The Voice Over

I

The Here-World

Poems from books and cycles

On Twins (2001)

The Here-World (2001)

Songs of the Northern Southerners (2001)

Happiness (2003)

Physiology and Private History (2005)

O (2006)

from On Twins

A Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a Russki,

All crowded round the festive table.

A plaintive bead hangs round my neck,

From the mountains, throat, some crystal.

Unforeseen ancestors descend to play,

Crash, like multi-stories, on the saucer.

They swarm about your elbows like mosquitoes,

And mere grandmas can’t push through to me.

On the balcony with hand and heel

To shove and push against these flying crowds—

Let them hide and seek with someone else,

Don’t sing to me, don’t flock into dark clouds!

Breed or blood won’t drown us, though, like kittens,

—they’ll have their fun as long as suits their fancy.

Our Lyubka, led to market, gets stripped down:

There, sizing up her muscles, gropes the muse,

Assessing us, deciding which to ride.

And every single birthday is a duel.

Translated by Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Martha Kelly, Ainsley Morse, and Michael Wachtel^*

—

^* This translation was undertaken collectively, and with Stepanova’s participation, as part of the AATSEEL 2019 Translation Workshop.

The North of sleep. Head’s in a pillow cradle,

And feet and toes are all pointing south.

And I fly like a cabin boy on a cable,

Spinning like a mace in battle’s wrath.

Some time you will see me too in your dreams

As a map smoothly laid out flat.

Two polar explorers there, one tent,

One hardtack biscuit and the post that’s last.

No, if in your dream (some bedroom) I’d appear

It will be as a magnitude unrecompensed:

On the cheekbone—a permafrosted tear,

Which, like a lamp, will light dispense.

Translated by Andrew Reynolds

from The Here-World

Adieu, until one branched floor higher,

One flight up fir tree under windowsill,

Where a bird darts like an adder,

Beneath the heavens, as before an icon wall.

It flits and flutters in my pupils,

And I, bespectacled monkey from the fable,^*

Eyes for necessary vision framed,

Do not get off scot-free.

On an empty windowsill.

Like Moses before the bush, so still.

In a light of a particular composition.

I could have become a bird, but didn’t.

Translated by Andrew Reynolds

—

^* An allusion to Ivan Krylov’s fable “The Monkey and the Spectacles” (1815), in which the protagonist (the monkey) acquires glasses but is unable to figure out how to properly use them for improving its vision.

Ahoy! Beyond the azure’s tempest,

Of excess stars bereft—

Glides non-dark side, the independent

Eye of heavenly nests.

Looking down, she throws light shades

Above the paper sheets.

We cultivate darkling beneath her sway

A face’s eyes.

And then we our breasts display

For others’ eyes and thrills.

Then, under a candle, as on a plate,

Are buzzing with our quills.

Then we ascend with silent steps

The steamboat, in full stride.

… and after palms have splashed with claps

Of ebb and flow of tide,

And having wolf-howled at this darling,

Roaming with dealers in kills,

And having bayed with hounds a-lapping

Her from puddles bright as rills,

I give her up, don’t give a toss,

(Sound the all-clear, Trumpet, do!)

For an hour in a moonless fosse

With you, with you.

Translated by Andrew Reynolds

For you, but the voice of the straitened Muse

Isn’t right for an ear without ears,

Nor for an ear the size of heaven’s sphere,

Nor for a body that’s not in use.

So, black earth must have a dweller.

So here’s black earth, but where’s she who dwelt there?

And there’s the air—it swirls as you,

And you calm the air down too.

Recognize, if nothing else, the seeing

That is stitching together the book’s cover,

Leaping in lilacs like a swing

Into here-world—and there-.

Translated by Andrew Reynolds

from Songs of the Northern Southerners

The Bride

1.

May was incredibly heated, white heat.

In every tree birds flitted and flirted.

Maidens glanced askance as they darted,

Air blew bird cherry through the streets.

It would have swept anyone right off their feet.

2.

So for the child that is born in May,

Though she hide behind a curtain of tulle,

Yearning will gnaw through, “Knock, knock. Who’s …”,

Greedily snatch up this toy and play

At rocking it over the abyss—so they say.

3.

That Marusya was barely in her teens.

Outsiders thought that she was a fool,

In through one ear and out of the other the cool

Moscow river’s oar wind had blown her brains:

Carried her common sense downstream.

4.

She didn’t stroll down the avenue.

Out with friends she rarely sashayed.

The small gift of young living critters,

That whiteness, and sweetness, and scarlet hue,

Bowled her over and gave her the jitters.

But it was water that made her sorely afraid.

5.

Even from a tap, and a trickle so thin.

Or from a kettle—the merest wisp of steam.

That’s why even as a teeny young thing,

Though few words were exchanged, no evening

Was complete without her swoon.

6.

She’d often tip over as if wanting to sleep.

Would show white like a saucer’s underside.

So they’d bring revivifying water to help,

And she’d bite her lips into a bee sting,

And sail off into an unearthly Spring.

7.

She even took safety-pins to school,

To keep herself from harm:

Permanent scar marks on her hands and arms.

Boats or ponds would set off alarms,

Or even benches next to pools!

8.

And maidenly May was all wrapped up

In a cosmoheat, miracle-ranging,

Rising to her bare knees from her feet,

Just like tea freshly brewed in a cup.

And all this led, quite naturally, to changes.

9.

For example, a groom announced his presence

Like a firework display over the park,

In the hot heaven, with a cherished present,

Differing from all others one could mention,

Like heavenly fabric from those with earth’s mark.

10.

And so here’s the guipure and veil of the dress.

Meters of lace, wings of inspiring advice on all sides,

Bows, ribbons, the corset’s tight press

And the cathedral veil flowing astride:

She’s been cleared for take-off, we guess!

11.

And so to the wedding: honey mead from lips spills.

The day’s set, all’s strictly planned by the hour.

A week to wait, straightening up the frills,

Trying footwear on for size and thrills,

Making sweet partings in the hair.

12.

But one old woman, her neighbor, has noted

That the bride’s soul is ill at ease,

Heart in mouth and nowhere to put it.

And she grows thin, and wan, and grieves,

And sits alone every eve.

13.

So this old dame gathered up her pluck,

A fortifying spoonful of air in her chest, no more,

And snuck

Up to the nearest door

And, eavesdropping, almost sank to the floor.

14.

“Ah” and “oh” was all she heard, time after time.

As water rumbled all through the pipes.

“His anger’s truly boiled over the brim.

Water imp, water imp, water imp.

Just my luck to take after him!

15.

And what on earth does he want with me,

Who announced himself like a patrimony?

On a dread day of my forgotten childhood,

I locked myself away from him in a wardrobe …

And to this day haven’t set myself free.

16.

I should get married, be curled up like a vine.

But my harsh master is spooking

Me in every cracked cup in the kitchen:

Quietly splashing: ‘Stay in line!’

Glistening in ripples: ‘Vengeance is mine!’

17.

How I’m scared of him, that old guy!

Whenever some running water is sprinkling

Or heaven’s thunderstorm winking

At the troubled green of my eye,

That’s him hinting, ‘Yes, all this is I.’”

18.

… And so the neighbor turned silent heels,

Walked the whole corridor length, teeth a-chatter,

Trying to escape this terrible natter—

With no one to advise or to heal

In white robes behind an ambulance wheel.

19.

But no sooner had she resolved to bear witness

And report this to the appropriate quarters

Than in her cat’s dish the shallow water,

As if brought to the boil, smirked and taunted her

With the words: “Mind your own fucking business.”

20.

And so it all remained a mystery.

A car rolled up decked in bows and sprays,

With a pink doll under bouquets,

The doll that beautifies our special day,

And, looking like a divinity,

21.

Down the stairs the bride descends,

And running up the stairs the groom ascends,

And held her up like a bouquet.

And his car revved up and sped away,

Drove off and didn’t return. The end.

22.

And fast withering, bough burnt by the sun,

And whiter than brocade for the dead,

Speaking rarely and non-hearsayly,

Till her grave the neighbor merely

Sought out reports the mainstream papers would run.

23.

There is no consolation, none.

Translated by Andrew Reynolds

The Pilot

And when he came back from wherever there is,

He groaned in his sleep and rained bombs on the cities

And ghosts appeared to him.

He’d get up in the middle of the night for a smoke,

Our communal rags piled about, and awoke,

I’d start packing bags in the dim,

But that was OK by and large.

He wouldn’t go tilling our vegetable patch,

Our family’s living and income to match,

And he wouldn’t allow me to go.

Wouldn’t let me touch the confounded greens.

He ate and grew cross, and grew mean, and grew lean

And rolled his own cigs nice and slow.

But life continued itself.

But when he came back from wherever there is,

Where civil airliners go up on the breeze

Up over the rainbow there,

So when he came back from up there for good,

We had no clue, we felt totally screwed,

Helpless like sucklings and scared.

But that was OK by and large.

There up in the skies, pilots sing at the yoke,

And stewardesses fly serving drinks to the folk,

Rolling carts down the aisle cheerfully.

And he wasn’t a lodger up there, not my man,

But the Father has lent him his firm helping hand,

And no one will take that from me.

And life continued itself.

So when he came back here forever to stay,

An empty descendant from the freedomless sky,

Mysterious like a suitcase,

We went out by the staff door, the night chill and clear,

The boy in my arms and the girl hanging near,

And he gave me a whack on the face.

But that was OK by and large.

Like the flowing blush when we hear the word “love,”

All over my face his sky-blue glance roved,

While he hurt me, time and again.

And we plopped on the lawn, all the pedigree, staring

At the horizon where the sky was flaring

And no one put out the flame.

And life continued itself.

He drank for a week, hard and deep, with a tear.

He cussed at whoever, with a snarl, with a jeer,

He grabbed at his throat and stuttered.

And then he grew quiet and said, in the sky,

He said, and he didn’t look me in the eye—

There lived The Heavenly Daughter.

She’s a daughter, a grandma, he said, and a wife,

And what she was like with her clothes off,

And I could’ve forgiven him lies,

But he was so convincing describing the ways

Of her gaze as indifferent as heavens themselves,

Of her careless and colorless eyes.

He saw her, he said, for the very first time

When the white little town all burst into flame,

But our mission was almost complete,

And in her blue skirt and white headscarf, she swooped

Headlong in a dive, in a hell of a loop,

To open my parachute.

He added, the dawn is the best time to see her,

She’s dressed every time as a Young Pioneer,^*

A raven-blue band in her locks.

—And he snored away, and the house awoke,

Deserted now on, ’cause we drank like we’re broke,

Could as well throw away all the locks.

And me, I got nothing at all, not a stitch,

But this bitch of his, this celestial bitch,

His airborne Commissar,

She’ll answer, she’ll answer for his every turn

She’ll remember his crew doomed to crash and burn

And whatever her orders were.

—

^* A member of a mass youth organization in the Soviet Union.

Then everything changed. And life lived on,

It felt clear as glass and pure as dawn,

As if there were no cares.

And my man went to work at the transit lines

And became an enforcer of ticketless fines

For the fair collection of fares!

But one day he came home a stranger again,

With a strain in his voice, that familiar strain,

And staring me close in the face,

He said worldly affairs had wearied him,

And The Heavenly Daughter appeared to him

Near the boulevards, on the bus.

He lay down on the bed and he set about dying,

He kept picking from bedsheets invisible down

And passed away, while, insane,

I sobbed as I ran to buy corvalol drops,

And a bus on the boulevard came to the stop,

And She looked through the windowpane.

She was wearing her Young Pioneer uniform,

She leaned to the side of the window and squirmed,

And a blush blew about her face,

And she made a terrible din in my head,

I stepped on the footboard towards where she stood,

And the court is deciding my case.

… I ask for forgiveness, even though, all told,

It’s my fault, the death of this twelve-year-old,

This girl who has met her doom,

’Cause in that drab abyss, like a fish in a tin,

The Heavenly Daughter still lives in sin,

And no one will know with whom.

… And life continues itself.

Translated by Dmitry Manin

from Happiness

The morning sun arises in the morning—

So many seductive probabilities!

Why then do you, girly, walk through the house,

Clattering your slippers, printing with your heels?

Whatcha want, my dovey little swan?

Turn back around, take off the last rag,

Feast your eyes on the golden mirror,

Moving this and that part forward.

And hey! I hear a muffled beating.

Your sides feel warm and neck’s stretched longer.

The legs don’t please you, but your white feathers

Are the envy of many girlfriends.

You only need to make a move with a wing

For an oof in the belly; the hardwood floor

Looms far below; my dear ones, farewell,

Write to me poste restante.

—Immortal, forever immortal am I,

The Styx itself will not arrest my flight!

Translated by Sibelan Forrester

As Danaë, prone in the incarce-chamber,

Hears the sounds of rain, barking, a ring and clink,

Sweetly squeezing her eyes shut (in vain: you can’t sleep

Through a visit by gold),

In the warm night, hear ye: suddenly and in the west

The gate hinges groan, snow blows into your mouth,

And weightily over the ice, as if on sand, villagers

Step with their wagons.

Silence? Silence. Nobody’s there, nobody.

The person-exemplar lies to sleep, as they lie,

Cumulonimbus migratory, feathery friable,

Banning evolution.

A female I-person would also sleep, but no.

There pining for us, who heal over in an hour

With grey hair, with scales, chicken feathers,

He is, and swallows tears.

Translated by Sibelan Forrester

It is certainly time to stop

The transversion of all these forms,

Fish turned fishwife, maiden turned maple,

Snow turned napkin, and all that jazz.

How to stop it? Well, for a start,

Set yourself the limit of self:

Squeeze the rhymes dry, cancel the metaphors,

Drop your lover, don’t sing in the bathroom.

Who is speaking to me in the night?

I am speaking, by daylight even.

Who is answering the question?

Answering; ask another!

Translated by Alexandra Berlina

Even bluer than the toilet tiles.

Even whiter than the sleeping sinks.

Longer still than toilet rolls, unwound.

Quieter than gently splashing water

Is my morning path toward the empty

Swimming pools, along the hotel’s quiet

Corridors, in clean and rapid lifts,

All around a sanitary strictness.

Does all this bring something else to mind?

What it brings is something else to mind!

All alone, as if in a balloon,

And—just half a meter off the ground.

Translated by Alexandra Berlina

(a birthday on the train)

So I rode, and it’s always amazing

That the curtain keeps holding on, like

A madwoman, a suicide, with a trembling hand,

But then, whoosh, flies into the window after all.

In my compartment, they won’t look me in the eye,

As if last night, someone made a thorough search,

Lights on, all belongings rummaged through.

Or maybe a little bird has told them something,

Explaining that what awakes from sleep

In a humbled strait sleeve of my self and mumbles hi

Isn’t me, but an old man, an experienced worker,

His suitcase clinking with empty space.

How did I meet-and-greet my birthday on the train?

Like a sentry who overslept and missed his minute of glory.

For all that, what a marvelous dream it was,

Which we will see again at the final trial.

Translated by Alexandra Berlina

(half an hour on foot)

Like when in a diving windshield glass

The very first of glaciers showed up,

All-the-bus, as if at the embrasures,

At the window, we breathe halfmouthed,

And they show us, show us,

To the right and to the left and again,

The tireless whiteness.

Felt ashamed, but tears spilled awake,

So on foot, catching my breath,

Straightening my spine in steps, rushing,

I open immemorial vent panes,

Sweep away the invisible dust.

You’ll get up in the dark, as if late in a country house,

Listen to the time, listen to your blood.

And a glimpse of a pro-i-e, that’s all there was,

A coloring book, so what.

A blue balloon spins-’n’-swirls in the sky,

Over my head spins-’n’-swirls in the sky,

It wants to fall down, spins-’n’-swirls in the sky,

Don’t fall silent, I don’t.

Translated by Irina Shevelenko

from Physiology and Private History

July 3rd, 2004

(on your birthday we visit a cemetery^*)

1.

I’ll now make a couple of

Glossy prints, tear open

A pack of Italic cigarettes,

Porno comics in cellophane,

The gentle sheath of the brain,

Under which there’s a smoky gray,

Breathing, like a spring,

A spring of this and that.

The cemetery floats in water,

A pie made of bricks.

Steamers, like water striders,

Scurry hither and thither.

The underage cypress has

A forced gloomy look,

Barely casting a shadow

On the neighborhood of shades.

While back there, in Russia, on Whit Monday

And on Soul Saturday, and thereabouts,

They’ve gathered together under the drizzle

By the friendly graves,

—

^* The San Michele Cemetery in Venice, where Joseph Brodsky is buried.

They light their candles, and crumble their bread,

And eggshells fall on the ground,

Which the deceased, as far as I recall,

Just couldn’t stand.

So then, the colored eggshells crumble

Off, mosaically.

The compulsory glass transparently filled,

Rainwater it’s not.

You can see those who stood there

Through those who stand there;

Little wings sewn to their feet,

And sometimes on their backs.

… And here, with the cooing of turtledoves

Behind the stone wall,

In a heavy beam of sunlight,

With an albatross meowing,

In the whole horizontal hall

From the Lutherans to the Greeks,

One is hard-pressed to find four

Living legs to walk,

And here, with nothing but dust and ivy

And the Pompeian blue,

A wreath of faience flowers is

Like a little rosy mouth,

A vial of vodka lies in shabby grass,

And a pile of copper coins

Is provided to promise someone

They’ll be back.

Here, nothing is as he would’ve liked,

The one who wanted to lie here.

Here, nothing is as I would’ve liked

Where I would want to lie,

And nevertheless an obvious sense of rightness, which wasn’t mine,

Extended both time and space like a festive table.

2.

Doctors, lectors and actors, young widows

Leave their photos-and-cards,

Leave their bottles-and-hearts,

All their hurried confessions on the window-

Sill of love’s limit, the utmost, the upmost rung,

The final address—the gravestone,^* but beyond

The gravestone, there is nothing, not a bond.

There is no more. Just money on your tongue.

America (his place of death), Europa

(The one he stole and bedded, his affair)

And native land (with hand outstretched elsewhere,

Her features covered up and bottom bare)—

The three perform a primavera ring,

Their heads together, in an ancient vein.

But every tombstone is the edge of things.

And trees—like walking canes.

Take this bouquet: transparent paper mates,

The bodies living off the ink they spend,

Amid the fictions, little clouds and shades

Over the fate you hoped to circumvent:

That of a god, one of so many gods:

Vertumnus joins Priapus, you’re the third,

In light and shade, your marbled vision blurred,

A faceless patron of the written word.

—

^* Author’s note: The gravestone that interested us distinguished itself among the neighboring ones with a folder, all swollen with rainwater, full of business cards, notes, photocopies of poems and articles, a little bottle of vodka, and a toy plastic bucket full of non-refillable pens.

This tiny island bears all that passed.

The size of an Archangel’s palm, this oven

Bakes everything until it’s interwoven,

A pie where single lines try hard to last,

Just numbers, rarely letters, to be seen,

And rarer still with my tongue in accord

That darkens for me, humid as a board,

Which you’ve wiped clean.

Translated by Alexandra Berlina and Irina Shevelenko

The Women’s Locker Room at Planet Fitness

Nothing in common but warmth and fleece,

Lonesame keys and nine orifices,

Filled with what? moisture, pleasure, shit;

Covered by a mouth; closed by sleep.

Baking up: blood, tears, kids and wax.

Surrounding: their essence or another’s flesh.

Of my own nine, I enter, sat to remove.

I stood to be. And head to the pool.

Pink and yellow, big like babies,

Nakie-nude, towels to the neck—

Crossing the floor are flocks of girltrees.

Each to the shower, languidly leaning its trunk.

Like types of wine and species of aves

They must be classi- or curiosified:

Here’s collarbone plates; there: sails of shoulder blades.

We must catalogue each footarch height.

Soon these ones won’t be. Soon they’ll be replaced.

Here’ll be wound in velvet, there: the stage refaced.

Visitors will stare amazed, not hiding tears,

At the combos of bones, skin, and black braided hair.

Some pretty boy on hand

Or baddie good’un

Plays in the kiddy garden:

Touching your plum,

Partaking of your pear,

Gathering, in his mouth, water:

Then winter will come into it, bejeweled and cut up time,

And the brother go unknown by the animal of mind.

This pillar of water might turn to ice,

Reason to a poison, air to gas,

Sweetie-pies will march and stride

In closed ranks through shops and shacks.

And the door that led out to the swimming cube

Will open just a tad, like a zipper on a boot.

And we’ll step out of slippers, nails and crowns,

From watches, juxtaposed rags, our voices’ sounds.

And into nostrils, ears and mouths, like out a kettle spout,

En masse they’ll surge and spill, souls

Who broke the lock.

But like in forest school: the noisy surplus

Of creams, muscles, hair, armpits and lips.

Self-tanner and shame, as vixens from their bores,

Look at our bodies’ surface through the lenses of our pores.

But like in cattle cars, with cramped and vulgar mutter,

Squares of steam and lengthy howls roam-wander,

Unbreachable, the sky becomes a brother.

And someone sings in the shower room.

In summer camps, in July’s blue shorts,

First hanging back, then straightening spine and neck,

My first I, scowling like a bullet,

Makes its very first step.

And furrowing the landscape, like crushing paper in the hand,

I look at it as almost with the sky. And will then

Lie down, like ball lightning does in fields:

With a single revolution of the wheel.

Translated by Zachary Murphy King

Sarah on the Barricades

1.

The year nineteen-oh-five.

In the cradles sleep no more.

Tiny hands unshod, open eyes,

Toothless mouths yawn wide,

Packed in the train like Guidon in his barrel,^*

Oh, no, like sardines packed in a tin,

Rattling off to distant steppes.

Over them in Tambov and Yeysk

In the sackcloth of drapes gone feral

They sigh, those misty Jewish mamas

(German Russian Polish or …)

And the list of children’s surnames

Like a roster of those lost in war.

Their future lady-loves, their girlies,

Come spilling from grandfathers’ loins,

And peer into the eyes of needles,

That lead far into unknown wombs.

(The funny grove around the funny shame

Is curly as a picture-frame.

Above it twirl the scents of procreation,

But no speaking of them.

—

^* Prince Guidon is a character in Alexander Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831). As a baby, he was sealed in a barrel with his mother and thrown into the sea.

Then there are the mists of soup and toilet.

And headlines of today’s financial news,

First bell, a second-class train,

Inkblot and tear stain.)

I know (it would be better not to know)

That these universal birthing pains,

Rhythmic as a cannonade, are

The coming of a whole new strain.

That into sleepless bassinets

Yawn these gaping hatches.

That this demo-graphic tide

Boils and bubbles with every type.

Any old Martha from off the street

Boasts the same kinds of folds,

A map under every skirt—

A yielding, nebulous, smooth

Landscape, going under ice

For years and years to come.

Atop should lie like tracing paper

The periodic layers of events,

Of spectacles and blood-lettings;

A steamboat chugs across the heart

From nineteen thirty-nine.^*

While in the throat—a barricade in black-and-white.

—

^* An allusion to the popular song “Parokhod” (“The Steamboat”), which was written in 1939 and performed by Leonid Utyosov and his jazz orchestra; also a reference to Marina Tsvetaeva’s return to the USSR from France on a steamboat in 1939. About the latter, see Stepanova’s essay “The Maximum Cost of Living” in this volume.

On which great-grandma Sarah

—her eye, punched black last night,

is tied around like a pirate’s—

and Sanka and Sarah Sverdlova

are standing with the workers of the world.

2.

Of all those lying in the earth, foreheads tossed back,

Keeping my speech in mind through the pine coffin,

Poured like dry grain into a tin can,

Playing in the city park, I choose one:

In a white hat, with girlfriend and friend,

On an alpine path,

Where the century’s burning down like a wick,

Dwindling in the throng;

On a summer day in the Luxembourg Gardens,

Where Mary Stuart is,

Where I, too, in a hundred years, will stand

And there’s no covering your tracks;

On a winter night in Villefranche-sur-Mer

Watching the lights go.

In Petersburg in prison,

Here, look.

Sorting through the desk box

In the Moscow apartment.

On Pokrovsky Boulevard.

In the communal latrine.

In the hospital ward

In a white coat—

Receiving patients.

Now—only in my crowded skull.

With her daughter.

Her granddaughter.

Her great-granddaughter me.

This feminist firmament—its swallow, its stormcloud.

The Noah of a female ark.

And when she crowns that barricade,

I will not bare her arms-her breasts,

But neither will I cover her with a flag,

For there is no such flag.

And neither red, nor blue & white

Is any good for things like this.

Now, from on high the radio turns on

Liberty, barricade, democracy.

And for them, Sarah Ginzburg’s a demonstration

(Perhaps of the reasons for poetry?)

Though any old acacia growing wild’s

Both easier and better for things like this.

… but who can tell the difference anymore.

And if you put our Sarah in a vase

Or drape the barricade with acacia—

It’s the same number (of the estimated year)

We get when we go look up the solution.

Translated by Amelia Glaser and Ainsley Morse

The Desire to Be a Rib

1.

Me and myself, we’re uneasy, like a lady with her pitbull.

Here I, a many-headed storm, strike this little village.

Here I’m some saber-toothed dino at a peaceful feast.

Better grab me by the and shove me in this drawer:

Like into a chest of drawers—my chest

Between this rib and that one,

Beyond borders of skin, flesh, bone—

Into this inviolable lifetime home.

I relinquish my rights

To one sleeve and the other.

I relinquish my lefts

To doubt, opinion, rage.

I relinquish speech.

I sever myself from shoulders,

Face, coat and bra

For the sake of this vocation—the rib’s.

I want to lie here in your midst,

Like messy hens up in their nests,

Like flat herrings in their tins.

To hammer out your rib cages.

I want to take part in the work

Of leukocytes or electrons,

Shock-worker in the flesh works,

I’ll pack up all the sockets,

Account for the state of the tissue,

Like Tanya from the textile plant,

The whole of her dowry in two braids.

Dole out to you sateen and calico,

For covering over the empty, the

Endless hallways of our body.

Singing along with riddle-songs.

Popping open pores with flair,

Like that champagne bottle from before.

Like dark blood flowing toward the nape.

2.

…. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. .

…. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. .

Like back in wild childhood on not peeing yourself—

To concentrate on seeping, shade-like,

Under the skin layer, under the fatty membrane,

Under this nervy, living scrap,

Under that bushel, beyond the wet layers,

Into filaments stratified and hard

Boring through a passage like some tick.

And gently lying down, like something small.

Translated by Amelia Glaser and Ainsley Morse

Bus Stop: Israelitischer Friedhof

Along the bus route, to the right and all in front

The letters on the wall spell out G—O—D.

And issuing from the mouth with unprecedented force

Involuntary, like a speech bubble: Lord. Have mercy.

And so another verst slips

By, with such and such upon the lips.

Like the cheapest ballad of a briar

At the bus stop, yet bearing on apace.

It runs at you and unwreathes

Like a paper handkerchief blossoms on your face

The whole town momently bathed in light

Climbing to the upper branches for a sight

Dumbstruck at the balustrades

Watching, like the neighbor, from behind her lace,

How the dead rise from their graves.

There is no place for the living on dead ground

Even there, where the first lady of the sod,

Soviet Maize, strode on limbs earth-bound

And waxed unceremonious towards the Gods

The young mother, the queen bee

Who has learned to gather up like children, the glean

Of harvests, meadows and sowings

Her tongue sucking sap from the weed

A cocktail of vital air and dank mold-green

Blood and water from the left flank flowing.

Even here where she leafs through the fields

Speaking with the voices of seasons

Where the antennae quiver, the swarm breathes

And unready minds are breached

By the promise of bright new reasons.

Thimble-bodied, the sparrows flit and fly

The sparrows, as shaggy as foxes.

Where a cross is formed from every outline

And, like the maypole, surges to the sky

And flies—but onto the ropes, like boxers.

So at dawn they lie still: her, him, any of us

Like the babe in its pram, the ice in the compress

Like the unborn child in the amniotic flow

Its soft down washing in the womb’s scumble

Like a headcount in a children’s home

Like a little finger loose in a thimble.

Is anyone easy in their skin? How about the one

Who will wake embraced and held tight?

Moses in his basket, the muses’ suckling son

The newlywed appearing in smoke and light?

Stepping across the reproductive earth, one as two.

In imitation of spring, whispering, renewed

And will he give thanks and praise

For this duality, so newly gained …

Is he easy in his skin? Who was pulled into light

And opened himself for the first shriek

Between red and white, between doctor and breast

The indignity of air in the barreling chest

Now speak!

Nor is there place for the living in the warm surf.

Is anyone easy in their skin? Is anyone easy enough?

And clutching at the very last the last of all

The hands I can trust, I glance out over the sill:

Between soothing and surviving, between living and dead

There is a secret place, I know

I cannot steal it, nor is it my debt

Nor will I leave it alone.

In the deadest of all dead places at the heart

Of the earth, in an empty sleeve, in the untouched dust

Of endless cenacles, each colder than the last

Brought to life by the cooing of doves.

On the buses terminating at and on their paths

In the darkening bushes, the unworkplaces

The brashly lit halls where kids learn martial arts

On orphaned balconies, two joining faces.

Buying the day’s pretzels

Crossing with the bicycles

Every warehouse loader, every wife, every girl

This place drags them all into its thrall.

I stand by it like a watchman, pacing my duty

Borne by invisible hands, in a heaven that is earthly

At the cemetery, where the eternal act of bringing forth

Is the meeting and parting with a new natural force.

Translated by Sasha Dugdale

from O

Zoo, Woman, Monkey

For every beast of the forest is mine,

and the cattle upon a thousand hills.

Ps. 50:10

zoo

… And the vixen rises, quaking

On her woody stalks.

And the bear slides the view to closed,

Like an outstretched piney paw,

And the deer seem older than their very skin.

And the polar owls are squandering their coats.

And bicolor ducks are leading out their troops.

And bipedal girls are sticking out of stockings,

Blowing smoke with the exclamation buttons of their mouths

And lying out on benches, faces to the skies.

We’re not here for nothing,

We are here on business.

I was sitting here like a pep talk before battle.

My belly warm, rolling

Before me like a stroller,

I roamed here like a hunter on an isle,

I was honored and patted like I’d passed an exam,

For any wretched

Two-winged, quadruped

Carries weight here with a babe on hand.

The assembly line of nature has done its job quite well.

Before our eyes convincing sets of breeds and races

Are reproducing, procreating kin,

Despite confinement and the muzzles on their faces.

And so long as roundelays are lying round the pond

The squad commander Nature, breeder-pimp,

Gives increase to the livestock and feasts out on the porch.

But I have always been the enemy of mandatory “sesames!”

And showy jumps through well-placed hoops.

When Dumber Nature used to hit the gas on me

I would freeze up from my tips down to my roots.

And when my family tree made a try to swallow me,

And presented me with faces, compelling my repeat,

That I cast a few more stitches on the knitting of our genes,

Just by a pinch—but still to go on, clinging to the axis!—

I only answered with my calm indifferent thanks.

But what was the result?

And what’s here to observe?

What are we laughing at, my soul, and where’s our weeping curve?

Like a short and paunchy, greased-up godlet,

(The names are not, the thing is all the same)

I eat a pliant pastry by the zoo’s link fence,

While glances from the public shine my skin to gleam.

I’ve inclined my mind, and today came to submit

Where they are off to mock and kiss—

With my admission of guile and full confessup,

To earn myself a place, like the beaver and the zebra,

Fence off some untroubled corner for myself

Between the summer molt and winter sleep,

To lie down on the concrete floor, to learn to love the grate—

The faithful carcass of the nesting on the way.

Here I am, and here I’ll lay my hopes.

It’s here that I will re(pro)duce myself

With every crumb of food and gulp,

Entrust my body to resilience and polysemy:

That is, two-facetry or monomatrimony.

Here they’re hawking juice and balloons,

Men carry daughters on their backs,

It’s here it’s time to take the place I’m due:

To enthrone myself by “Hawk” and “Stag”:

Another witness to a yawning tomb.

Sleeping nanny and nurse by my own womb.

woman

Cheeta the dope sits nakey in her cage:

Face a bag, nipples pencil-tipped,

Babe at feet and trough at head.

And neither her coating of red fur,

Nor her keeping up a hunky mate

Will pacify or save her.

And her stolen beigey rag may entertain

But also is no savior,

And there’s no second one around to snag.

And days go by, and breasts begin to sag,

Like sails of mangled hopes.

The baby is still playing on the floor,

Its back to you; already bloomed to girl

And eager to please in its own court.

So life’s gone by, with nowhere left to go.

But in the cage across, others have pride of place.

And one’s run up, wearing her son on top,

Testing the speeds and stamina of her tail.

While others hide their girly blushing facelets.

Others lurch for the higher ledge,

Which is so far away.

And build monkey castles in their minds,

And lead monkey troops to the fray.

Some are scary, some are scarred,

Some lie like shrooms on stumps,

Like stranded fish or slaves.

Above them sway liana fakes,

Whose shadows cloud each monkey face.

All their seeds are sown with spring

But time goes and what’s it bring?

And the children, the children fly in a tire

Above the harvest’s ample share,

They flicker by, in men’s or women’s eyes,

To the right or the left of the cage,

They grow old senselessly and stately,

In their mother’s own embrace.

And like a recent patch of cloth you fly away

Worn and weary from the weave of life,

Animal womanness with a rag erased,

Clutched behind her in a death-grip—

A threadbare, cotton, soggy

Scrap, so small, so small and tiny!

And here I’m still heading to you for my face-off,

Like to a clerk for a crucial doc,

To stand and set my mirrors to you—

Recording devices, my glasses’ lenses,

My last hour’s bodies and business,

Marked by the scars of their new breakage.

monkey

The hammers tap, and hidden bits are burning,

Sudorific doodads wind the calendar,

So we mums and girlies turn out for the big parade,

And fathers with their sons work out a dictionar,

Where it shines and snorts, strikes, igni-,

Centens of spoons play in little cups from sunup,

And just breathing out can explain to the doc,

That human reason’s naught or I don’t want.

You open your eyes: time to file in the ark:

Spring comes and swallows you up,

The Czechs are close, Kolchak advances from the east

And under Moscow undressed Germans stand like sharpened pales.

And flayed forest partisans like flanks.

And dead pilots without their holsters or their watches.

All who sent appeals to the setting sun,

All for whom a lawyer bell-like tolled his tongue—

And won them no delay. And the naked earth

Like gums expelling lodgers from a shameful dream.

And they flood the outskirts with black postal streams,

Rattling wattles, walking freetown free.

But wherever they go, the door alltoomatically secures,

And only galing woods perk up their wrens.

Or does the noise come from a lesser, tongueless creature,

That pleads for mercy, beating at the boundaries of its ken?

I’ll go and sit by the pond uncovered by ice,

Waiting for my pardon like before the Last Judgment,

And lay my monkey palms upon my tum,

Like a vault upon a vault,

So what was promised in dark and empty space

Like a victory salute, apply no less to me and my tum,

Apply like the wind, and lie down in an embrace,

As a letter slips into the mail.

In a red and white coat, in a wide red-white coat

We will while by the pond, having laid out our hopes,

In unbounded O, like a window’s wide hole,

Two together home.

Translated by Zachary Murphy King