Baines follows Nadezhda in placing the “Verses” sixth in the Third Notebook. To me, however, indicating its pivotal status by putting the “Verses” at the beginning makes sense; conversely, including a miscellany of verses before it dilutes its effect.
In any case, while the circumstances of his life, which is to say the attempt to silence him absolutely, inspire a special sense of obligation to get it right, I think, most importantly, that the whole idea of a “final word” would be anathema to Mandelstam. It was as if the real and final form of his poetry existed in his head, in a nimbus of multiplicity, and a printed, published version was only one of many possible emanations. As he says in “Conversation About Dante”:
Imagine something intelligible, grasped, wrested from obscurity, in a language voluntarily and willingly forgotten immediately after the act of intellection and realization is completed...
And again:
The signal waves of meaning vanish, having completed their work; the more potent they are, the more yielding, and the less inclined to linger.
And again:
Any given word is a bundle, and meaning sticks out of it in various directions, not aspiring toward any single official point. In pronouncing the word “sun,” we are, as it were, undertaking an enormous journey to which we are so accustomed that we travel in our sleep. What distinguishes poetry from automatic [that is, mechanical, involuntary] speech is that it rouses us and shakes us into wakefulness in the middle of a word. Then it turns out that the word is much longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road.§
—Andrew Davis
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks are due especially to Aquilino Duque for his providential translation into Spanish of the Notebooks (an essential aid to my halting Russian) and his generous encouragement; to Oksana Alyeksyeyeva and Vlada Yaremenko for their patience with a tone-deaf student; to Marina Magazinik, met by chance on a cross-country flight, for Schubert and for hunchbacks; to Professor Andrew Kahn for important information at propitious moments. And most importantly, to Riley Ossorgin, my past returned to me, for his enthusiasm, intelligence, and persistence in combing the text with me for errors. Standard disclaimer: all mistakes are my own, but without Riley things would have been much worse.
—A. D.
*Joseph Brodsky, “The Child of Civilization,” in Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 142.
†Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, translated by Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1983), 13.
‡Jennifer Baines, Mandelstam: The Later Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
§Osip Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, edited by Jane Gary Harris, translated by Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1979), 398, 407.
First Notebook
1
I live in big-time gardens!
Vanka the porter might step out of the past.
The wind serves the factory for free,
A boardwalk teeters to nowhere across the fens.
Black-ploughed night at the steppe’s rim;
Frozen light, a string of coruscating beads.
Behind the wall the pissed-off landlord
Paces and retraces in his Russian boots.
And the floorboard groans, lavishly—
This ship-deck coffin lid.
Can’t snooze among strangers—
Only death, and this little stool, for company.
April 1935
2
Headphones! My little squealers!
I’ll remember the nights in Vorónezh:
A voice half drunk on champagne
And Red Square’s midnight sirens...
How’s the subway? Quiet! Keep it to yourself...
And don’t ask me how the buds burst open...
And you, bell strokes of the Kremlin—
Pinched in a point—speech from space...
April 1935
3
Release me, restore me Vorónezh:
You’ll deplore me—or ignore me,
You’ll spurn me—or return me,
Vagrant Vorónezh; raven, edge...
April 1935
4
Gotta keep living, though I’ve died twice,
And water’s driving the city crazy:
How beautiful, what high cheekbones, how happy,
How sweet the fat earth to the plow,
How the steppe extends in an April upheaval,
And the sky, the sky—pure Michelangelo...
April 1935
5
What street is this?
Mandelstam Street.
What a crooked name!
No matter how you twist it,
It doesn’t come out straight.
Nothing in him was stuck on right,
His morals sure weren’t lily white,
Which is why this street
Or, better yet, this slum
Is called, correctly,
Mandelstam.
April 1935
6
Black Earth
All praised, all black, all cosseted and coddled,
All open air and watchfulness, all ranged in tiny hills,
All pulled apart, all organized in chorus—
Your soil soaked with my native land, my will...
Ploughed at daybreak, black shining to blue,
The work abides in it unarmed, without defense—
A thousand hills whisper of cultivation:
See? There’s something un-encircled in this circumference.
Still, all in all, the earth...is hammer blow, is accident.
No use insisting, no matter how you grovel—
Hearing tunes a crusted flute,
The ear freezes to a morning clarinet...
How sweet the fat earth to the plow,
How the steppe extends in April upheaval!
Be brave, vigilant, you there, black earth!...
There’s an eloquent black silence in work.
April 1935
7
Having stripped me of my seas, my flight, my running start,
And given my feet the platform of the violent earth,
How’d you do? Just great!:
You couldn’t still my moving lips.
May 1935
8
It’s true, I lie in the earth, moving my lips,
But what I say will be learned in every school:
The round earth is rounder in Red Square,
And its slope asserts itself, willingly,
The round earth is rounder in Red Square,
And its slope is vast, unexpectedly
Sloping down—to fields of rice—
As long as one last slave is left alive.
May 1935
9 –10
I
How dark the River Kama seems,
When its cities kneel on oaken knees.
Web-vested, cheek to bearded chin,
The burning spruce fly by, in water born again.
On one hundred four oars the water was pinned,
Swept upstream and downstream, Kazan to Cherdyn.
I sailed the river with the curtain tight,
The curtain tight and my head alight.
And my wife with me—five nights no ease,
Five nights no ease, trailed by three police.
II
I watched the eastern forest draw away.
In full flood, the Kama breasted a buoy.
I’d like to peel the mountain back with fire,
But you’d just have time to seed the trees with salt.
I’d like right then to settle in—get this!—
In the ancient Urals, full of folks,
And I’d like to preserve this plain—dead smooth, crazy—
And wrap it in a greatcoat skirt, for safety.
April–May 1935
11
Stanzas
I
I don’t want to blow my soul’s last cent
With wastrels, wet behind the ears—I want instead
To walk into the world—and among the worthy—
Like a lone man on the fields of the collective.
I love the pleated coat of the Red Army—
Its ankle length, its smooth and simple sleeves,
Its cut like a storm cloud on the Volga,
Which, bursting on the shoulder and the chest,
Falls right, not wasting its reserves,
And rolls away in summertime.
II
A cursed cut, an absurd adventure
Separated us, and now—get this!:
Gotta keep living, breathing and bolshevizing,
And, before I die, aggrandizing,
Still stick around and play with folks!
III
Consider how in pigeon-like Cherdyn,
Where the Oba smells and the Tobel swells,
I got into a spat twelve inches long:
The goats spit insults but I missed the battle,
Like a rooster in the limpid shade of summer—
The grub, the gob, the something more, the slander—
I shouldered off the pecking of that beak. One leap,
and I’m myself again.
IV
And you, Moscow, my delicate sister,
When, on a plane, you find your brother
Before the streetcar touches its first bell:
More tender than the sea, more tangled than a mixture,
Salad of milk, and window glass, and timber...
V
My country gabbed with me, chided me,
Made peace with me, put me out of mind,
But, witnessing, when I became a man
It was aware—and focusing,
Suddenly, it kindled me on fire
With a ray reflected from the Admiralty.
VI
Gotta keep living, breathing and bolshevizing,
Work the world, not even listening, myself my only friend.
In the arctic dark I hear the throb of Soviet machines,
And I remember it all: my German brothers’ necks
And the gardener, the hangman, who kills spare time
With the lilac hairpiece of the Lorelei.
VII
I haven’t been robbed, I haven’t bent,
It’s just that I’m completely spent...
Like the Song of Igor my cord is tense,
And in my voice, asthmatic, sounds
The earth, which is the last defense,
Dry nectar of the vast black ground!
May–July 1935
12
A day reared up on five heads. For five whole days
I huddled, proud of space which rose like yeast.
The dream was larger than sound, but sound was older—sensitive, established,
The Bolsheviks raced after us beneath the coachman’s lash.
A day reared up on five heads and, infected with the dance,
The cavalry rode, the black-capped mass of infantry advanced—
In a swelling of the aorta-pulse of power in those white nights—
no, in those white knives—
The eye turned into needled flesh.
But give me a bit of blue sea, enough to fit the eye of a needle,
That the double escort race smartly along on wings of time.
Dry mint Russian fable, wooden spoon: Hey! Where are you,
You three strapping offspring of the GPU, of those iron doors?
That Pushkin’s profligate production not fall
In hands of parasites, our tribe of Pushkin scholars
Grammerize in greatcoats with revolvers—
Young lovers of doggerel with immaculate dentition.
Give me a bit of blue sea, enough to fit the eye of a needle!
The train heads for the Urals. Before our gaping mouths
Garrulous Chapaev galloped from the screen—
From behind a timber palisade—on a scrim of sheets—
To drown—to mount—his steed.
April–June 1, 1935
13
Talking from a soaking sheet—
Get this! Even fish can speak—
The sounding screen advanced
Over me, over you, over all of us...
Sneezing at a grotesque demise,
A lethal cigarette between their teeth,
The officers marched, in the latest style,
Between the plain’s gaped-open thighs...
There was an audible low hum
Of airplanes, burnt to bits,
A heavy blade of Sheffield steel
Scraped the admiral’s cheeks...
O my country, take my measure, refashion me, revise—
Miraculous warmth of stitched-up earth!
Chapaev’s rifle has choked—
Help me! Untie me! Cut me down to size!...
(April)–June 1935
14
We’re still completely, totally alive;
They all still stroll the Union’s city streets
Decked out in shirts and fancy shifts
Of Chinese cloth with moths and leaves.
And still the number one machine
Abruptly collects the chestnut bribes,
And spills them—tresses at once
Thick and wise—on clean white sheets.
There’s still enough of swallows and of swifts,
The comet’s not yet made us lose our minds,
But draws, with its pragmatic, purple ink,
The form of stars and comet tails.
May 25, 1935
15
Ingots forged of Roman nights,
Nipple where young Goethe nursed—
Let me answer this stuff; I’ll take no guff:
Outside the law, whole depths of lives.
June 1935
16
Though she’s died, can I still sing her praise?
So powerful, so far away—
The force of an alien love has dragged her to
A violent, an ardent grave...
Swallows, severe, with rounded brows
Flew toward me from her tomb
To tell me they had rested on
Her icy bed in Stockholm.
Your family boasts great-granddad’s violin;
Your neck made it more handsome,
And you parted your pink lips and laughed,
In Italian and in Russian...
I still preserve your painful memory,
Wild thing, bear cub, Mignon,
But the mill wheel’s locked away in snow,
The trumpet of the postman’s frozen.
June 3, 1935
17
Dead lashes frozen on St. Isaac’s,
The fancy streets have turned to blue—
The organ-grinder’s dead, his bear pelt too,
And a foreign fire fills the hearth...
The warden’s driven the fire out
In a clutch of spreading beams,
The round earth tears along, this cozy sphere,
And a mirror mocks the know-it-all.
On staircase landings—mist and separation,
Breathing, breathing, and singing,
And frozen in a shuba* Schubert’s talisman—
Moving, moving, moving...
June 3, 1935
*A Russian fur coat.
18
The extra length of Paganini’s fingers
Would make any troop of Gypsies shake a leg
In a quick Czech dance, a Hungarian czardas,
Or picking out a polonaise.
But you, kid, vain and brazen,
Whose sound swells like the Yenisei,
Console me with your touch, you Polish cutie,
And that mound of curls on your head
Would grace the brow of Marina Mnishek.
Little Miss Musician, your bow is putting on airs.
Knock me out with a Chopin with chestnut hair,
With a sober Brahms—No! Wait!
Hit me with Paris, savagely alive,
With a carnival of flour dust and sweat
Or the heady froth of a young Vienna
That frisks, in a conductor’s coat and tails,
On a Danube with fireworks and leaps
And a waltz that plays from coffin to the cradle,
A Vienna radiant, like drunkenness.
So play until your heart explodes,
Play, a cat’s head yowling in your throat!
There were three devils, the fourth is you,
The last, marvelous and in full bloom!
April 5–June 1935
19
Wave follows wave, breaks the back of a wave with a wave,
Hurls itself at the moon with a slave’s despair,
And the callow Janissary depths,
The new, sleepless city of the waves,
Stretches, startles, scrapes a ditch in the sand.
And through the shadowy, the turbid air appear
The ramparts of a wall not yet begun,
And soldiers of suspicious sultans pitch
From staircases of foam, dropping one by one,
And icy eunuchs pass out cyanide.
June 17, 1935
20
I’ll perform the reeking rite:
In the opal here in front of me
Lie seaside summer strawberries—
Carnelians, doubly sincere,
The agate, auntie to the ant,
But my sweetheart is the simple stone,
The gray and savage soldier of the deep,
With whom no one, ever, is content.
July 1935
21
Not as a butterfly, white as flour,
Will I return to the earth my borrowed dust—
I want my body, intelligent form,
In street and country to be transformed:
Vertebrate body, charred to ash,
Conscious of its own specific size.
Cries of dark green needles of the pines,
Pine wreathes from the depths of wells
Extend our lives and precious time,
Support themselves on death machines—
Red-banner hoops made out of boughs,
Enormous, elementary wreaths!
Comrades of the final call-up rose
To labor in the leaden skies,
In silence the infantry passed by,
Their shouldered arms like exclamations.
And a thousand antiaircraft guns—
Their pupils either brown or blue—
Straggled in disorder—men, men, men—
And who’ll come after them?
July 21, 1935–May 30, 1936
Second Notebook
22
Out of the houses, out of the forest,
Longer than a string of boxcars—
Sound for the power of midnight labor,
Sadko of the factories and fields.
Blow, old man, breathe sweetly,
Like Sadko, in Novgorod a guest
Of the blue sea in its depths—
Blow forever from the sink of centuries,
Siren of Soviet cities.
December 6–9, 1936
23
The Birth of a Smile
When a child first begins to smile
The bitter and the sweet part company,
And the sober limits of that smile
Open, oceanic, into anarchy.
To him, everything’s unbeatably good:
He plays, in glory, with the corners of his lips—
And he catches up a rainbow seam
To learn the nature, infinite, of things.
On its own two feet, from water, matter rose—
An influx, an arriving, from the mouths of snails—
And an instant of Atlantis strikes the eyes,
In a languid pose of praise and of surprise.
December 8, 1936–January 17, 1937
24
I’ll marvel at the world a little more,
The kids, the snow,
But like a road, a smile’s authentic,
Disobedient, no whore.
December 1936–1938
25
Goldfinch, friend, I’ll cock my head—
Let’s check the world out, just me and you:
This winter’s day pricks like chaff;
Does it sting your eyes too?
Boat-tailed, feathers yellow-black,
Sopped in color beneath your beak,
Do you get, you goldfinch you,
Just how you flaunt it?
What’s he thinking, little airhead—
White and yellow, black and red!
Both eyes check both ways—both!—
Will check no more—he’s bolted!
December 9–27, 1936
26
Now the day’s some kind of callow yellow—
Can’t make it out,
And the sea gates scout me
Through anchors and through mists...
Softly, softly through the faded water
The passage of the battleships,
And the narrow, pencil-box canals
Beneath the ice still darker...
December 9–28, 1936
27
Not mine, or yours—but theirs,
Complete, the power of the race:
Reed and fipple use their air to sing,
And, grateful, the snail lips of mankind
Draw to themselves the burden of their breath.
They have no name! Enter their marrow
And you’ll inherit their kingdom—
And for plain people, for their vivid hearts,
Their wandering in windings and unwindings,
You’ll reveal their joys, and all that
Torments them—at flood tide and at slack.
December 9–27, 1936
28
Deep in the mountain the idol rests
In sweet repose, infinite and blest,
The fat of necklaces dripping from his neck
Protects his dreams of flood tide and of slack.
As a boy, he buddied with a peacock,
They gave him rainbow of India to eat
And milk in a pink clay dish,
And didn’t stint the cochineal.
Bone put to bed, locked in a knot,
Shoulders, arms, and knees made flesh,
He smiles with his own dead-silent lips,
Thinks with his bone, feels with his brow,
And struggles to recall his human countenance...
December 10–26, 1936
29
I’m in the heart of the century. The road is dim,
My purpose, with time, grows old—
And the ash tree sick of the staff,
And copper’s mendicant mold.
December 14, 1936
30
The master, factor of armaments,
Tailor of blacksmith monuments,
Will say to me: Don’t worry, father—
We’ll sew you up one even better...
December 1936 (?)
31
It’s the law of the pine forest:
The harp and viol’s common peal.
The trunks are naked, knotted up,
But still the harps and viols
Swell, as if each trunk
Began to bend into aeolian harp
And gave up, took pity on the roots,
Took pity on the trunks, on their strength;
And with the harp had raised the sound
Of a viol, ringing in the bark—already brown.
December 16–18, 1936
32
With the skinny blade of a Gillette
A cinch to scrape the stubble of sleep—
Let’s you and I remember
That half-Ukrainian summer.
You, you splendid peaks,
Saints’ days of shaggy woods—
The glory of a Ruisdael canvas,
And for starters—just a bush,
A blush of clay in amber and flesh.
The earth goes straight up. How sweet
To see the pure strata,
To be master of a seven-roomed,
Embraceable simplicity.
Its hills, like graceful haystacks,
Flew off toward distant destinies,
Steppe-boulevards of roads,
Like a chain of tents in scorching shade!
And a willow lurched forward in the flame,
A poplar stood up proud and tall...
Over the yellow stubble-camp
The rutted tracks of frozen smoke.
But still the Don turned silver
Like a half-breed, awkward, shallow,
And gathering water with a half-dipper
Was lost—like my soul,
When, on its miserable bed,
The burden of evenings drowsed,
And spilling from the riverbanks
The drunken trees caroused...
December 15–27, 1936
33
Night. A road. First dream,
Seductive and new...
What dream? A radiant
Tambov, sleeved in snow,
Or the Tsna—ordinary river!—
White, white, mantle white?
Or myself on the fields of the collective—
Air in the lungs and life which turns
The sunflower with its terrible suns
Directly into the depths of the eye?
Beyond bread, beyond a home,
A great dream comes:
A hard day’s work; a sleepy rising,
Turned into deep blue Don...
Anna, Rossosh, Gremiach—
Blessed will be their names—
The eider whiteness of the snow
From the window of a train!...
December 23–27, 1936
34
Distant banners of a passing column
Through the windows of a mansion,
Frost and fever
Bring the river nearer.
And what’s that forest—spruce?
Not spruce, a spruced-up violet—
And what kind of birch is that?
Who’s to know or care?—
Only a prose inscribed on air,
Illegible; evanescent...
December 26, 1936
35
Where am I? What’s wrong with me?
The steppe is naked without winter...
Maybe it’s Koltsov’s stepmother...
You’re joking—it’s goldfinch country!
Only the empty city
In an icy observation,
Only the nighttime teapot
In its solo conversation,
In the dregs of the air off the steppes,
A summoning of trains,
And the Ukrainian drawl
Of their lingering calls...
December 23–25, 1936
36
One by one they fell into the deep,
Bucketful of endless storms,
From the nobleman’s estates,
To the ocean’s very core.
They fell, swaying themselves down,
Gently, threatening they fell...
Just look: the sky’s gained height—
Roof and house, a fresh new home—
And, in the street, light!
December 26, 1936
37
When the goldfinch, in his airy confection,
Suddenly gets angry, begins to quake,
His spite sets off his scholar’s robes,
Shows to advantage his cute black cap.
And he slanders the hundred bars,
Curses the sticks and perches of his prison—
And the world’s turned completely inside out,
And surely there’s a forest Salamanca
For birds so smart, so disobedient.
December 1936
38
Like a postponed present,
That’s how winter feels—
From the first I’ve loved
Its uncertain extent.
Fear makes it beautiful,
Something terrible might occur—
Before this forestless circle
Even the crow’s lost his nerve.
But all that’s most powerful is tenuous—
Bright blue of these convexities—
Ice half-circles at the temple of the streams,
Lulling to a sleep without dreams...
December 29–30, 1936
39
All the disasters that I see,
All before me comes from this,
This usurious, feline eye—
Grandson of hanging greenery
And water merchant—of the sea.
There, where Kaschei
Stuffs on scorching soups,
Hoarding stones that speak, for luck,
He awaits his guests—
He pries the stones with pliers,
Nibbles the gold of nails.
And in his house, in drowsy rooms,
Dead serious, a tomcat lives—
In his feverish pupils lies
A treasure chest of squinting peaks,
And in those pupils, freezing,
Suppliant and pleading—
Spark-sphere feasts...
December 29–30, 1936
40
Your pupil, with its cortex like the heavens,
Turned to the distance and prostrate on the earth,
Is rescued by the provisos of
Those delicate, spare lashes.
It will live, made God,
A long time in its native land:
The startled maelstrom of an eye—
Cast it after me!
Even now it looks with pleasure
On the passing centuries—
Bright, incorporeal, iridescent,
And, for the moment, suppliant.
January 2, 1937
41
Smile, angry lamb, in Raphael’s canvas—
A painting of the universal maw, now something else...
Dissolve, in the gentle breath of a reed, the pearl’s anguish—
The ocean salt’s been etched the blue, blue color of chenille...
Color of airy theft and cavern densities,
Pleats of a calm within the storm are spilled about its knees.
On a rock more stale than bread—a thicket of young reeds,
And an enchanting power floats the corner sky...
January 2, 1937
42
When a sorcerer introduces
In the trampled branches
A whisper, color
Chestnut, or bay—
The faded, lazy hero
Has no taste for song—
Nor the tiny, the mighty,
Winter warbler—
Beneath the cornice of the day,
Beneath its beetling brow,
I’ll more quickly board
The purple sleigh...
January 9, 1937
43
Near Koltzov I,
Like a falcon, guyed—
No porch to my house,
No word arrives.
To my leg is tied
A pine forest, blue,
Like a herald without tidings,
Horizon thrown wide.
Little hills roam the plain—
And moving, all is moving,
Overnights, all nights, little nights—
As if it’s the blind they were guiding...
January 9 (?), 1937
44
Yeast, precious, of the world,
The noise, the trouble, the tears—
The beat of the rain,
Of toil, brought to a boil,
From what ore will we restore
The loss of all that sounds?
And for the first time you sense,
In destitute memory, the sightless trench,
Full to the brim with coppery water—
And you head off after it,
A disgrace to yourself, unknown—
And blind, and a guide to the blind...
January 12–18, 1937
45
He’s up and off, the imp with soggy fur—
Hey you? Where to? Where to?—
To thimbles punched by hooves,
To the hurried tracks—
Kopek by kopek he extracts
The printed air of settlements...
He spatters the reflections in the ruts—
The exhausted tracks
Stagger on a little longer
Without mica, without cover...
The wheel groans its way downhill
Then calms itself—it’s no big deal!
I’m bored: This little to-do
Babbles obliquely—
Is overtaken by another,
Which mocks it; knocks it askew...
January 12–18, 1937
46
You’re not alone. You haven’t died,
While you still, beggar woman at your side,
Take pleasure in the grandeur of the plain,
The gloom, the cold, the whirlwinds of snow.
In sumptuous penury, in mighty poverty
Live comforted and at rest—
Your days and nights are blest,
Your sweet-voiced labor without sin.
Unhappy he, a shadow of himself,
Whom a bark astounds and the wind mows down,
And to be pitied he, more dead than alive,
Who begs handouts from a ghost.
January 15–16, 1937
47
Alone, I look into the face of the cold:
It—going nowhere; myself—from nowhere,
And the whole breathing miracle of the plain
Is perfectly flat, is ironed without a fold.
And the sun squints in milky penury—
Its blink is consoling, fearless.
Ten-figure forest—almost like these...
And the snow crunches in the eye like pure bread, sinless.
January 16, 1937
48
Oh, this airless, indolent expanse!
I’m completely sick of it—
Catching its breath, the horizon opens wide—
A bandage, please, for both my eyes!
Better to endure the fact of layered sand
In the dentilled banks of the Kama:
I would staunch its timid flows,
Its ripples, margins, depths.
We’d get on well—a century, an instant—
Jealous of the rapids under siege,
I’d listen, beneath the bark of flowing trees,
To the fibrous procession of its rings...
January 16, 1937
49
What to do with the slaughter of the plains,
With the endless famine of their miracle?
It’s just that the vision we discern in them,
We see ourselves, we behold in sleep—
And still the question swells: Where to? Where from?
If after them another, crawling slowly, comes,
The one at whom we cry out in our dreams—
The Judas of the unengendered spaces?
January 16, 1937
50
As feminine silver, burning,
Does battle with admixture and air,
So gentle labor silvers
The iron of the plough, the song-maker’s singing.
January 1937 (?)
51
Me, right now, I’m in a spiderweb
Of light—light-chestnut, dark-stranded.
The people need light and air, a luminous blue,
Need bread and snow from Elbrus, too.
And I have no one to advise me,
Hardly likely that such I’ll find:
Neither in the Crimea nor in the Urals
Are stones so transparent, so lamenting.
The people need a verse that’s secret, of their kind,
To once and for all wake up from it,
And with a surge of chestnut, of flaxen curls—
With its very sound—to be cleansed of it...
January 19, 1937
52
As a star-stone somewhere whacks the earth awake,
A disgraced verse falls, paternity: unrecognized—
Inexorable, to its maker, this discovery.
No one will judge him—it can’t be otherwise.
January 20, 1937
53
I hear, I hear the early ice,
Rustling under the bridges,
I recall a luminous intoxication,
Swimming over our heads.
From the cruel stairs, from the square
With jutting palaces,
Alighieri sang with greater power
Of the circle of his own Florence
With exhausted lips.
Just so, the granite, grain by grain,
Gnaws at my shadow with its eyes,
Sees in the night a string of posts,
Which by day turn back to houses,
Or my shadow twiddles its thumbs,
And shares with you a yawn,
Or makes a stir among folks,
Warmed on their wine and sky,
And feeds its bitter bread
To the petulant swans...
January 22, 1937
54
Where can I hide in this January?
Wide-open city with a mad death grip...
Can I be drunk from sealed doors?—
I want to bellow from locks and knots...
And the socks of barking back roads,
And the hovels on twisted streets—
And deadbeats hurry into corners
And hurriedly dart back out again...
And into the pit, into the warty dark
I slide, into waterworks of ice,
And I stumble, I eat dead air,
And fevered crows exploding everywhere—
But I cry after them, shouting at
Some wickerwork of frozen wood:
A reader! A councillor! A doctor!
A conversation on the spiny stair!
February 1, 1937
55
I love a frozen exhalation,
The steam of a wintry confession:
Me—I’m me; reality—is reality...
And a kid, red as a bulb,
Of his own sled lord
And master, tears by swimmingly,
And I—in a spat with the world and my own will—
Will make peace with this plague of sleds—
Their silvered parentheses, their tassels—
So let the century fall, softer than a squirrel,
Softer than a squirrel by the gentle stream—
Half-heaven in felt boots, ankles...
January 24, 1937
56
Amid the noise and scurry of the people,
In railway stations, steamship docks,
The century’s signpost in its power stands guard,
The flutter of its eyebrows starts.
I get it! He gets it! You get it!
Then take me where you want to go!—
To the terminal, a wilderness of words,
The waiting by the powerful flow
Of the river—that stop’s now far away,
The boiling water in the tank,
The tin cup on the slender chain,
The eyes obscured by mist.
Gone the weighty dialect of Perm,
Gone the dustup between neighbors in the coach,
And they delight and torment me, those eyes
Which from the wall observe me with reproach.
Top secret, this matter of the future,
With our pilots, the workers on our farms,
With our comrade river, our comrade forest,
With our comrade towns...
What once was can’t be recalled for certain,
The burning lips, hard-hearted words—
And a rumor, arriving, of iron leaves
Struck, fluttered the white curtain...
And in fact, everything was peaceful:
Only a steamship sailed along the river,
And buckwheat bloomed behind the cedar,
A fish moved in the water’s murmur...
So I went to him—to his very core—
Entering the Kremlin without a pass,
Sundering the canvas of distances,
My head, heavy with guilt, bowed low...
January 1937
57
Where’s the strangled, shackled cry?
Where’s Prometheus—support and sidekick of the rock?
And where’s the kite—the yellow-eyed lock
Of his talons, glowering as he flies?
That can’t be—there’d be no more tragedy,
But just these aggressive lips—
But these lips lead straight to the core,
To the Sopho-woodcutter, the Aeschy-stevedore.
He is echo and hello, he is signpost—no, a ploughshare...
The swollen-time theater of stone and air
Struggles to its feet, all want to see them all:
The living, the destroyed, and those not masters of their fall.
January 19–February 4, 1937
58
Like Rembrandt, that martyr to chiaroscuro,
I dropped deeply into silenced time,
And the bite of my burning rib
Is neither by the watchmen of the dark protected
Nor by this soldier who sleeps out in the storm.
If you forgive me, marvelous brother,
And master of the green-black dark, and father—
But the falcon-feather’s eye,
And the candescent casket in the midnight harem
Disturb without pity, disturb for no good reason,
The anxious tribe, with skins of twilight.
February 4, 1937
59
Breaks in round bays, and shingle, and blue,
And a slow sail continued by a cloud—
I hardly knew you; I’ve been torn from you:
Longer than organ fugues—the sea’s bitter grasses,
Fake tresses—and their long lie stinks,
My head swims with iron tenderness,
The rust gnaws bit by bit the sloping bank...
On what new sands does my head sink?
You, guttural Urals, broad-shouldered Volga lands,
Or this dead-flat plain—here are all my rights,
And, full-lunged, gotta go on breathing them.
February 4, 1937
60
I sing when my throat’s wet, my soul—dry,
My gaze just moist enough, when my thoughts don’t lie:
Is this wine OK? These skins good stuff?
Is it healthy, this throb of Colchis in the blood?
Silent, without language, my chest’s uneasy:
I sing no longer—now it’s just my breath,
Ears sheathed in mountains, head deaf...
Selfless song of praise—by me, for me:
Solace for friends—pitch for an enemy.
Cyclops song; sprung from moss—
Solo-voiced gift of the hunting life,
Sung on horseback, on the heights,
Mouth wide open; with all one’s might,
In rectitude and anger; only wanting this,
To bring the young pair sinless to their kiss...
February 8, 1937
61
Armed with the eyesight of skinny wasps,
Who sip the earth’s axis, the slipping earth,
I take it all in, whatever comes my way,
And I learn it all by heart, uselessly...
And I don’t paint, I don’t sing,
Don’t rosin the black-voiced bow:
Just empty myself into life, and love
To envy the seditious, imperious wasp.
If only I, stalling sleep and death,
Could somehow, someday catch
The chirp of the air and summer warmth,
Hear the slipping earth, the slipping earth...
February 8, 1937
62
Their vision was keener than a sharpened scythe—
From a drop of dew, a cuckoo in the corner of each eye—
Even so, at full stretch, they barely managed to discover
The wealth of stars in solitary splendor.
February 9, 1937
63
He still recalls my worn-out shoes—
The slick splendor of their soles,
And I, his: like him tin-eared,
Black-haired, a neighbor to Mt. David.
Touched up with chalk and whiting,
The ascending pistachio streets:
Air—stair—farrier—mare—air,
Oaklets, plane trees, lazy elms...
And the feminine chain of leafy letters,
Vision-tipsy in the membrane of light—
And the city, so capable, takes off into timber,
Into youthful, aging, summer.
February 7–11, 1937
64
My dream defends a dream of the Don,
And the maneuvers of the tortoises unfold—
Their high-speed restless carapace,
And the carpets, curious, of people’s speech...
In battle, straight talk moves me—
To defend the living, to defend my country,
Where death sleeps like an owl by day...
Between chiseled ribs the glass of Moscow burns.
Irresistible, the Kremlin’s words—
In them is the defense of the defense;
And head and brow and battle dress,
Amicably assembled with the eyes.
And this earth—and other countries—hear news
Of war, falling from the choral cornucopia—
No slave will be slave, neither woman nor man—
And cheek to cheek the clock and chorus singing.
February 11, 1937
65
Like wood and copper, Favorski’s flight—
In the coopered air we are neighbors in our times,
And, together, the layered fleet compels us,
Fleet of sawn-up oaks and copper-sycamore.
And in rings the pitch is angry still, and drips,
But perhaps the heart is only startled flesh?
It’s my own heart’s fault, and the heart-part which
Is an hour swollen to infinity.
Hour which satisfies countless friends,
Hour of menacing squares, with happy eyes...
With my own eyes I circumscribe the square,
All this square with its wilderness of flags.
February 11, 1937
66
Into the fastness, into the lion’s pit I pitched,
Sinking deeper and deeper and deeper,
Trembling beneath the sound of the downpour—
Stronger than a lion—than the Pentateuch more powerful.
As nearer and nearer came your call—
To the tribe’s commandments; to those who came before—
In the deep of ocean pearls,
In the meek baskets of Tahitians...
Continent of castigating song,
In the depths of that rich voice come nearer!
The sweet-savage face of wealthy daughters
Not worth your great-grandma’s little finger.
My time is still not ending,
And I accompany the universal joy,
As an organ, in an undertone,
Follows a woman singing.
February 12, 1937
Third Notebook
67
Verses on the Unknown Soldier
I
Let this air be witness
To his long-range heart,
And in the trenches, hyperactive, voracious,
Ocean without window—vital substance.
These stars are such informers!
They have to see everything—Why?—
In the judgment of the judge and of the witness,
In the ocean without window, vital substance...
The rain, stingy with its seed,
Recalls its nameless manna,
As a forest of crosses marks
An ocean—or a battleground.
People will come, freezing, sickly,
To kill, to suffer cold and hunger—
And in his famous grave lies
The agreed-on, unknown soldier.
Teach me, sickly swallow,
Who’s forgotten how to fly,
How to cope with this airy tomb
Without rudder or wing.
And in Mikhail Lermontov’s stead
I’ll give you the bitter news
How only the grave cures all ills,
And a socket of air sucks us in.
II
With hurled grape
These worlds threaten us,
And they hang, sequestered cities,
Pavilions of the spreading constellations,
Like golden malaprops, like slanders,
Like berries of the poisonous cold—
Golden grease of constellations...
III
Arabian mash, chopped-up bits,
Light of speedsters, ground to a ray,
In my retina the ray resides,
Its shoe soles sticking to the side.
Millions of dead—yours for almost nothing!—
Have worn a path in nothingness—
Good night! I wish you all the best,
On behalf of this earth’s fortresses.
Sky an incorruptible fosse,
Sky of endless, wholesale dead—
For you, from you, together,
I follow my lips headlong into gloom—
Behind the craters, the rockslides and embankments
Where it delayed, embayed in mist—
The sullen, poxed, and smoke-wrapped
Genius—torn asunder!—of the tomb.
IV
Well dies the infantry,
And well sings the chorus of the night,
Over the flattened smile of Schweik,
And over the bird-pike of Quixote,
And over the chivalrous metatarsal of a bird.
And the guy makes friends with the gimp—
There’ll be work for both of them for sure,
And the little family of wooden crutches
Knocks on the century’s palisade—
Hey, friendship!—earthly sphere!
V
Is that why the skull must spread
Side to side—across the head
So that armies cannot colonize
The beloved orbits of its eyes?
Life itself expands the skull
Side to side—across the head;
It’s teased by the purity of its seams,
Gets clearer with its dome of wisdom,
Bubbles with ideas, dreams its own dreams—
Fatherland of the fatherland, chalice of chalices—
Hat stitched with stellar ribs—
Shakespeare’s father—cap of happiness...
VI
Ash-tree avidity, sycamore sagacity,
Heads for home, blushing slightly,
As if uniting in fainting fits
Both skies with their dreary fire.
But for us there’s only union in excess,
Before us not disaster but a test,
And a battle for a minimum of breath,
A glory which inspires...no one.
And uniting my consciousness
With half-unconscious existence,
Do I, indiscriminate, choke down this slop,
Consume my own head beneath this fire?
And why prepare this magic-box
Beforehand in empty outer space
If the white stars, turning,
Slightly blushing, head for home?
Can you sense—stepmother of a Gypsy camp of stars,
Night—what now is, and what’s to come?
VII
Aortas strain with blood,
And running through the ranks a little whisper:
“I was born in ninety-four...”
“I was born in ninety-two...”
And clutching in my fist the worn year
Of my birth, with the crowd, all together,
I murmur with a mouth drained of all blood,
“I was born in the night of the second and third
Of January, ninety-something-or-other,
An unreliable year, and the centuries
Surround me with fire.”
February–March, 1937
68
I beg of you, France, your honeysuckle and earth,
As a sign of your pity and favor,
The truths of your turtledoves, the little white lies
Of the vines in their gauzy divisions...
In mild December your closely cropped air
Is frosted—wealthy, offended...
But a violet in jail—gone crazy with space!,
Whistles—sarcastic and careless...
Where it once seethed, cleansed itself of its king,
The street in July is broken...
And now, in Paris, in Chartres, and in Arles,
The boss is good old Charlie Chaplin—
In a potful of sea, with precision confused,
For the flower girl he swaggers akimbo...
Where, with a rose on its breast in a two-towered sweat,
The shawl made of webs turns to stone,
It’s a shame that this carousel, grateful for air,
Turns, breathing, in time with the town—
Then bow down your head, little godless one,
With a nanny goat’s golden glances,
And so, with your scissors, lisping and curved,
Tease the mounds of your miserly roses.
March 3, 1937
69
I saw a lake stood on end,
Fish played with a rose, trimmed
In a wheel, house fresh and new.
Fox and lion fought in a canoe.
Miseries peered from within three barking arches—
Enemies of other unhidden arcs.
A gazelle galloped the violet span,
The cliff retired suddenly to its towers—
Sodden, the honest sandstone rebelled,
In the middle of the handmade cricket city
A pip-squeak ocean will rise from the clear river
And fling cupfuls of water at the clouds.
March 4, 1937
70
On a game board, scarlet, crimson,
On the knight piece of a tumbling mountain—
Three times satiate with snows,
Carried high, sleigh-bound, sleepy,
The half-coastal home for horses, the half-city,
Harnessed with a halter of red embers,
Warmed through with yellow mastic,
Burned, complete, to caramelized sugar.
Don’t look for the heavenly fat of winter,
The downfall of the Flemish skater,
Nor caws here, cheerful, half-cocked,
The midget band in earflap hats—
And since the simile’s OK by me,
Cut short my plans, in love with difficulty,
As the smoke whips away the root of the maple,
Fleeing on stilts, dried out...vital...
March 6, 1937
71
I’ll sketch this out; I’ll say this quietly—
Because its moment is still not evident:
The game of the unconscious sky will be
Accomplished later, with experience...
And beneath the time-soaked sky
Of Purgatory, we frequently forget
That the blessed storehouse of the heavens
Is our home, limitless and present.
March 9, 1937
72
The sky of evening fell in love with a wall—
Sky slashed to bits with the light of scars—
Fell over it; burst into light,
Transformed itself in thirteen heads.
Here it is—my sky of night,
I stand before it like a kid:
My eyes ache; my back grows cold,
I gather strength to batter it—
And at each tolling of the ram
Stars without heads rain down:
New gashes in the grand design—
Smoke of unfinished timelessness...
March 9, 1937
73
What to do?—I’m lost in the sky.
Let him answer—he who’s nearest by...
Easier for you all to ring
The nine discuses of Dante.
It’s not for me to separate from life—which dreams
Of murder—and ends up with caresses,
So that in the ears, the eyes, the sockets of the eyes
Strikes a Florentine sadness.
Don’t crown me, don’t crown me
With laurel, with its spiky tenderness,
Better you split my heart in two,
Into bits of ringing blue...
And when I die, all used up,
Friend in life of everything alive,
Let the echo of the sky ring out
Throughout my chest—far and wide!
March 9 (?), 1937
74
What to do?—I’m lost in the sky.
Let him answer—he who’s nearest by!
Easier for you all to ring
The nine discuses of Dante,
To choke, turn black, turn blue...
If I’m not past date, or all used up—
You who stand over me—
If you’re a bon vivant, or in your cups,
Pour me strength unmixed with empty froth
To drink to the health of this tower which spins,
A light blue, crazy and pugnacious...
Dovecote, birdhouse, blackness,
Shadow figures of the deepest blue—
Vernal ice, best ice, last ice of spring,
Clouds—enchantment warriors—Hush!
They’re leading a storm cloud in harness!
March 9–10 (?), 1937
75
Maybe this is it, the point of madness,
Maybe this is your conscience—
The knot of life, in which we’re known,
In which we come into our own...
As in cathedrals of hyper-vital crystals,
The conscientious spider of the light
Looses its rays among the ribs, and then,
In a single beam, gathers them again.
Grateful shafts of limpid lines,
Directed by a quiet ray,
Will sometimes be gathered up, will join again,
Like houseguests with an innocent expression—
Only here, on this earth, not in heaven,
As if this house were filled with music—
Don’t wound them; don’t frighten them away—
Wonderful if we live to see that day...
For what I’m saying, please forgive me...
Read it over to me quietly, quietly...
March 15, 1937
76
A living being is incomparable; don’t compare.
With a sort of tender fear
I embraced the plain’s monotony,
The circle of the sky my enemy.
I appealed to my servant, the air,
Waited for its favors, fresh rumors,
Gathered for a journey, floated in an arc
Of journeys that refused to start...
I’m ready to wander where my sky is greater,
But a limpid sadness will not let me leave
The still raw hills of Vorónezh
For the clearing, all-human hills of Tuscany.
March 16, 1937
77
Rome
Where the frogs of the fountains croaked
And splashed, they sleep no more.
Once wakened, overcome with weeping,
With all the power of their throats and shells
They water the city, toady to
The mighty, with amphibious tears—
Summery, cheeky, a light antiquity,
With fallen arches and a glance of avidity,
Like the untouched bridge of Sant’Angelo
Flatfoot over the yellow flow—
Light blue, unformed, ashen,
In a tumor of houses like a drum,
The city’s a swallow, made into a dome,
A cupola of paths and drafts—
You’ve turned it into a murder-nursery,
You—you brown-blood mercenaries—
Italian Blackshirts—
Vicious whelps of departed Caesars...
They’re all your orphans, Michelangelo,
Shrouded in marble and shame:
The night soaked in tears and the
Fleet young David, faultless,
And the bed on which Moses
Lies like a cataract, without motion—
Freedom of power and a lion’s portion
Fall silent in slavery and sleep.
Yieldings of the furrowed stairs,
Of flights of rivers flowing to the square:
Let those steps ring out like deeds,
Let the somnolent citizens of Rome arise,
But not for crippled joys like these,
Like idle sponges of the sea.
The pits of the Forum are dug up anew,
And Herod’s Gate opened at last—
And over Rome hangs the heavy jaw
Of the dictator-outcast.
March 16, 1937
78
That a friend of wind and rain
Might guard within their bit of grit,
The Tsars scrawled multitudes of herons,
Made bottle after bottle lip,
The shame of the Egyptian body politic
Covered itself in select dog skins,
It gave the dead all kinds of things,
And built those little pyramids.
How much better, my belov’d blood brother,
The singer, comforting in sinfulness,
The grinding of your teeth still heard,
Of careless dust the advocate.
Disentangling in two testaments
Your clutch of idle impediments,
You returned the earth, a cavernous skull,
In chirps of birds and in farewells—
He lived beside the mischievous gothic
And spat on all the spider’s rights,
Insolent schoolboy, thieving angel,
François Villon, the incomparable!
Thief of the celestial choir,
To sit beside you is no sin—
And larks will ring out before
That very world, coming to an end...
March 18, 1937
79
Dark blue island, famed for its potters—
Crete the green. Baked, their gift
To the surrounding earth. Can you detect
The powerful fin-beat under earth?
The gentle sea is brought to mind
In the clay rejoicing in the pit,
And the power of that frozen vessel
Into ocean and eyes has been split.
Give me mine back, blue island,
Crete on the wing; return me my work
And from the breasts of the changing goddess
Fill the fired cup...
This was, was sung, turning blue,
Long before food and drink
Were called “my own” and “mine”—
Long, long before Odysseus.
Then get well, grow radiant,
Star of ox-eyed heaven,
And flying fish, and fortune,
And the water saying “yes.”
March 1937
80
Guilty deadbeat with a bottomless thirst,
Smart-ass pimp of water and wine:
The goat kids caper on your sides,
The fruit swells under music.
Flutes wheeze, swear and get into it,
The chip in your lip’s
A dusky red—and there’s no one
To pick you up and fix it.
March 21, 1937
81
Oh, how I wish,
Perceived by no one,
To fly after a beam
To where I’m nothing.
You! Shine in a circle—
No better fate—
And study from a star
How light is made.
And to you I’d like
To say what I now whisper,
That in a whisper I deliver
You, child, to light.
March 27, 1937
82
My Nereids, sea goddesses!
Your food and drink are our laments,
For daughters of the Mediterranean offense
My compassion is offensive.
March 1937
83
The theta and iota of the Greek flute—
As if all this chatter weren’t enough—
Unformed, unacknowledged,
It matured, suffered, passed over the fosse...
To abandon it, impossible,
Or to silence it, gritting the teeth,
Or to advance it further, into words,
Or with the lips dismember it...
The flautist will know no peace of mind:
It seems to him he is alone,
That once upon a time he formed
With violet clay his native sea...
With the brassy whisper of the ambitious,
With the whisper of lips that still recall,
He’s in a tearing hurry to be thrifty,
To gather sounds—punctilious and stingy...
We who follow will not repeat his essence,
Clods of clay in the hands of the sea,
And when I myself was filled with sea—
My measure became pestilence...
My own lips don’t please me—
Murder is in their root—
And I bend, unwitting, down
And down, the equinox of the flute...
April 7, 1937
84
As through the streets of Kiev the evil-eyed,
God knows what little woman searches for her guy,
And down her waxen cheeks
Falls not one tear.
The Gypsies tell no fortunes for hot babes,
The violins don’t play in Kupechesky Park,
The horses tumble on Kreschatik Street,
The godly Lipki stink of the grave.
Red Army soldiers split the city,
Leaving with the last of trains,
And a sodden overcoat proclaimed:
“Get this straight—we will be back...”
April 1937
85
I’ll take this green to my lips—
This sticky oath of leaves,
This perjuring earth:
Mother of snowdrops, maples, oak trees.
Look how I grow stronger, blinder,
To these humble roots obedient,
And isn’t this thundering park
Just too magnificent?
And the frogs, like drops of mercury,
Bind their voices into balls,
And the twigs come together as branches,
And the mist as milky fantasy.
April 30, 1937
86
The buds congeal in a sticky vow,
“Look!—a falling star...”
That’s what mother told daughter
So she wouldn’t run far.
“Hold on,” distinctly whispered
Half the sky,
And a rolling rustle in reply:
“If only I’d a son...”
I’ll become
Something completely new,
To rock the cradle
The slightest touch will do.
A husband! Upright and arrogant,
Made obedient and harmless,
Without him—like a black book—
Horrible world—airless...
The summer lightning, winking,
Stumbles on its words,
Older brother scowling,
Younger sister complaining.
Velvet, a winged wind
Pipes a piccolo—
That the kid’s own forehead grow,
Spread wide, like both his kin.
The thunder will inquire of his friends:
“Hey thunders, don’t you see?
You gave the lime in marriage
Before the cherry...”
And from the lonely forest,
Fresh, the cries of birds,
Matchmaker birds who sing
Natasha’s flatteries.
Such oaths stick to the lips:
That for honor’s sake and side by side
The eyes should push headlong to die
Beneath trampling hooves.
Everyone’s always telling her to run:
“Clear-eyed Natasha, come!
For our good health, for our own
Happiness—take the plunge!”
May 2, 1937
87
The pear—and the cherry—took aim at me,
Hit me—with their fragile power—perfectly.
Flowers with stars, stars with flowers—
What’s this double force? Where’s truth’s inflorescence?
With a flower, a fist, they struck the air,
An air done in by pure white flowers, entire and evanescent.
Insufferable sweetness of that double scent:
It struggles, spreads—is mingled—rent...
May 4, 1937
88–89
I
Hitching slightly over the empty earth,
Unconscious, with a sweet, uneven gait
She goes, little by little gaining ground
On her coeval male, her rapid female friend.
The uneasy liberty of her animating fault
Compels her, and maybe it’s that
A clear conclusion wants to be refused
In her step—that for us, this spring season is
The ur-mother of the sepulchral vault—
And that this will be eternally renewed.
II
There are women born of the humid earth,
Their every step is steeped in sobbing,
Their calling to be with the resurrected
And to be the first to greet the dead.
Transgression to insist on their caresses,
Exhaustion to attempt to part from them.
Today—angels. Tomorrow—maggots.
And the next day—only faintest sketch...
What was—a step—it will end beyond us.
Immortal flowers. The sky a single dome.
And all that will be—only promise.
May 4, 1937
Index of First Lines
A day reared up on five heads. For five whole days →
A living being is incomparable; don’t compare →
All praised, all black, all cosseted and coddled →
All the disasters that I see →
Alone, I look into the face of the cold →
Amid the noise and scurry of the people →
Armed with the eyesight of skinny wasps →
As a star-stone somewhere whacks the earth awake →
As feminine silver, burning →
As through the streets of Kiev the evil-eyed →
Breaks in round bays, and shingle, and blue →
Dark blue island, famed for its potters →
Dead lashes frozen on St. Isaac’s →
Deep in the mountain the idol rests →
Distant banners of a passing column →
Goldfinch, friend, I’ll cock my head →
Gotta keep living, though I’ve died twice →
Guilty deadbeat with a bottomless thirst →
Having stripped me of my seas, my flight, my running start →
Headphones! My little squealers →
He still recalls my worn-out shoes →
He’s up and off, the imp with soggy fur →
Hitching slightly over the empty earth →
How dark the River Kama seems →
I beg of you, France, your honeysuckle and earth →
I don’t want to blow my soul’s last cent →
I hear, I hear the early ice →
I live in big-time gardens →
I’ll marvel at the world a little more →
I’ll perform the reeking rite →
I’ll sketch this out; I’ll say this quietly →
I’ll take this green to my lips →
I love a frozen exhalation →
I’m in the heart of the century. The road is dim →
Ingots forged of Roman nights →
Into the fastness, into the lion’s pit I pitched →
I saw a lake stood on end →
I sing when my throat’s wet, my soul—dry →
It’s the law of the pine forest →
It’s true, I lie in the earth, moving my lips →
Let this air be witness →
Like a postponed present →
Like Rembrandt, that martyr to chiaroscuro →
Like wood and copper, Favorski’s flight →
Maybe this is it, the point of madness →
Me, right now, I’m in a spiderweb →
My dream defends a dream of the Don →
My Nereids, sea goddesses →
Near Koltzov I →
Night. A road. First dream →
Not as a butterfly, white as flour →
Not mine, or yours—but theirs →
Now the day’s some kind of callow yellow →
Oh, how I wish →
Oh, this airless, indolent expanse →
On a game board, scarlet, crimson →
One by one they fell into the deep →
Out of the houses, out of the forest →
Release me, restore me Vorónezh →
Smile, angry lamb, in Raphael’s canvas →
Talking from a soaking sheet →
That a friend of wind and rain →
The buds congeal in a sticky vow →
The extra length of Paganini’s fingers →
Their vision was keener than a sharpened scythe →
The master, factor of armaments →
The pear—and the cherry—took aim at me →
The sky of evening fell in love with a wall →
The theta and iota of the Greek flute →
Though she’s died, can I still sing her praise →
Wave follows wave, breaks the back of a wave with a wave →
We’re still completely, totally alive →
What street is this →
What to do?—I’m lost in the sky →
What to do?—I’m lost in the sky →
What to do with the slaughter of the plains →
When a child first begins to smile →
When a sorcerer introduces →
When the goldfinch, in his airy confection →
Where am I? What’s wrong with me →
Where can I hide in this January →
Where’s the strangled, shackled cry →
Where the frogs of the fountains croaked →
With the skinny blade of a Gillette →
Yeast, precious, of the world →
You’re not alone. You haven’t died →
Your pupil, with its cortex like the heavens →
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