial,

Diffident sweep.

Its terror is beautiful,

Like the beginning of dreadful deeds:

Even ravens are alarmed

By the leafless circle.

But precariously more powerful than anything

Is its bulging blueness:

The half-formed ice on the river’s brow,

Lullabying unsleepingly…

I would sing of him who shifted the axis of the world…

See, Aeschylus, how I weep as I draw the portrait of the Leader…

In the friendship of his wise eyes

One suddenly sees – a father!…

(His powerful eyes – sternly kind…)

And I want to thank the hills

That nourished this gristle, this wrist.

He was born in the mountains and knew the bitterness of prison…

I want to call him – not Stalin – but Dzhugashvili!

I seem to see him dressed in his greatcoat and his cap,

On the wonderful square, with his happy eyes…

The furrows of his giant plough reach the sun.

He smiles with the smile of the harvester…

You still haven’t died, you’re still not alone

While – with a beggar-woman for companion –

You delight in the immense plains

And the haze and cold and snow-storms.

In miraculous poverty, opulent privation,

You live alone – consoled, at peace;

These days and nights are hallowed,

Honey-tongued is this innocent labour.

Unhappy any man whom, like his shadow,

A dog’s bark scares and the wind scythes down.

And poor indeed one who, half-alive,

Begs mercy of a shadow.

I look the frost in the face, alone –

It’s going nowhere, I come from nowhere –

And always the breathing wonder of the plain

Ironed, folded without a crease.

The sun is squinting in laundered destitution,

Its frown peaceful and consoled,

The multitude of forests much the same…

Snow crunches in my eyes, innocent as bread.

Oh, these suffocating, asthmatic spaces of the steppes –

I’m sick of them! And the horizon,

Catching its breath, is flung wide-open.

I need a blindfold for both eyes!

I could better have endured the sand

In layers along the banks of the toothy Kama.

I would have clung to its shy sleeves,

Its ripples, brinks and hollows.

We would have worked in harmony – for a century or second.

Envious of the rapids’ precipitation,

I would have listened under the flowing timber’s bark

To the movement of the fibrous rings.

Plagued by their miraculous and all-engulfing hunger,

What can we do with the murderous plains?

Surely what we deem to be their openness

We ourselves – falling asleep – behold;

And everywhere the questions swell – where do they go,

And where do they come from?

And is not he who makes us shriek in our sleep

Slowly crawling across them –

The space for Judases not yet born.

Don’t compare: anyone alive is matchless.

I yielded, with a kind of tender terror,

To the flatness of the plains,

And the circle of the sky made me ill.

I appealed to the air, my servant,

Waiting for service or news;

I prepared for a journey, swam along the arc

Of voyages that would never start.

I’m ready to wander where I shall have more sky.

But that bright longing cannot release me now

From the still-young hills of Voronezh

To the bright, all-human ones of Tuscany.

What has contended with oxide and alloys

Burns like feminine silver,

And quiet work silvers the iron

Of the plough, the voice of the poet.

The mounds of human heads disappear into the distance,

I dwindle there, no longer noticed,

But in caressing books, in children’s games,

I shall rise from the dead to say: the sun!

Listening, listening to the early ice

Rustling below the bridges,

I remember being luminously tipsy –

Head swimming, going under.

From callous stairways, areas of awkward palaces

On the edges of his Florence,

Alighieri sang more forcefully

From tired lips.

So too my shadow picks

At the grain of the granite,

Eyeing in the dark a row of hulks

That seemed houses in the light,

Or twiddles its thumbs

And yawns with us,

Or kicks up a row,

Warmed by other people’s wine and sky,

And feeds stale loaves

To the importunate swans…

A little boy, his red face shining like a lamp,

Lord and master of his sledge,

Careers across the steaming ice

And I – at odds with the obedient world – rejoice

In this contagion of toboggans,

Amazed by children swooping down:

Steep slopes, silver runners, frosty exhalations.

Oh that our era might slide for ever,

Soundless as squirrels, towards a soft river.

Where can I put myself this January?

Exposed, the town is extravagantly stubborn…

Have I got drunk on doors that lock me out? –

All the catches and fastenings make me want to bellow.

And yapping alleys stretched like stockings,

Streets tangled as an attic,

And cornered creatures crawling into corners

And scuttling out on the sly.

And I slither into a pit, into the warty dark,

Towards the iced-up pump-house,

And, stumbling, munch dead air,

And the feverish rooks rise up.

And I gasp after them, yelling

At some frozen wood-pile:

Just a reader, someone to speak with, a doctor!

A conversation on the bitter stairs!

Like Rembrandt, martyr of light and dark,

I’ve gone into the depths of time –

And found it numb.

But one rib of mine is a burning spike

Which isn’t guarded by these watching phantoms,

Nor by this sentry asleep under the storm.

Forgive me, magnificent brother, and master,

And father of the black-green darkness…

Like a boy following grown-ups into wrinkled water

I seem to be walking towards a future,

But it seems I shall never see it,

Now that our tribe is troubled by a shadow,

Twilight’s intoxications, hollow years.

Breaks of the rounded bays, shingle, blue,

And the slow sail continued as a cloud –

I’m parted from you, scarcely having known your worth.

Longer than organ fugues and bitter is the twisted seaweed,

Smelling of long-contracted falsities.

My head is tipsy with the tenderness of iron

And rust gnawing gently at the sloping shore…

Why does another sand lie under my head?

You – guttural Urals, muscular Volga,

These steppes – here are all my rights, –

And I must still inhale your air with my entire lungs.

I sing when my throat is damp, my soul dry,

Sight fairly moist and the mind clear.

Are the grapes in good condition? The wine-skins?

And the stirrings of Colchis in the blood?

But my chest tightens, I’m tongue-tied:

It’s no longer me singing – my breathing sings –,

My ears sheathed in mountains, head hollow.

An unmercenary song is its own reward:

Comfort for friends, for adversaries tar.

A single-eyed song, growing out of moss,

A single-voiced offering chanted on horses, on hills:

In quivering veins their blood is alive –

The hunters imbibe the wine, inhale the air,

Their only task a vexed and generous justice:

Single-mindedly to betroth and bring

The young pair, sinless, to their wedding.

Eyes once keener than a sharpened scythe –

In the pupil a cuckoo, a drop of dew –

Now barely able to pick out, in full magnitude,

The lonely multitude of stars.

Armed with the eyesight of narrow wasps

That suck at the axis of the earth,

I smell everything that’s come my way,

Fruitlessly remembering it by heart.

I neither sing, nor draw,

Nor scrape a black-voiced bow across a string:

I only sting life, and love

To envy the energy of subtle wasps.

Oh if only heat of summer, sting of air,

Could – sidestepping sleep and death –

Some day goad me into hearing

The buzz of earth, buzz of the earth.

I am plunged into a lion’s den, a fort,

And sinking lower, lower, lower

Under the leavening shower of these sounds:

Stronger than lions, more potent than the Pentateuch.

How close the advent of your summons:

As keen as commandments of childbirth, of the first-born;

Like a string of pearls from Oceania

And meek baskets of Tahitian women.

Motherland of chastening songs, approach

With the deep notes of your resonant voice!

The shy-sweet countenance of wealthy daughters,

Primal mother, isn’t worth your little finger.

My time is still unbounded.

And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe

As muted organ pipes

Accompany a woman’s voice.

If our enemies take me

And people stop talking to me,

If they confiscate the whole world –

The right to breathe, open doors,

Affirm that existence shall go on

And that the people, like a judge, shall judge,

And if they dare to keep me like an animal

And fling my food on the floor,

I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony,

But shall write what I am free to write,

My naked body gathering momentum like a bell,

And in a corner of the ominous dark

I shall yoke ten oxen to my voice

And move my hand in the darkness like a plough

And, wrung out into a legion of brotherly eyes,

Shall fall with the full heaviness of a harvest,

Exploding in the distance with all the force of a vow,

And in the depths of the unguarded night

The eyes of that unskilled labourer, earth, shall shine

And a flock of flaming years swoop down,

And like a ripe thunderstorm Lenin shall burst forth.

But on this earth (which shall escape decay)

There to wake up life and reason will be – Stalin.

Life’s reticulations loosen, madness looms.

So a ray of light spun by a spider

Scatters ribbed pillars,

The crystal temples of eternity.

A thin beam of light to join them,

The columns of grateful pure lines

Shall gather intimately some time or other,

Like guests with an open countenance.

Only let it be now on earth, and not in heaven,

As in a house full of music. –

If only we don’t scare or wound them –

It would be pleasant to survive.

Forgive me for what I’m telling you;

Quietly, quietly read it back to me.

This is what I want most of all:

With no one on my track

To soar behind the light

That I couldn’t be farther from;

And for you to shine in that sphere –

There is no other happiness –

And learn from a star

What light could mean.

A star can only be star,

Light can only be light,

Because whispering warms us

And babbling makes us strong.

And I would like to say to you,

My little one, mumbling:

It’s by means of our babbling

That I hand you to the light.

This azure island was exalted by its potters –

Green Crete. In the resounding earth

They baked their gift. Do you hear the dolphin fins

Beat underground?

It’s easy to remember the sea

In the clay enraptured by firing;

The cold power of a pot

Cleaves into sea and passion.

Azure island, volatile Crete,

Give me back what is mine – my labour;

From the breasts of the fruitful goddess

Fill the baked vessels.

This was, turned azure, and was sung,

Long before Ulysses,

Before food and drink

Were called ‘my’ and ‘mine’.

Recover and shine again,

Star of ox-eyed heaven,

And fortuity, the flying fish,

And the sea saying yes.

As if words were not enough,

The theta and iota of a Greek flute –

Unsculptural, unaccountable –

Matured, laboured, crossed frontiers.

It’s impossible to forsake the flute:

It can’t be stopped with clenched teeth,

It can’t be prodded into speech with the tongue,

It can’t be kneaded with the lips.

The flute player doesn’t know repose –

It seems to him that he’s alone,

That some time or other out of lilac clay

He formed his native sea.

With the urgency of recollecting lips,

With an ambitious, resonant murmur,

He collects the sounds to save them,

Neatly, stingily.

Later we shall not be able to repeat him,

Clods of clay in the sea’s hands,

And when I am filled with the sea

My measure has become disease.

My own lips now lisp,

Plague or murder at the root.

And involuntarily falling, falling,

I diminish the force of the flute.

I raise this greenness to my lips,

This sticky promise of leaves,

This breach-of-promise earth:

Mother of maples, of oaks, of snowdrops.

See how I am dazzled, blinded,

Obedient to the lowliest root.

Aren’t they too much splendour for one’s eyes –

The explosions of this park?

Like little balls of mercury, the frogs:

With their croaking they couple into a sphere;

Each twig becomes a branch,

And the air a chimera of milk.

With her delightful uneven way of walking,

Limping on the empty earth,

A halting freedom draws her on.

It seems that a clear conjecture lingers in her gait –

Something to do with this Spring weather,

Original mother of the sepulchral dome.

And this shall always be beginning.

There are women who are natives of the sodden earth:

Their every step a hollow sobbing,

Their calling to accompany the risen,

To be first to meet the dead.

And we should trespass to demand caresses of them,

And to part from them is beyond our strength.

But whatever shall be is a promise only.