Soul’s blue.
Never dilute or measured.
Idiot soul! And yet Peru
will yield to the madness of it!
My friend became heavy to lead,
as a child does for no reason,
(I found my own bold web
as lovely as any spider’s).
Suddenly like a vast frame
for a living miracle: Gates!
Between their marble, I could
stand, like an ancient sign,
uniting myself and the landscape;
a frame in which I remain,
between gates that lead to no castle,
gates that lead to no farmhouse,
gates like a lion’s jaws
which let in light. Gates
leading to where? Into
happiness came the answer,
twofold…
Happiness? Far away. North of here.
Somewhere else. Some other time.
Happiness? Even the scent is cold.
I looked for it once, on all fours.
When I was four years old, looking
for a clover with four leaves.
What do these numbers matter?
Happiness? Cows feed on it.
The young are in ruminant company
of two jaws and four hooves.
Happiness stamps its feet.
It doesn’t stand looking at gates.
The wood block and the well.
Remember that old tale?
Of cold water streaming past
an open, longing mouth,
and the water missing the mouth
as if in a strange dream.
There’s never enough water,
(the sea’s not enough for me).
From opened veins, water
flows on to moist earth –
Water keeps passing by
as life does, in a dream.
And now I’ve wiped my cheeks
I know the exact force
of the streams that miss my hands
and pass my thirsting
mouth
The tree, in its cloud of blossom,
was a dream avalanche over us.
With a smile, my companion compared it
to a ‘cauliflower in white sauce’.
That phrase struck into my heart, loud
as thunder. Now grant me encounters
with thieves and pillagers, Lord, rather
than bed in the hay with a gourmand!
A thief can rob – and not touch your face.
You’ll be fleeced, but your soul will escape.
But a gourmand must finger and pinch, before
he puts you aside, to eat later.
I can throw off my rings. Or my fingers.
You can strip my hide, and wear it.
But a gourmand demands the brain and heart
to the last groan of their torment.
The thief will go off. In his pockets
my jewels, the cross from my breast.
A toothbrush ends all romance
with gourmands.
Don’t fall in their hands!
And you, who could be loved royally
as an evergreen, shall be
as nameless as cauliflower in my mouth:
I take this revenge – for the tree!
1934-6
When I look at the flight of the leaves in
their floating down on to the paving of cobbles
and see them swept up as if by an
artist who has finished his picture at last
I think how (already nobody likes either
the way I stand, or my thoughtful face)
a manifestly yellow, decidedly
rusty leaf – has been left behind on the tree.
1936
6
They took quickly, they took hugely,
took the mountains and their entrails.
They took our coal, and took our steel
from us, lead they took also and crystal.
They took the sugar, and they took the clover
they took the North and took the West.
They took the hive, and took the haystack
they took the South from us, and took the East.
Vary they took and Tatras they took,
they took the near at hand and far away.
But worse than taking paradise on earth from us
they won the battle for our native land.
Bullets they took from us, they took our rifles
minerals they took, and comrades too.
But while our mouths have spittle in them
the whole country is still armed.
8
What tears in eyes now
weeping with anger and love
Czechoslovakia’s tears
Spain in its own blood
and what a black mountain
has blocked the world from the light.
It’s time – It’s time – It’s time
to give back to God his ticket.
I refuse to be. In
the madhouse of the inhuman
I refuse to live.
With the wolves of the market place
I refuse to howl.
Among the sharks of the plain
I refuse to swim down
where moving backs make a current.
I have no need of holes
for ears, nor prophetic eyes:
to your mad world there is
one answer: to refuse!
1938
Girlfriend
p. 1 Sophia Yakovlevna Parnok (originally Parnokh; 1885-1933) was a poet, dramatist, librettist and a translator of Baudelaire. She was born into a Jewish pharmacist’s family in Taganrog on the Black Sea coast of Russia. She studied in Geneva, where she lived for a time, and thereafter moved between St Petersburg and Moscow. Her brother Valentin Parnokh was also a well-known poet. Sophia married Vladimir Volkenstein in June 1906; they were divorced in 1909. She was seven years older than Tsvetaeva when they began their love affair in 1914. Parnok’s first book of poems spoke openly of lesbian desire. By 1928 Soviet censorship decided her poetry was unlawful, and from then until her death she was unable to publish.
We are keeping an eye on the girls
p. 1 kvass: a common Russian drink, non-alcoholic, made from fermented rye bread. Razin: Stenka Razin was a Cossack leader of the seventeenth-century peasant rebellion in Russia. According to legend, he sacrificed a Persian girl whom he loved to the river Volga.
No one has taken anything away
p. 1 This poem is addressed to Osip Mandelstam (1892–1938); he and Tsvetaeva were lovers for a short while in 1916.
Derzhavin: (1743–1816) the most important Russian poet writing before Pushkin.
You throw back your head
p. 1 Also written for Mandelstam, who recorded a similar excitement in walking about Moscow in his own poem ‘With no confidence in miracles of redemption’ (Tristia, 1922).
Where does this tenderness come from?
p. 1 Again addressed to Mandelstam.
Today or tomorrow the snow will melt
p. 1 Rogozhin: character in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot, who sets out to kill Prince Myshkin.
Verses about Moscow
p. 1 I lift you up: the first lyric from this cycle is addressed to Tsvetaeva’s daughter, Alya.
forty times forty [churches]: a phrase often used of Moscow. Vagankovo: well-known cemetery in Moscow, where Tsvetaeva’s parents were buried.
p. 2 Strange and beautiful brother: the second lyric is addressed to Mandelstam, who lived in St Petersburg, and to whom Tsvetaeva offers her native city, Moscow.
Spassky gate/five cathedrals: in the Kremlin. Inadvertent Joy: a wonder-working icon of the Virgin Mary, not far from the Kremlin.
Peter: Peter the Great (1689–1725) founded St Petersburg, which replaced Moscow as his capital.
p.
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