Ian Probstein
FROM THE BOOK
ENVISIONS
The author gratefully acknowledges that “The Poems on a Given Theme” and “Carnival” were published in Salonika, “A Parable” in International Poetry Review, “Dialogues” in Spring, the Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, “The People of the Book” and excerpts from the long poem “On the Ways of Job” in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, 1801-2001: Two Centuries of a Dual Identity, 2 vols. Maxim D. Shrayer, editor. Armonk, NY: M E Sharpe, 2007, vol., "A Family Portrait" and "A Talk Show" in Calliope, “Reptiles” and “Rodentia” in Clockwise Cat 21, and “Bestiary,” in a shorter and slightly different version, as well as “T.S. Eliot,” “Borges,” “ Word ,” and “To My Father” were first published in Vita Nuova, Roslyn, PA: REM Press, 1992.
The author is grateful to Mr. John Ashbery, Mr. Charles Bernstein, Mr. Michael Graves and Mr. Remington Murphy for insightful ideas, encouragement, and generous help.
Time
Flowers wither and bloom.
Even the snow is different each snowfall.
Seeing how frail are the flowers and snowflakes,
think about humans.
Fragile stems of carnations,
delicate souls of children
grow, ripen with strength,
and stiffen.
The stiff stems of the flowers break.
Petals of snow
and flakes of flowers
are falling down on earth
turning into Time.
Two Poems on a Given Theme
1. A Photogrammatic Poem
Down the slope of the Indicative Mood
slides our life,
indicating, mocking, showing itself —
the film is developed,
we stare at the negatives,
not quite recognizing ourselves,
realizing too late
that the verbs are already "Imperative."
Later we'll find ourselves
paging past "was," "lost," "acquired," "did not participate"
in the photo album of recollections.
Happiness would have been
so close to us in the future-in-the past,
Subjunctive.
2. A Study of Art
The full soul loatheth an honeycomb;
but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.
Proverbs, 27:7.
At first — a watercolor, a dim light:
the hay appeared and the tender grass showed itself,
then — all the turbulence of the midsummer's oil
when beating wildly in the fields,
everything formed ears:
the ear of rye, of wheat, and man,
breast, mind, and loin,
but the full soul loatheth an honeycomb
before the crop of sufferings is ripe,
and a scholastic evil is eager
to frame you in a picture, where
you won't escape your limits
unless you tear yourself out,
having realized that only rhythm
in which the image of eternity is alive
will give you strength and tempo to tame
intemperate passions, a temperament.
The pains of being are overcome
in spite of evil, the sufferings well-tempered —
that is the only profit of our losses:
not a framed picture, but a perspective
of our eye-the creator, soul's all-seeing eye,
a sleepless wanderer of the Universe.
Census
A secret universal census is in progress.
What is the native tongue
of the builders of the Tower of Babel?
What is the birth rate in Tyre?
the Death rate in Gomorrah?
the life span in Sodom?
Is there a righteous man?
The angels are flying,
doing a secret census
before it's time to reveal the results.
A Parable
"A one man show," said Cain,
as he multiplied seven by seven by seven.
Thus he walked, and multiplied
until he composed the multiplication table,
the system of measures and weights,
the periodic table of Mendeleyev,
discovered the theories of probability and relativity,
split the atom, executed tests at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
and at leisure remembered Abel and wrote memoirs.
He also wrote the Bible. At leisure.
To teach others a lesson.
The War
The being of human beings
is substantial: the trails
of civilization are all over the Earth.
The descendants of Tartars, Scythians,
Greeks, Romans, Huns, and other Crusaders
left footprints everywhere.
They battle still
for their ideals, shrines, and gods.
Can anyone tell me how long
will the Trojan war last?
The Angel of Peace
1.
A cloudless sky is hovering over Hiroshima,
and it is still calm, my friends, in Nagasaki,
but the Angel of Vengeance is again devising
his righteous wars in the name of Providence.
In the world where we are fighting for truth
with a brine of hatred on our lips,
there will be no love, no kiss,
no grass, no birds, nor even God in Heaven.
2.
The Angel of Peace is stiffen
with a begging hand
stretched to the world —
as always, he’s blind and invisible,
for only the Angel of Vengeance
with a punishing hand is invincible,
but the Angel of Peace as ever
comes to us only in dreams.
Life
The day is done,
the harm undone,
but the damage remains,
and the morning retaliates.
In the long run
life is
a long run.
The end and the beginning
The end is the point
where everything is clear
while a new beginning
is always confusing.
A Dead-End
I stand at my wits' end.
My fading faith is fainting
at the sight of carnal incarnation,
the multiplication of
the matrixes of atrocities,
of the black-mailing list of hate
alongside thoughtless jubilation.
Vanity Fair, they say?
Alas, Flea Market.
Laws of Physics
The friction
of eraser against paper
grows as palimpsest is being rewritten.
Inertia is overcome
with a stick
driving hens
from perch.
Gravitation
is overcome
by repulsion
or rather disgust.
Despair
Is when you do not dream of dreaming
Nor hope of hoping.
We can share our despair.
If we don't spare each other,
who will?
it's much more difficult to spare
than to kill.
In these days of disgrace,
show us some grace.
In the age of dissipation,
show us a dream of salvation.
Messiah
We are waiting for the Messiah
To crucify him.
Messiah has to be crucified,
otherwise he is not the Messiah.
Save Us Savior
Save us Savior
save our money
save our bread and caviar
save our honey
save our time
save our health
save our prime
save our heath
Save our Souls
save our psycho
Save us Savior
and recycle
Save Changes
Save changes
before closing
your eyes before
shutting down
your mind
before a break-down
before dawn
Self-Portrait in Brooklyn
Windows are open.
Villains are often
Noisy and bragging.
Widows and orphans
Bear the burden.
The poor are begging.
Life is so ragged,
Anguish and rage —
This is my age.
My brains are brown.
My mood is down.
My lungs are grey —
This is my day.
Night shadows come,
They chant and charm.
I do not weep,
I’d rather sleep —
Or drink some rum.
A Family Portrait
He was an expatriate patriarch,
an expelled pilgrim,
grave as a graveyard,
the essence of senselessness,
saltless mica salis;
she was his promising
and promiscuous land,
always standing behind
her man but showing
her back to others;
their daughter, topless
and partially headless,
had a very round bottom
and would stroll around
with her bottom up;
their promising son
was a pop-singer,
he was not exactly dumb,
but somehow lost his focus
on profit and loss
and would mess and toss
his left ring finger
with his right thumb;
otherwise they are rather decent
and more or less well off.
A Portrait of a Lady
She has an air
of someone who deserves more
than she gets from life,
always underpaid, throwing pearls,
dishes & wishes in the den
of crooks and liars.
Where have real men gone
in the age of feminization
and artificial fertilization?
That lovely little woman
was smiling in her sleep
snoring like a drunk sailor.
A Talk-Show
I saw you on TV the other night
I saw you in a dream the other night
I saw you in a nightmare I guess
I talked to you but you were on TV
I talked to you but you were in a dream
I talked to you in a nightmare perhaps
I talked to you but you never said a word
You talked a lot but never said a word
In that nightmare dream on the TV
You looked around but never looked at me
Then you turned back and turned away alas
Went back to business or perhaps to sleep
Or maybe to a party — who will know?
God knows what happened there to you and me
Since I turned off that nightmarish TV
Virtual reality
He sets his alarm clock at six am every day
and swallows his quick oats & runs
to be swallowed by the subway,
plunging diligently in bullshit
from 9 to 5, an hour for lunch,
devouring information ton by ton,
and trots home loaded like a mule
only to be swallowed by the world-wide web.
He makes virtual friends, virtually loves,
even drinks virtually to their health,
he became virtual himself, virtually lives,
but one day he will really die,
and his friends will say their virtual “Good-bye.”
Enormous World
In that enormous world,
unlimited and eternal
everything is turned into sold
by 21 century ltd., Sachs & Gold
man or some other infernal
power.
We urge you not to submerge
but to emerge and thaumaturge.
Dialogues
1.
—RSVP ASAP
— OK
Some time later:
—ALAS
—Excuse me?
— ALAS
— When?
— Two days ago.
— My condolences.
2.
—I have no more ribs to share
and no more time to spare
— eat that apple then
3.
— I can’t figure it out!
— You take this and move it there
then you take that and move it here.
You march and demarche,
chant and disenchant,
you decuple couples — that’s inevitable vitality;
you mimicry & cry,
you decry & you decree
any decrement of mobility;
you mobilize mob & demobilize demos
or vice versa
you mobilize GOP & utilize GOR & GDP and
you recruit NYPD and re-route GOPD —
united we stand!
Oh, say, can’t you see it’s as simple as that!
— I could have applauded
if I haven’t been appalled.
You’re a roosting chanticleer!
Give me a break through!
Give me another example,
some kind of a decurrent event.
— Everyone is someone else
and someone else is everyone.
Life is such a splendid mess:
up & down and down & up,
updown and downup,
sometimes more and sometimes less,
you define and defy,
you defray and defraud,
increase IQ & APR
you lost gain but gained loss.
— But that’s a fabulously ineffable fable!
You’re a demoniac maniac.
Don’t you have practical advice?
— Keep a low profile on a high-paying job.
Save a brainy day.
Stick to your own stick.
Stick to your own shit.
Join MLA or just MP
NJDL or just njg.
Act at your own indiscretion.
Advertisements
Please ex
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Miss
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Please
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we have
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Please don’t
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I have no More Ribs to Spare
I have no more ribs to spare.
i can barely sleep aware
of my homemade nightmare.
You’ve been my revelation
and inspiration
and exhilaration,
then probation
& exhortation
& consternation,
Now it all ended
in constipation.
We were allies, now alien.
The next stage is rebellion.
Give me a break through.
Favorite Holidays
A-Day
Ash Wednesday
Bank Day
Birth Day
Columbus Day
D-Day
Doomsday
E-Day
Election Day
Father’s day
Flag Day
Fool Day
Ground Hog Day
Good Friday
Halloween
H-bomb Day
Independence Day
Jackson Day
Jack Frost Day
Judgment Day
Kamemameha Day
K-Mart Day
Labor Day
May Day
M-Day
Mother’s Day
Memorial Day
New Year’s Eve
Open Day
Payday
Presidents Day
Queen’s Birthday
Ragtime
St. Patrick’s Day
Thanksgiving
Unbirthday
V-Day
Veteran’s Day
Wall Street Day
Waldbaum’s Day
Witch and Wizard Day
X-Mas
Yom Kippur
Yule
Zoo Day
Zoom Day
Carnival
1.
Carnalis — carnival, feast of flesh,
a narrow escape for the homely people, when
the soul, tired of the daily toil and of itself,
refutes its name and masks itself,
eliminating time for instant's sake:
king for a day, a crowned fool strolls,
Easter laughter rings through the town,
a guffaw walks streets and plazas,
pouring out a dance of stamps and roars,
the flesh of babies and elders wrinkles,
Punch's mask shrivels with laughter,
and Death himself laughs heartily,
observing his arena
where the head master is
a headsman butchering flesh, —
for flesh a scaffold and for spirit time,
while for the soul — laughter, tears, and carnival.
2.
What has kept you, soul,
on the edge of this world?
A wanderer, you have endured
a bit of life, a bite of life, and the stings of humans:
of those who were passionate
and of those who were compassionate,
of those who stole
and of those who brought the gifts
of plastic bombs wrapped
in colorful covers,
bright as Easter eggs,
but then you revived again, recovered
consciousness, recollected your name,
and named the nameless,
bringing it back from unbeing,
for nameless things belong to Heaven
and inanimate to God.
Therefore leaving the feast of lights
you, anima, come back
to your native bosom,
while the wind disperses ribbons and guises
along the pavement, raises the dust of confetti,
the timber that tomorrow we will use
to kindle recollections
at coffee-time or at lunch.
...The wedding gown is placed in the wardrobe
and will be exposed tomorrow
as a legend to a granddaughter
or donated to Salvation Army,
while the granddaughter with her groom
gazes politely at the pictures
in the family photo album.
3.
And here we go (the routine bells are
striking eight) through spring and fall,
through summer, winter, no-man's land we stroll
to where our eyes and business lead us all.
The eyes torture us, while spirit soothes pain,
yet spirit suffers — the eyes are never satisfied,
like Abbadon, are always lusting for novelty,
the soul is tossing between the two worlds as if two voids,
yet, cut off all that tempts, toss them away
and pass them by, you still will realize:
your soul is never satisfied, it is a burden on your back
as long as it's alive: only celestial Heaven is light.
BESTIARY
1. Mole
Forcing the way to the light
all your life,
you will rebound,
zealous, weak-sighted mole,
from the dazzle of freedom
and begin to convince yourself
that being addicted to light
you’ll neither distinguish
weird relics
in memory’s dusk
nor penetrate with your sight
into the soul of the elements,
of substances, center of waters --
into the soul of Earth,
into the core of Truth.
Why should you care
for this vain secular light?
2. Ostrich
...Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
but merely vans to beat the air.
T. S. Eliot
Camel-bird, hide your head beneath your wing:
Your callous paws tread earth in despair.
Staring at the inaccessible orb, unapproachable sky,
wearing out your trampling life,
you’ll entrust your children to the Sun and Fate,
hoping your descendants,
or descendants of descendants
will overcome
their winglessness,
or shake off the burden
of meaningless wings.
3. Hypnale
The gentlest guide to momentary death
whose scaly cord will coil you in embrace:
he nestles in, while, taking your last breath,
you dazzle the worldstage with grace.
When your triumphant sun turns dark,
you’ll call your slave — a dexterous hypnale,
and having signed the book of fate — your final mark,
enjoy your blissful sleep: this poison doesn’t fail.
Why should their giggles mix with mortal cries?
Let the astonished mob just gape and stare
at your unfurrowed brow — and Cleopatra tries
to press the snake with hope, and love, and care.
4. Salamander
You'll quench the fire
and poison the water,
you give people
your virulent venom —
let them shudder,
looking at salamander:
she purifies her skin
in fire.
5. Siren
Praising life in rhapsody,
A siren’s singing in my brain.
She calls, “Come on, my boy, and reign.”
She shows her charm, seductively.
She screws her greenish eye, she’s cunning.
She calls, “Hold on, my boy, a storm is coming.
I’ll cleave to you amidst the waves and rocks.”
Ha! What a tempest: foamy flocks
in the dirty beer-mug of existence.
Poor, she weeps and keeps her distance.
6. A Frog
I'll call the rain
and kill a frog,
I'll burn a frog's skin,
I'll burn and destroy
the bridges behind.
I'll kill that slippery creature
and burn my own skin.
7. Swallow
As if scissoring a hole in the sky,
come to us, a herald of spring,
cut an air-way into the blue!
If we could try
to be like you,
bird of heaven, if we knew our time...
You labor day by day,
not sparing your wings,
and build the nest on the roof of our world.
Foreseeing a disaster, you try
to warn the humans
and share with them your visions.
Drawing the signs,
you circle the air over your nest,
over a serene world, as if cutting the threads
with you forked, scissors-shaped tail
and cry over the wingless humans
and fly, leaving a doomed house.
8. A Cinnamon-bird
Why do you build a fragrant house
from a cinnamon-tree, a weird bird?
Is subtlety an extravagance or a duty?
Your pride in your bronze-colored nest
will not last long, alas:
your dreams will be ground into powder,
ruined cinnamolg nests will become
symbols of vanity.
9. Halcyon *
When a midwinter warm breeze blows
and rough icy seas are tamed still,
the mind is still skeptic, but the time
is waiting for king-fisher's off-spring.
A hallucinating halcyon dreams of the spring,
seven days of creation, hope of wonder:
as if built from nowhere to never,
a fragile bridge aims at the future.
Seven more days among the warmer stars,
and a living word will break an egg-shell soon;
then you'll suffer and bite your tail again,
dreaming of an unfaithful thaw.
________
* In the medieval Bestiary from the St. Petersburg Public Library,
a medallion shows a halcyon biting its tail.
10. Scarab
Crawling in the manure,
a charmed scarab
drags a precious load on its back.
Humans discerned the Sun's imprint on it,
and having wiped the dung away,
transformed the beetle into an amulet.
What does he see
who looks on us from his height?
11. Reptiles
— What do you know about reptiles, Elizabeth?
Take, for instance, lizards.
They are cold-blooded and seek sunshine,
just like you are craving for fame, Lizzie.
And don’t they cast off their tails when in danger?
Remember, how you cast away your high-heeled shoes
when you ran after that handsome ranger?
What’s the matter, Lizzie?
Are you cold?
— I would have applauded
if I hadn’t been appalled.
12 Household Mice
Mice dart in the kitchen,
picking crumbs
of bread and cheese
and dragging them
into their holes.
Mice have a bite
taste a bit of a crumb,
and make their judgment
of the whole crop.
Tomorrow again
I'll throw them
some crumbs
by which they will judge
the world.
13. Rodentia. Gnawers
Squeaking rats
with the bloodshot eyes of maniacs
rave, fly into rage,
gnaw the walls, devour the papers,
crack pillars, and crush the grounds of science.
The rats don’t give a damn
about the present’s venom. Time is
to throw the stones we haven’t gathered.
Legions of sly,
malicious harvest mice
trot fields,
devastating the stores of the past.
It’s time we ploughed again.
14. Dolphin
I dreamed I was a dolphin.
Humans wanted
to teach me their language
with the help of electric shock.
I understood,
I understood it all.
No, I was not mad
at them: I was just sad...
But oh, again — electric shock.
15 . Saura Lizard
Hermit and liberated slave,
wherever you go, you are doomed
to stay in the incandescent desert:
getting used to desolation
and everlasting thirst, you’ll have
to struggle for life.
Having fed on bitter herbs and wormwood,
keep in your veins a poor moisture of words.
You are doomed to gaze
at the sun's blaze,
blinding, at the end - you’ll creep,
senescent, to the East
upon the darkening Earth,
having fixed your sightless eye-balls on the rising light,
you’ll stare without a blink at obscure fire
in a desperate hope of recovering your sight,
lizard, you'll believe in vision...
A Vision I
A sharp eyesight is like
a dagger cutting horizon,
and the treasures of the earth
are filling your body like poison.
A keen perception is
a suicide’s knife:
you’re shivering either from thirst
or are just agonizing.
A deep exultation is
taking a deep breath,
then a short exhalation: “Oh, God!”
God is revealed perhaps
or maybe you’re seized by fright
that beauty will blind
or you can’t endure delight,
and void is dazzling your sight.
The First New York Elegy
Uniqueness of an ever-changing life:
a liner fleetly cuts the Hudson River,
and a yacht disappears like a bird
piercing the haze with resilient wings.
Uniqueness of a mutable life —
“Is that how it looks like?”
you scream like a dimwit, recovering senses
after it has vanished without leaving stitches
on the horizon, like an old wound, and you
are ready for new ones.
Heat rings. The day swells.
Yells of salesmen rip the air, their hands
tempt the world with goods and odds,
and a protean world resounds.
The second New York Elegy
The Hudson buzzes like a double-bass.
A sultry afternoon faints.
The dough of being grows and thickens.
The hum of a swelled sky
is scattered around the park.
The strings ring and fade.
The sky is breathless
over the mirroring river.
If the sun could wipe out
the sweat from the mirrors
by the essence of sense
and reveal the depth of the sky,
the world would shine again,
and every instant would revive.
The Third New York Elegy
A leaden river is mantled in mist,
a long rain is falling askew,
a filthy fog covers the island like film
disguising the skyscrapers and the sky,
hanging over our heads;
only furious blades of grass
are fighting against the dull gray
trying to tear the disguise
and cure the skies and the eyes
blurred by a filthy film, which blinds
like nyctalopia, and you, my dear,
pulling down the leaden blinds
of this dank day, will hear
the jingling of the leaves of grass
beating against the edge of being,
and the splinters of chime
will drift on the Hudson like sails;
seeing that the lushness of verdure is back,
your soul will rejoice,
and you will recover your sight.
Aspiration
Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers...
T.S. Eliot
Soaring, the soul, aspires blindly
to vision, revelation and surrender:
the only sensible trace
might be the rapture of the aorta.
Until the soul is frozen into stone,
“the soul’s sap quivers
between melting and freezing.”
And you are longing to disgorge a word
out of your hoarse and wounded throat,
and, having hurt your gorge,
you spew an ugly thing.
Of all the stiff things in the world
the most intractable, the word;
that is why it may reach to Eternity,
tearing the veil of Time and Being
adorned by tiny golden stitches of instants
and – by stars...
II Tributes
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Each time denying himself,
he sailed up to different shores
in order to never return.
He left “the lost” searching for sense;
non-believer, he came up to faith denying agnosticism.
He was longing for the beginning,
yearned for the first gates
into the world without passions
where Love is free from desire;
and finally reached the third stair.
Destroyer, he constructed a high harmonious building
of the haven of spirit and until his death
kept silence for two decades,
scared, perhaps,
of himself, preserving
the high harmonious temple...
Homage to Ezra Pound
Kai Moirai’ Adonin
Make it new, but make it few
Lines like “an apparition of the faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.”
You were great and I was born too late
to show you how to fuse my East-
uary with your West, my zest.
PLEASING THE CARTHAGENIANS: PUSHKIN
Your crystal ball after your fall
Into the pitfall of fascism
Still shines, and love survives
Though gone as lightning
Enduring your blackout.
Amazing maze! Going crazy
But keeping Ubi Amor Ubi Oculus est
In haze and still keeping time
Rhyming light with love and hatred
In a knot of Paideuma,
a revelation and a blunder,
Knowing less than drugged beasts.
You claimed your paradise on earth,
if not under,
following your hero, Odysseus,
you are one but asunder,
following your gods and lights that drift out with the tide,
The sea’s claw draws the lamps outward.
Tamuz! Tamuz!
Falleth,
Adonis falleth.
Will your gods return?
Jorge Luis Borges
All his life he’s been dreaming,
having seen in his dreams
the other history of the world,
striving to change the universe,
to re-create this world created
by an awkward student’s hand.
The forking paths were circling around him.
He contemplated the circular ruins, the universe
whose center is everywhere, the rim – nowhere...
Books. Hundreds. Thousands of thousands.
Forcing his way through the depths of Babylonian libraries,
a studious blinding mole,
he was losing illusions along with sight,
but he wasn’t embarrassed by that:
the blinder he grew,
the sharper he saw,
parsing the black and the white
into hundreds of shades.
As into the pictographs
on a red leopard’s skin
he was scanning his dreams,
writing and re-writing them,
transforming the world with a metaphor,
and, having lost count of his years,
lived scores of lives.
The forking paths were circling around him.
He’s been writing the same book of visions,
but he woke up once
and died.
Lives
One smashed her car against the wall,
her silver bell jar against God’s will
achieving her long-cherished dream
and leaving two unloved young boys.
The other has arranged it all,
put her manuscripts in order
before donating them;
trying to shape her afterlife, she
made her daughter her trustee
and made her understand
that life and love had gone.
Then she committed suicide
in the most civilized way.
The third was scared of senility,
decrepit age, when neither mind
nor body would obey,
so she decided to outwit her fate
and plunged into the river
desiring to be dissolved in nature.
The fourth knew love and death from birth.
She “saw a great darkness coming”
and died unknown, or rather was “called back,”
and endured all, even being
misprinted and misread
for more than half a century after her death.
Death no more or no less?
Manuscripts do not burn.
They outlive it all,
even suicide.
III. The Answer of the Tongue
WORD
The weapon
which I forged and sharpened
has never ever saved anybody
the sharper and stricter it is
the more mercilessly it bites
boomerang
cuts chimerical air
and strikes the ghosts
under the sky
of desperate prophecy
Is there a shield
to shield myself
from myself?
Utter or Mutter a Word
Utter or mutter a word,
put it in for those at the gate,
it won’t absolve their sins
nor your own misdeeds that await,
and the gatekeeper will take you all wrong
if he ever gets through,
but a word after word is gone
into a thin air though.
I doubt that meek angels will hear
or bless me, but who will here
do this hopeless task
instead of me, may I ask?
The Ultimate Verge
There's only a flash of quiet
and a flash of light
on the bound of despair,
on the ultimate verge, for that
tomorrow I'll get
only thorns, burdens, chains,
a drab tattered dress and a wanderer's staff,
greeted by hobgoblins and owls,
but I also get my reward
in this wide open world
where bringing delight
darkness turns into light.
A Fatal Arch
For N. K.
A fatal arch, a curve
of the eyebrows,
a bend of the bowstring:
Will art or archness
Flow from it?
…A kingdom for a glance!
Envy, a spent arrow’s gone,
so is rage.
My soul strives on the verge
between the two voids —
what will you meet, my soul,
the light or gloom?
Eclipse
For the eclipse to be
the sun must shine first.
One learns what life is
having known death.
The rings spread round a tree-cut
under the rind of life;
only a glance behind “I”
gives me strength to survive.
There, behind the edge
of fire and the verge of dark,
I dissolve in “not-I”
and give birth to “We,”
and we get to know the dark,
which brings the light to the world,
when the apple of an eye gets dumb
and the tongue fails;
and we get to know the light,
which brings the dark to the world
and hides in the heaven the answer
inconceivable to the mind.
Vacillation
My shaky being swells,
a bridge links the two worlds,
and a deep moat
gapes between.
Only a glance above
and beyond either side of the world
gives me strength to survive,
dazzling my sight.
Having recoiled from
both the heaven and void,
one can go ahead
and embrace life.
Dungeon Man
Why do you lie idly on a couch of lies —
do you really love a copy of substance?
If you could only imagine the treasure of essence
gleaming in the wakeful womb of the Earth,
but you'll never see or enjoy the wisdom of love,
a language of petals — beauty
of the opening flowers and of worlds
being mysteriously born in the depths!
What will you, a stepson of truth, hear or find
in the dead-end dungeons, in the caves of your mind?
A snake of false knowledge that seems to delight
twists on your blue bloodless lips.
Starving and growing cruel, you will
gnaw at your own heart, poor prey,
to show the triumph of death
as a proof of your theory of death and decay.
The Answer of the Tongue
Where to start?
Everything cracks and shakes,
The air is trembling with similes,
No word is better than the other.
Mandelstam
The preparations of heart in man,
and the answer of the tongue, is from the Lord.
Proverbs, 16:1
I.
When the years have gnawed your guts,
it seems there's no difference where to start:
from cold cuts
or from a cold shower of Ecclesiastes,
or perhaps, from a cup of hot coffee
and a newspaper thrown on your porch,
like a foundling, waiting patiently on your stairs.
So we begin, though
where to start when
it's time, my friend, it's time
you looked for a shirt, a tie,
and a smile in the closet (envious of Cheshire Cat):
let's start our fight with a smile,
let's talk, my soul, to each other
as a star to a star.
And then we'll start:
half a pump, a shift of the gear —
oh, my sorrow, let's plunge in there
where you can fish nothing
but watch only the circles of indifference
widening on the waters of being
and carrying trifles linked to each other.
II.
At dawn, a warm membrane
of a homely womb breaks,
and we enter a blinding world
before the eyes get used to light:
there homo homini is a partner
caring for his own profit,
and a man to a state is a tax-payer
(or a crooked sponge);
there the art of eloquence reigns —
more spoken, less said.
Can I quench my thirst
with a ginger ale of common places,
with a puppyish exaltation of communication
at the dull parties when
my inner man hears how
"deep calleth unto deep
at the noise of Thy waterspouts?"
For "the Fear of the Lord is to hate evil:
pride and arrogancy," but we
fear the Fear, we hate loneliness,
we're uncomfortable in the shells
of our inner selves
leaving them for the sake
of the warmth of your best fiend and close foe,
parting with the soul as if with a wife,
"I won't be long, dear," —
not going too far though,
for we fear the look of closeness,
the dusk of the other's soul —
is it ripe or raped?
A scum of experience clutters our veins
and mantles our souls;
wishes burn to ashes,
mirrors of evil and good filmed by filth,
become crooked:
a friend turns into a fiend,
dignity into vanity;
scared to lose self in a fit of self-denial
you fear to find treason instead of a treasure,
a grave instead of a grove,
dead hopes in the soul of the other.
And not daring to dare,
cutting the self from the others,
and the others from self,
one denounces the world
though continues to stroll its pavements
wrapped in a coat of doubts,
because equally frightful is
a naked abyss and a yawning peak,
an instinct forces you to look for a solid soil
where chill and warmth take turns
and darkness turns into light.
III.
You may also leave by staying where you are:
by discovering a brave new and furious world
with the help of a remote control:
you can browse Martian channels
of this spacious small world
when the knowledge that someone
lives much worse than you do consoles you,
or — take a drug of violence
to escape the boredom of life
and find an excuse for your own worthlessness.
You may also laugh heartily,
guffaw with a taste of a soap opera in your mouth —
laugh your bitter laughter;
or look for the experts of temptation,
for some artful seductress
hooking men with honeyed words,
the wine of love changed
into the vinegar of lust:
"with her much fair speech
she caused him to yield,
with the flattering of her lips
she forced him," as king Solomon said, a sage,
who knew it from his own experience,
and burned his festering sins, like sores,
by the Fear of God.
TV-cameras stand
"in the top of high places,
by the way in the places of the paths
to call those who walk in their uprightness."
They call to plough the fields of lust
among exhausted mirrors:
frigid lecherous dummy
with the eyes of a Barbie,
and a bust blooming with lust,
breasts that will feed neither Romulus nor Remus,
seduces a bullish superman.
Then, following the laws
of reflection and repulsion,
the war of sexes breaks out
in the mirrored world,
because homo homini is a partner:
both are anxious of their own profit
and an extra piece of a pie,
"but he knoweth not that the dead are there,
the guests in the depths of hell."
IV.
"Wisdom was brought forth when there were no depths."
"When He prepared the heavens, I was there...
Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him:
and I was daily His delight,
rejoicing always before Him, rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth;
and my delights were with the sons of men."
A son of a man asked another son of a man,
"What is truth? For I have my truth,
and you have yours, and each of us
has an interest of his own,
so everything is relative
in this world of relativity."
Then they started readings, misreadings,
a wide range of wild resonant words:
everyone listened to each other,
keeping his own truth in the pocket,
ready to cock a snook at his neighbor;
tired of disagreeing discussions,
they decided to measure the truth
by the height of the buildings
and by the standing of the stock markets;
they praised the Lord in the words like a "landlord,"
turned their temples into steam-baths
to wash their sins off;
getting fat from donations,
priests sold their blessings
wholesale and retail;
to ensure their own well-being,
they put other prophets in deep wells
and stop the flood of threatening prophecies.
They respected wasps more than bees;
those who did not gather honey
span a web of entertainment
to catch ripe souls, children of boredom;
for their less fortunate children they arranged
food stamps of encouragement,
a stale bread of consolation
or a prison ration of punishment
and the grace of absolution
when a sinner sick with a terminal disease
starts to confess, stuttering in confusion —
humble folk having no place to retreat
imagines time as the Birnam Wood,
life as a dead-end or
a precipice's edge, jaws of the abyss,
scared to go forward and meet
the Wood marching on them.
Carrying a soul away,
a boat of being
is whirled in a merciless vortex.
For, as Solomon said,
"The fining pot is for silver,
and the furnace for gold:
but the Lord trieth the hearts."
V.
A bird sings because it can't help singing,
but a poem is not just a nightingale's warble,
a poet is not a black grouse at a mating-place
thrilled by his own trill.
When you hear something
you cannot translate
to any of your thousand tongues,
you'll accuse them of lying
and start cutting them off one by one:
the tongue of sweet euphony,
the tongue of wild metaphors,
the tongue of abstractions that elevate souls —
neither of them has known
a bloody sweat of toil,
a salty taste of the soil;
you will also cut off
a jargon and a saucy slang
of streets, squares, and subways
for their rudeness and crudeness;
and finally comes the turn of the tongue
of threatening prophecies
when a naked truth scares
like a child dying from starvation in the ghetto...
you'll regain consciousness
and find yourself amidst a bloody mess
as insane Hercules after slaughtering his children,
and a deadly silence
that was before the Creation
will surround you.
Only then, if God hears you
and gives you the answer of the tongue,
you'll start, like Adam, naming
the world already unknown to you
and will know where to start.
To My Father
…And right above me is my star,
my glowing star, his dazzling fire
blazes over barbed wire,
he breathes in infernal smoke,
dying and again reviving.
Yes, right above me is my star:
He is neither yellow nor blue nor red:
the colors of existence are
all mingled in one as if His head
was touched by snow
that turned Him gray.
The People of the Book
The last unbreakable inch, the last patch
of the land promised as blessing and as bliss,
not El Dorado, not the Wonderland,
but the Wilderness, where a chilling voice is heard,
and stone is heavy, and sand is weighty,
and a bush burned without being consumed,
here God made his covenant with Abraham
and granted twice his Testimonies to the people;
they finally convinced the other nations that
this strip of land was sacred and loved by God,
and they were driven out to clear the space
for others to stand closer to God;
they were dispersed, and left with their Book
and lived in it and were bound in it.
Diaspora
The readers like
the life-lovers
whose sister is life,
yet feverish lips
would murmur of famine,
of disaster and plague.
The tyrants like
to be consoled – not by a slave,
by a voltaire –
so, let them celebrate
this feast of life
until a hoarse cry
cuts the air
and strikes them with the whip of fate.
So, Jeremiah,
in triumphant prophecy,
take your revenge
over the mob...
But he cried
and tore his robes, while
the others were dragged
into exile.
On the Ways of Job
1.
Bless us with the breath of autumn
but leave a gap of blue sky,
make a hole in this misty cover
this veil too dense for my hapless eye
to reach beyond it for light.
If the light that's in Thee
grows dark, then what's the darkness
within us, who are unable to tell
dawn from dusk or day from night?
We see but a dim reflection, a spark
that dies in the heart of this darkness.
Whom shall we tell that we are
dissembled and scattered
like bones in the valley of Josapath,
waiting for Messiah as for a falling star,
waiting to be reborn and revived
on the Mount of Olives or on every hill,
by the Golden Gate and by any gate —
how long shall we wait until
God reawakens within us?
2.
"Blessed be Thy name,
Light, the source of light,
the Almighty, divine,
inconceivable and nameless,
endless and fathomless,
King of the Universe, the only Lord.
I entrust my soul
every day and every night
into Thy hands that have kindled
light and life in me
and granted my soul to me."
That was how they were praying,
reading the Shema,
reading the Kaddish,
in Treblinka, Dachau, and Auschwitz
waiting, like Job, for an answer and for death.
And God saved them from pain.
3.
They lit Yitzkor candles,
They lit Yahrzeit candles.
They prayed and remembered
Six million of Abels.
Yahrzeit candles flicker,
Yitzkor candles flicker,
while a restless Cain
roams the world in vain.
Sacrifice is sacred,
but Cain is not forgotten.
Sacrifice is a heavy load,
our eternal burden,
sacrifice is our hecatomb,
while Cain fights for the truth
with a nuclear bomb.
Yahrzeit candles flicker,
Yitzkor candles flicker,
while every Cain is reading
Kaddish for his Abel.
4.
Should we stay only
A lesson for the posterity
on what scales should we weigh
the death of an innocent baby?
Are we traceless like wind?
Are we passing like birds?
What if this life in a dim
light is but a dream?
Is my fate to become
just a mark on the page?
Mighty roots of the trees
are breaking the tombs asunder,
that's how I mark where I wander.
Is my fate but a dream?
Is the crematorium chimney, through which
Korczak and his children escaped,
the only way out of pain?
Here's your gift of life, take it back!
5.
Job called in affliction
and begged his friends to show pity:
"If you would comfort me
or just could hold your peace,
but judgement and justice take hold on you,
and you are forgers of lies
for the righteous is robbed,
and the wealth of robbers is secure;
God brings abundantly into their hands;
And the light in their tabernacles never dies.
Why Thou condemn me?
Thy archers compass me around,
and on my eyelids is the shadow of death:
am I not just clay before Thee?
Thou art higher than Heaven and stars.
Man that is born of a woman
is of few days and full of trouble;
no one is born clean.
Can a man measure the weight of wind?
Man setteth an end to darkness
and searches out for perfection:
the stones of darkness and the shadow of death.
But where shall wisdom be found?
And where is the place of understanding?
The depth says, "It is not in me,"
And the sea says, "It is not with me."
It cannot be gotten for gold,
The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it.
Only Thy thunder
Can break the earth and Heaven asunder.
Thou pour contempt upon princes,
and overthrow the mighty,
remove away the speech of the trusty,
and take away the wisdom of the aged.
Only Thou have an almighty eye:
Thou discover deep things out of darkness
And bring out to life the shadow of death.
Thou multiply the nations
and destroy the nations,
Thou enlarge the nations
and straighten them again.
Thou take away the heart
of the chief people of the earth
and cause them to wander
in a wilderness where there is no way:
they grope in the dark without light
and stagger around like a drunken man,
but I desire not the night
when people are cut off in their place.
Behold now, I have ordered my cause;
I know that I shall be justified.
Withdraw thine hand far from me:
and let not thy dread make me afraid.
Then call Thou, and I will answer:
or let me speak,
and answer Thou me."
6.
You talk of your merits
But it's not too hard for the rich
to be righteous and virtuous
giving a crumb of your wealth
to the poor, to widows and orphans,
but what is it without love?
Can your faith fight in distress
against doubts on the eve of millennium?
There is no rebirth without death,
nor timelessness without time,
and the people will be back in their place
and arise in due time from oblivion:
without love there is no rebirth.
Thoughts About Oblivion
On a visit to Brighton Beach Home for Senior Citizens
1.
They started to forget what happened yesterday, last year,
enjoying the sun like children or
like those who are destined to start
on a new voyage — in this very life,
preparing for a new beginning and another death.
Sitting at the beach in wheelchairs, they
peacefully drink oblivion of the Lethean waters
of the Atlantic: sharing only the memory
of their own bodies,
a handful of words, particles of the language,
fragments of dreams in remembrance of a flight,
some almost unsolderable links of the chain
of earthly being in which they understand
best what the birds tweet,
yet in dreams they still see this life.
2.
God grants us grace and mercy
stripping us of memory,
erasing the boundaries between life and unbeing,
that is why, perhaps, the soul might be
so reluctant in the morning to come back
into this world — a wanderer
looks at it wondering or puzzled.
But that first exile remembered all,
in the sweat of his face eating his bread,
courageously caring for his wife,
he gave his labors, days, his blood and sweat,
his life and death to her.
He called her Life.
He cultivated his own garden
though it was only a poor copy of Eden.
Yet he was lucky
not to foresee the future — otherwise
how could he have endured his burden,
remembering all and knowing
that he was doomed to share
the curse of Cain, living in his descendants?
What fate might he have had —
the killing of his own son or
living marked by the sign of fratricide?
3.
It was a blessing that having known good and evil,
they hadn't eaten from the tree of Life,
otherwise nothing would have been forbidden
to them who had been taken from the dust —
from age to age indifference might have grown
in their souls lacking the gifts: creative power,
the gifts of passion and compassion, and of joy,
the blessing of sleep, oblivion, and death,
the crown matching our frailty —
or else the Creator wouldn't have known
the ways of His creations.
Do not turn back
I.
Go on, do not look back
at the stones of the Tower.
Listen not: ears are still filled with
God’s unending thunder.
He has divided us so that the mire
rising against the heaven wouldn’t ascend
at the sound of the Trumpet. Yet
He did not let
us forget that yesterday and
the flames of the hundreds of tongues aspire.
Hold your torch tight.
Go on and don't look back!
The blind are blest :
the bards of fate
or Beauty. Is beauty granted to us
as salvation or merely as consolation,
a reward for studious zealots?
What wealth has it brought to you,
warriors of Achaia?
The site after fire
crowns the question mark.
Forking in tongues, the flame still blazes,
concealing the sacred,
ineffable mystery from us.
A stranger, dumb and deaf, still gazes.
So go ahead
and don’t turn back!
The blessing and the curse of God,
our tongue, is split,
distorted into tiny splinters,
for the Tiger and the Lamb redundant
or, as Dante said, for angels —
it’s blind men’s tentacles
in wilderness and void.
So, go ahead
and never turn your back!
II.
A child sits on the sand,
and sand is streaming in his sand-glass;
a myriad of splinters in his hand,
an hourglass in the other, and
it’s long before the midnight stars.
He plays his tricky game with time:
there’s plenty of it still far ahead;
space doesn’t burden him yet,
by his own frailty he's not upset;
so go ahead and don’t turn back.
He draws a circle on the sand,
trying to shape a quadrangle in it;
he would be happy to invent
a round quadrangle in the end.
...The splinters twinkle in his hand.
Time has been driven by centuries,
he still believes he’s born for joy,
the splinters are his favorite toy,
a nail is another toy of his,
and soon he’ll play with the Crucifix.
It
Desperate to seize the day,
we're peeping into the future,
secretly stealing the present from ourselves
in the name of life or just well-being so that
everything is not worse than in our neighbors' houses.
The fumes of momentariness are thrown
out from the exhaust pipe, while you drive
amidst the mirages, leaving them behind.
So would you demand common people
cease being common? if only the chosen
can elevate themselves by acquiring vision,
can you despise the others then? or scorn yourself
if your day has been lived out and wasted
not in the way your mind imagined it at dawn?
A powerless hour lacking friction
is trembling in the air, weightless,
unable to gain weight or power
to overcome the Earth's gravitation.
You dream on winter evenings, longing
for snowdrops, lily-of-the-valleys, strawberry fields,
you thirst for snow in summer:
last year's snow was good,
but then you were constructing
your crystal castles, but huge things
did not withstand the fiery sun,
and now you roam in an unearthly desert,
dreaming of an earthly human hearth,
but could you not at least destroy,
nor deconstruct what homely people build?
Could you go along this way again,
with all your present knowledge:
all by yourself, using your own power,
enduring the gravitation, since now you know
that no one has to share your ordeals?
You have no right to lead astray the others,
you'll have to pay for that yourself or even worse:
you'll make the innocent pay for all your deeds.
2.
The word roams between the two worlds,
reflects their light and dark,
but the matter is unfathomable,
obscure like water in the clouds.
Before the word is deeply rooted in the soil, it lives without flesh, weeps without soul, speaks without tongue, laughs without joy, and nobody sees it.
At first a ghost, a splinter, a fragment, an echo,
making its nest in consciousness a while:
it laughs with a mocking-bird, echoes with
a cuckoo-bird, at night it weeps with an owl,
it lives in you and takes away your sleep
and makes you slumber in the real life; it steals
your reflection, shadow, robs you from yourself;
drop by drop, it drinks your blood every day,
little by little, replacing it
with the strongest poison — you never notice how,
but then your friends can't recognize you
and you pass them by, unnoticed.
Yet you are getting to know yourself better and better:
being unable to illuminate the others,
it's exploring the depths of your soul
with a sonic depth-finder, and therefore
each step of you gives birth
to a many-voiced, resonant wilderness:
rumble, roar, hum, laughter, whisper, weeping,
but look around — you are alone, my friend.
You'll bring again your mirages to people,
already in a humble way, not pretending
to change their world, extend it nor turn it upside down,
nor even trying to reveal them in your word.
3.
How clear was the first day: the dark was spotless
over the void; there were no eclipses —
heavenly bodies, luminaries, were shining,
reflecting the Word by which they were named
and brought to life; the firmament was firm,
the verdure green, when the unclouded dawn
was rising and dividing dark from light.
We are wandering in the twilight,
yet once you saw it in your dream, so
why complain that only echo, shades, and shapes,
ghosts, fragments, and splinters are left
from your visions: you have to verify
the picture of a somber space to them,
so, carry on your torch and don't look back.
The Peak
Dense signs tremble in the air,
the lens of the skies is focused on this world,
its rays burn your melting guts.
Enchanted, you go along the ray
and gradually lose your will:
condensed into the crystals of symbols
and lined up in a row of images,
words seize you and lead
to the edge of the precipice.
Icy fences around a bottomless abyss
leave you no chance of retreat.
Before you reach the edge,
you lose your warmth, but icy rocks
having consumed your body's warmth,
start melting at last:
the air is soaked in melting ice,
snow monsters shrink and rush
in glassy streams into a resonant pit.
The world is changing its shroud.
...You shake off your stale coarse skin
and run on light-footed,
regaining sight, hearing, perception,
psyche aspires into the domain of sapphires,
elevated, she runs ahead of you
and, having pierced a gray curtain,
reaches a greenish hillside
with the streams of crystalline bells
running along it.
Looking back at footsteps,
you notice the fountains of snowdrops
running out of green holes.
If you only had enough breath
not to suffocate in the downpour of light.
The art of running
is the art of breathing
and — that of listening to Fate.
Heart's impatience may lead
to explosions, to the rapture of aorta.
If you could avoid going blind
looking at the constellations' radiant dances
in the starry void!
If you could help hovering blindly:
self-denial often leads
to the denial of others;
blind fascination of others
makes you fall into the pit.
If you could stop in time
or you'd pierce icy fences
and fall down without
seeing the Peak:
the flabby, soft sky of this season
won't hold you.
The sun on its pinnacle
has melted frozen eternity,
leaving a landmark of spring snowdrops.
Heaven's starry map is lighted.
Path winds along the edge
of day and darkness.
On the verge between heaven and void
I follow a twinkling ray,
feeling with every step my skin
getting thinner and thinner...
IV Midnight Elegies
On the Edge of Midnight
On the edge of midnight a mystery trembles:
a mysterious quivering becomes clearer,
more vivid, distinct, acquires flesh and form
of sounds, images, words:
wild, awaken sounds,
suns of words burn in the night,
fill you, and you follow them,
but with the power of your will
you condense them into the crystals,
constellations of verses,
as the history of the Earth
was condensed into the crystals of millennia —
one can observe this in the open cuts
of mountains and minerals,
as the night is condensed in the nocturnes of Chopin,
while a creator, having been a slave of Time,
now becomes eternity's ambassador,
reigns in the night,
governs the moment,
look: the essence of sense
blooms in the Star of creation.
At dawn,
with eyes burnt out by knowledge,
an artist tries to find his way
from the inner side of life
to the main road,
and the world astonishes him,
and he amazes the world.
The Return
Things decay, are covered with dust,
disintegrate into powder,
while you live (eternally, it seems at times),
each time you are the other one, surrounded by others,
not always admitting that in familiar forms
new persons are hidden, whom
you didn't meet before;
yet once in the streams of a winter sun
on a slippery blinding snow track
or in a murky corner,
drinking Pepsi or coffee far from the capital-city,
you discover that those talking with you
are not talking with you, but with some sort of a dude,
almost an impostor, that lived you right out
of your shell, adopted your name,
even took up your habits,
and then you suddenly met
in one and the same fate,
and walking away from others unnoticed,
you come to your previous dilapidated home,
where a web of cracks have spread across the walls,
or it might be the tentacle
of an odd octopus, that
is punishing you for having left this place
by ruining an abandoned home;
it steadily and even so, visibly
wipes away the traces of your being here,
following you, crossing out
your previous lives;
and being unable to understand
whether the changes in you are good or evil,
you stand silently, as if
you were burying someone, and
tomorrow the mirror will multiply your reflection,
and you notice how the lines have sharpened...
From that point you'll begin
to notice changes in many people you knew,
inside and out, and the mystery that
in their shells others settled long ago
fills you with worry:
are you really surrounded by phoenixes
and one day there will be no strength
to come back after
burning yourself for the last time?!..
Even so, it's sad, when castles crumble
(which was, inarguably, your childhood home),
and even the homes whose walls
you didn't manage to strengthen,
to put up ramparts or dig moats.
Construction each year
gets tougher,
and the bricks get heavier
every time you come back.
The Wall
The wall of my bedroom fronts my sleepless nights.
I crush my forehead and heart against it,
yet a web of cracks spread all over it:
I'm waiting when the light breaks through the cracks,
but I hear only the howling of the venomous voices of chimeras —
a chimerical laughter of hyenas is more real than reality,
the past grasped out of oblivion
by the magic lantern of memory,
acquires shape, flesh, voice, movement;
I can no longer change anything —
neither insert some successful scenes
nor cut out any stupid ones.
What we have outlived belongs to us no more
than a book taken from a bookshelf and opened at random
or a movie shot by someone else.
Night is the time of burning down the regrets.
In the morning, I shake the ashes from my bed
and hurry to pay the tribute
to my present expectations.
Our construction site is the Universe
built by constructing ourselves,
but every word, glance, every touch of hands,
every embrace or a furious gesture
is embodied once and forever,
no drafts allowed;
having realized this, I stiffen in despair
at the imperfection of creation,
I stiffen in silence
lest I bring more chaos into being.
We would stand in such a manner,
stiff and dumb, unable to take a step
to each other, until suddenly
a sparkle falls on us or
a lightning strikes us,
and instantly we revive,
having realized our frailty
which inspires us to act.
Therefore, I am trying to get through
your shell to you.
I test your shell for its solidity —
I wonder whether the nestling of your soul
will be able to break the eggshell,
or has it frozen in a cold distrust and the lack of love?
I don't want to catch you by surprise
and grasp you with a dead grip.
I'm not better than you, even much worse,
but I've gone through the agony of fire, through the dark,
I've burnt my desires in the furnace of insomnia,
I tempered my soul in the cold water of loneliness
and now I am calling you to endure the brass of the trumpets.
I'm neither a destroyer, nor a constructor,
since the things I create are based only
on my belief that a word is a deed.
I disclose my depths in order to warm you,
pull yourself together,
parts and particles,
make peace with the world
and acquire a peace of your soul.
A soul will crush a chaos of hesitation,
answer the call, and blow the horn of hope.
The Lakes of the Past
The lakes of the past are measured to the bottom:
measurement is a gap, but mystery is
a lacuna on the map, a vacant space, a lot, a sparkle,
a loss turned into profit,
a frog into a prince, a beautiful beast fading like smoke,
while a stern smoke of homeland astern,
having mixed with the fires of passions and holocaust pyres,
draws signs of doom in the sky.
The soul 's land is where the soul wrestles against fate,
and a native tongue is deeply rooted
in a complex ornament of rhymes and syllogisms:
an ancient elm which tries to reach
the heaven with its helmet,
and while this struggle lasts,
a whisper flies from the leaves into the open air
echoing the word that lives deep
in the blood of the roots and the crowns.
Try to uproot it, and you’ll reach a void,
beholding which you'll lose the gift
of speech given to us in place of
the silence of gods. And you
will go towards silence through
gains and losses, victories and pains,
and in the end of your way home
you'll stand forever still like a tree
looking into a lake.
Roots and Crowns
Roots and crowns are interwoven —
blind crowns are vividly seen
while foreseeing roots are hidden from sight,
for the roots nest deeply in soil,
but the homeland of the crowns is solely the future,
the place from which Chronos shades
his fading light on them by thus alluring them into the twilight,
while the roots sap the memory
from the darkness of being, from the depths of the soil.
The fruits ripe in the dark and give the crowns
the power to foresee the past and the future
until the blizzard of forgetfulness fells on them as a bliss.
Humans Are Like Trees
Humans wither and dry like trees,
though much quicker:
humans are dried up to the roots or
are instantly burned by the lightning,
for they bear the lightning inside
and give birth to fire and light —
a flash in the depths of millennia, a flicker
before they burn down to the roots.
Chemistry
It would be probably less bearable
to live in a madhouse. Pound wrote
that the dead walked there, and the living
were made of cardboard. Life is lichen
of relations, scale of trials;
a crust of hardships hardens,
inside is a soul bound in mummy-cloth,
anima hoping to reanimate, craves
to run barefooted in a dewy grass,
to fly like a lady bug or a butterfly
closer to heaven and God.
A rustle of recollections in the branches
of lime and oak which were cut down long ago:
Philemon and Baucis are used for kindling
of our hope. A carpenter –woodpecker
does not peck my body because he is a frantic monster,
that’s his nature. Fanatics care for faith,
meaning good. Our society is good-natured:
they will fix a tooth, prescribe glasses
before a mortal injection. An eye for
a tooth, and for a tooth — 40 Martyrs
or just one, Thomas Beckett. Martyrdom is a reflection
of a nation’s guilt, a guilt is a loss
of innocence, yet there is faith
of Daniel in a lions’ den and Job’s doubt,
who can weigh them?
What’s left to us, hoping to live
and hopping thrilled by life or by death
or by ourselves? Only that third
component without which
the reaction is impossible: reagents
do not interact, there’s no acceleration,
wings are drooped, a jet-liner
lacks fuel, and our grieves and bitter
tears acquire sense only when we
read the letters of Abelard to Eloise.
God’s Love
The solution of creation is being dissolved in God.
We can only guess
what the Providence is,
the vision of the divine laborer
who is busy cleansing the world
from filth, sweat and blood,
and the world becomes clearer
and receives communion of the mystery of creation
in the sacrament of May thunders
and thunderous torrents.
To see God’s love, though, is not less difficult
than the thunder of His wrath:
we can only bend down
and caress with our glare
the reflection of the heavenly dome in the lake.
Hell and Paradise
Dead Mozart doesn't call for vengeance.
Prince Myshkin, falling in a feat of epilepsy,
stretches his hand to Rogozhin, exclaiming,
"I don't believe you wanted to kill me!"
Yet humans easily learn to believe
judging by experience only;
they invented elaborate punishments,
even God they made the Supreme Justice,
being unable to believe only in God's love.
Looking at the world's broken mirror
it's so easy to paint hell
in a Florentine manner or the English way:
an artist's sketch, a study of nature.
But even a genius can't reveal
God's dazzling love.
A Treasure
To the memory of Bruno Schulz
God granted us a treasure and a trifle:
How parents foster this frail trinket,
Life wrapped in diapers and pampers,
Fighting against measles and mumps;
then teachers try to bring you up
while you resist them having come
to conscious possession
of this priceless trifle, soul,
you build it up constructing
the edifice of life sifting
the gold sand of the events and things,
mixing it all with the mortar of thought —
a sacred thing, a trifle, a frail
and, therefore, a priceless vessel.
But an alabaster vessel can be also put
in a pig-sty or in a king’s latrine —
to entertain swine or kings,
or it can be broken by one flick on a skull,
by a bullet in a forehead,
and a broken crockery is swiped away.
Judging by those splinters we can only guess
how beautiful and how divine
God’s world could have been.
The Ultimate Measure
Moderation dies its own death,
extremity perishes
since world's ultimate measure
of boundlessness has always been death.
Immortality's only hope is faith.
A Stream of Time Between my Fingers
A stream of time between my fingers,
my being leaks through me unnoticed,
but life itself is a flow, a flood,
it pumps and pushes out my blood
until the source of thought is dry
and my ripe eye is exhausted or
a helpful stranger passing by
cuts my throat and stops the pain.
A Vision II
There is no rest, no sleep, no day, or night,
I see neither a void nor heaven’s veil.
What is a roof, a hearth and home, and kinship?
I’ve stripped my life as naked as a wire,
and like a lightning rod, alone I stand
amidst a vast and devastating vale.
My worth or worthlessness will be revealed
when the Lord’s lightning hits me as a revelation,
and my life, which has been hidden in a dream,
will be illuminated by God’s light
that’ll make it real or will burn to ashes.
Inspiration
Creation is conciliation:
there’s only a gesture, a look, a sound —
the words are extra,
silence is the only companion of admiration,
but the impressions ripen as wild cherries
while love, and pain, and joy
are festering like sores
and burst as inspiration.
Newness and Novelty
Newness, the outer side of novelty,
is a label, a trade mark,
a sign of fashion and modernity:
approaching us from the outside,
it tries to look like novelty,
but novelty soars like a bird,
foreseeing the eternal laws
under the covering design
of the hot issues of the day,
it pursues nothing but the truth.
Contemporaneity
Contemporaneity is temporary,
so are we, my contemporary,
sometimes my compatriot,
sometimes co-dissident,
sometimes competitor or co-discoverer
and co-keeper of time,
sometimes my codefendant
sentenced for holding time
or for halting time —
how was it? “Instant, halt!” —
or perhaps we both suffer
from the incontinence of time,
sounds like a disease, but the diapers do not help:
time leaks — as tears, blood,
or as a radioactive rain,
at best, as ink on a piece of paper,
bur this is not modern, alas,
it could have taken us to the past century
or even well before, to the edge, the age, covered
with snow that has melted long time ago,
it’s all Black water under bridge,
I mean the Black River,
and all bygones are bygones, gone,
even our hearth and home
and the graves of our loved ones,
to say nothing of contemporaneity.
One recollects dates at random,
such as, June 6, 1799,
dreaming of liberty and peace
hoping for glory and good,
then out of the blue
one sees a leaden stick writing something
on a slate board,
if it peels off,
it falls off to eternity.
6 June 2004
A Palimpsest
The friction
of eraser against paper
grows as palimpsest is being rewritten —
the resistance of erased generations.
Oh, Clio mia, you look sadly
at the deeds of your cunning serfs:
devoted priests devouring the past,
serve the instant aimed at
the gaping heights of the future —
there, to the cannon of nonbeing.
Elysium of shadows,
a parade of hell-paradise
visions of the vanity of imagination:
there eternal nothing shines
to the servants of science,
insinuating erasers,
hard-working gold-diggers
in the mines of the moment —
a gaping moment
is their monument.
Who said they would writhe tortured in hell?
They, thriving scholars,
will eternally stay
in caustic footnotes
when the blood of the erased generations
develops on the palimpsest.
A Stream of Consciousness
A stream of consciousness,
an echo of a distant river:
a forgotten vernacular —
precious pieces of crockery broken
by a careless and overconfident gesture;
unable to keep our heritage
we now try to glue the pieces
of God's mysterious vessel.
Incantation
Incantation is as perilous as immolation.
It's forbidden to wake up the night's dark, a host of ghosts;
if you repeat a sacred name in vain,
it loses power. Neither can you
turn back and look —
you'll lose an image, dissolving in your eye:
vague forms are stirring there, in a dim light;
a shapeless heap is gradually growing
out of the dusk — should you rush it,
the contours of mystery will stiffen forever
piled as a mass of spheres and angles,
importunate paltry details.
Memory is a Cameo
Memory is a cameo, it can't be broken into splinters
and puzzled back again —
Camena takes of Gorgon's form, Gorgon that of Camena's,
serpents of hair coil in dreams,
spreading fiery points, and you,
hardening into stone, will stiffen
from that supernatural chill, unable
to shield your face or —
put a millstone around your neck.
God Smites the Curious
God smites the curious —
staring at His deeds is forbidden:
only stones, rocks and water,
unconscious creatures or innocent babes
can endure the weight of His look or foot.
So before you dare remove a single veil,
examine carefully the reflections of the rocks
of the city of the dead in the Dead Sea.
Imagination
The images roam your imagination:
worlds are born from your head,
like Demiurgos, you watch the newly-born
tremble on your palm with navel-strings uncut,
their fate cannot be shaped without care,
in an instant, Galatea might stiffen into stone:
obsession with the play of fancy is perilous;
you have no right to play indifferently either —
into the blinding shards the world will burst,
disjointed time will wander in your winding mind:
abundance to deficiency may turn,
and you will lose yourself in the diversity of forms,
roaming in a fog of shifting images —
Proteus oblivious of his original essence —
the gift of God is never granted gratis.
A Vessel
To fill the vessel of the world with thought and word:
humbly accept your gift and master it
in harmony with the world; make it your home,
your dome, domain, dominion
at whose gates you stand thinking how to sift
novelty from news, how to evoke
the art from vision when you see
an outline, not a line, contours taking shape;
don't rush your vision into being lest
an awkward movement, a wrong word,
a false sound will turn a miracle
into a monster; watch this wonder
born from a spring, akin to earth and skies,
a kin of you and others,
a forerunner running unnoticed yet,
before it has turned into a wordy river
or a redundant flood, and, therefore,
it is unseen, unheard, and subtle
when you pass it by
aimed at the rapids of purpose in distant lands
(not going too far away from it
but not approaching either);
this purpose is fragile in its holy wholeness,
you cannot hold it — just behold the sky
in the mirror of a lake,
embrace it like a cloud, a beloved shadow,
a reflection of the dear face;
you cannot seize it as the Fire-bird's feather:
it will burn to ashes in your hand
or, leaving a shining void on the glassy surface,
it'll vanish in the looking-glass.
Is This Sky a Part of Me
Is this sky a part of me,
and I belong to it?
It is much easier to think that it
has absorbed me entirely,
such is the spell of space,
a near edge, a closer distance.
How can one measure it by oneself?
The closer to it, the further one is drawn
away by the horizon, and
what used to be at hand,
is drawn away while one amid the seas
foresees, like Greeks, the boundlessness of the world,
for they were conquering space conquered by it
and idolized the substance and the matter –
all that exists: a ship and sea,
a cup and wine that had absorbed the sun
through the vine blessed by the gods;
the sap of earth, the murmur of the springs,
the torrents of the sun
that overwhelmed the cup;
honoring gods, they offered the first cup
to them and then showed love
and friendship to each other
by giving a cupful of the sun
that blended gods and mortals in its body.
Oh, being drunk by being! Aren’t we
absorbing worlds in likewise manner —
invisible and seen, and close, and distant,
and Time that overwhelms us and imbibes?
Aphaia
Two rows of columns flying into the sky:
how open to heavens and to the sea,
how credulous to the almighty gods
is your light forest of the colonnade, Aphaia.
Here, on Aegina, the birthplace of the runners,
who defeated Athenians at the Olympic games,
and of the seafarers, who brought fame to Greece;
here, on Aegina, covered with the rust of greed
and trade, a rattle of tourists and resorts;
here on Aegina, I realized that the lightness of love
is readiness to lose and faith in gods;
the rest is in the power of mortals,
that they should do here and now,
and that is why the temple of Aphaia forever flies
and forever stays resisting the river of time.
Ithaca
He had a reason to cry for his Ithaca:
What is immortality without love
and beauty, and home, and a son?
He seeks oblivion who is weary,
whose spirit is dry, who is deaf and dumb,
even stray dogs disdain him;
but he is young, his hair be gray,
who’s open to all the roads and all the winds.
There is a magic creek on some isle.
Good-bye, Calypso! My wife and son,
my dad and friends, and even my own foes,
curved bays and a high house
are all waiting for me on my isle.
Alienation
Alien boys are yelling in alien tongues,
foreign firemen fight alien fires,
alien joy will bless an alien hearth,
and even grief looks strange in alien bounds.
The world is bounteous,
full of temptations and charms;
its granary is brimming with wonders,
but a wanderer is a stranger even in heaven and hell;
yes, poor in spirit
do not seek treasures on earth,
yet, bare roots are shaking from chill.
A Burden
“Gods dwell here as well,”
said Herakleitos once to visitors,
as he was warming himself
near the oven.
The genius of place
is essential, but a royal spirit
reigns and resides where it wills,
subjected to God and faithful to Him
by its free will. It’s not the place where we dwell,
but the essence of our being that is essential to us:
it makes our being fit
to fulfil what we are called to;
standing before Him and the field of our life,
having answered clearly to a call,
we make sense of its meaning,
grasping the essence of our destiny,
and then we make it real, fulfilling our calling,
which was the law for ancient Greeks.
True, it’s a burden, when sick time
falls apart breaking into splinters
under the yoke of the day:
One has to guard it and heal it from oblivion
by the tincture of memory brewed on herbs and
on the roots of language — under the guidance
of the tongue’s keepers kept by it.
Now, without muddling the drink
you have to sip it tenderly with thrilling lips,
but having tasted it, you’ll learn
that you’ll be tormented by thirst
to the rest of your days,
finding no place to stay,
no hearth, no home, no roof,
neither on the battlefield
nor in a safe haven among your kin
will you find rest;
your eyes will grow homesick,
your heart hearthsick,
your life roofless,
and you will regret it many times,
until both you and the time are healed
by a wholesome wholeness of the tongue.
Archetypes
Paris was chosen to judge, Achiles to fight,
to burn like a meteorite in battle's heat,
yet forever he rushes embattled
and dazzles us forever with his shield,
and the arrow eternally follows his heel;
king Oedipus deprives himself of sight,
king Lear tears his tattered robes apart,
and lady Macbeth eternally washes her hands —
what is the wealth of an archetype?
without an image, flesh, or gesture,
it would have turned into a stone,
a kind of exhortation, but
that place has been already taken by the Tablets;
therefore, Medea, enraged, flies in her chariot forever,
and we forever remember Jason's final dream.
Mystery
The tongue of paganism: fertility of flesh:
the substance was begotten and born
from the Ocean and Mother-Earth,
out of the father's head and of the horses' nostrils,
from the Sun and the Moon, the winds and the elements —
it was fertilized, regenerated, and,
acquiring forms and flesh, it grew
in the unconsciousness of a blind
and self-engendered life.
The substance prophesied and ordered
Leviathan and centaur to grow;
the bull kidnapped the maiden; Psyche
invited the handsome god into her depths,
until she dared see his face,
the forbidden fruit was tempting her,
and in an instant everything was lost:
the mystery of unknowing was dissolved
in a drop of wax, from that time on
she was doomed to roam between the two worlds
in order to regain the lightness
lost in a surplus knowledge:
a bird, a butterfly, she was doomed to fly from dark to light
and strive, and throb again in the blindness of the night.
The Twilight of Gods
Gods dwelled on the mountain peaks,
Kings reigned in the palaces below.
Mortals were wretched and lonely without gods,
That’s why the mysteries
lasted here long until dawn.
Then the strangers came and claimed:
“Your gods died.
Serve our gods or perish!”
Gods watched the last of the devoted die,
and when none of them left,
they either died
or hid themselves forever from the mortals.
The Absolute
I turned my inside out
and then became myself again.
I burned my fear, hope, and doubt,
and lost myself in a round of transformations:
I do not recognize my former self,
and only a rough wine of endurance
turns darkness into light, and lightning into life,
my metaphors into metamorphosis.
My footprints run ahead of me:
a demanding snake-like circle of life
leads me to the wall of Scriptures,
where Cain still learns “Though shall not murder,”
Aaron “Though shall not make a carved image,”
King David, “Though shall not covert your neighbor’s wife.”
As if to childhood, all roads lead
to the beginning where the springs are pure.
Relativity reigns amid the stars,
but the absolute law rules on Earth.
Seeing and Foreseeing
If you could cast half of your eye upon it,
if you could listen to it with a half of your ear,
if you could take half of a note, of a tone, of a sound,
as if from nowhere, just by chance, and then —
seeing, foreseeing, foretelling
either the past that might come back in the future
or the future seen already in the past, as if reading it:
it will dazzle you at night
and make you blind in the broadest daylight,
a shaft of sunlight will flash like a lightning,
a razor blade ray —
soothsaying is fate,
Cassandra knew it
and Medea knew it:
tomorrow a thunderbolt
will fall out of the blue on the people,
but today only the chosen can see
the unseen signs burning on the wall,
Cassandra whispers,
Tiresias murmurs something,
but This is already approaching,
and Jeremiah tears his clothes apart,
John pales with horror,
and quietly Cassandra enters Clitemnestra's house.
In The Beginning
In the beginning the flow of seconds went wrong,
then minutes collapsed
and something happened to the hours;
months were mixed up in the general mess
and new months kept arriving,
but there was no room to put them;
the boundaries of the seasons were blurred,
and the genius exclaimed, "Marchember,"
feeling the shakiness of time and space,
the lameness of chronotope;
then the centuries were compressed:
age pressed into age
on the tree of eternity,
so that it was impossible to tell
Marie Antoinette from the Russian tsarine Alexandra,
it looks like only tomorrow
Socrates will have to drink his cup,
Troy is in flames, Aeneas sets his sail,
Ulysses too, winged with victory,
and the mighty Agamemnon
takes his prey, Cassandra, to his kingdom;
Caesar has just crossed the Rubicon,
Jeremiah writhes in the dust of his visions;
it's not so clear
when coming nearer to our era:
who mounts the pyre: Joan of Arc or Giordano Bruno?
who denies: Peter or Galileo?
Everything the mortals wrote
has been condensed into One Book —
the Scriptures and the Word
that was in the beginning.
He
1.
You model your visions from a clay-like flow of being,
giving shape to absurdity, uncertainty,
to accidental phrases, colors, sounds,
to the roar and the murmur of the ocean
that tosses with the tide,
to your losses and commotion, stupid acts,
even to the betrayal of your sworn friends
and faithful foes; to the snow flakes and the tears
of the lily-of-the-valleys — once, as if it were
in your previous life, they struck you
by their timid beauty; here, side by side
grow the thistle and dead-nettle of your desires.
A stiff dough of words is thickening and rising,
having been transformed into your fate,
that later on you'll read aloud to others
in a restrained manner: some will grasp it,
some voluptuaries will trample it
with a persistent foot — back into mud,
and you're alone again or just suppose you are,
while hundreds of wires have been stretched,
connected to your fate, and the flocks of letters,
reach you like geese at dusk.
............................................................................
Yet, have you thought of Him, who lonely
millennium by millennium works ceaselessly,
looking perpetually at His own creations
being crushed by those
who blame Him for their imperfection?
2.
Throughout eternity He sifts the grains of worlds,
searching for flakes of life
and golden nuggets of spirit:
dividing ceaselessly the light
from the darkness, day from night,
He is cloaked forever in the ancient chaos,
that inner lining of His life,
He walks along, granting light to galaxies...
On this world the dark will fall again,
and then He'll light the stars again.
3.
It is alive: it roars within its seas,
it burns us up with wind and chokes with heat,
builds its Scyllas and Charybdises and stretches
its tablecloths of the steppes that dizzy us
with the wormwood of forgetting — there we could
have forgotten hours, days and years, but
for time: it flows rhythmically
from the clepsydra of worlds
age by age, heartlessly conquering space,
enslaving us with its eternity, and having chained
permanence and mutability together —
its spirit conquers even those
who despise the burning issues of the day.
How human are the Trinity and Crown —
He reigns forever in the fourth dimension —
unseen, uncounted, and unknown.
Crystal
A curve of the eye’s crystal
brings neither consolation nor salvation,
but altering your eyesight, it
leaves hope for regaining vision.
Glued to the world turned upside down,
the pupil tries to turn it back
while the light bent by a curved eye
overflows its boundless ground.
The world, however, stays the same and changes;
It is eternal as mutability itself…
The pupil of my eye runs like a dog
Exploring terrifying spaces,
and having passed the utmost edge of earth,
it ruins Euclid’s triumph looking how parallel lines
merge completely far ahead
and close again behind my back.
FROM THE BOOK
ENVISIONS
The author gratefully acknowledges that “The Poems on a Given Theme” and “Carnival” were published in Salonika, “A Parable” in International Poetry Review, “Dialogues” in Spring, the Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, “The People of the Book” and excerpts from the long poem “On the Ways of Job” in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, 1801-2001: Two Centuries of a Dual Identity, 2 vols. Maxim D. Shrayer, editor. Armonk, NY: M E Sharpe, 2007, vol., "A Family Portrait" and "A Talk Show" in Calliope, “Reptiles” and “Rodentia” in Clockwise Cat 21, and “Bestiary,” in a shorter and slightly different version, as well as “T.S. Eliot,” “Borges,” “ Word ,” and “To My Father” were first published in Vita Nuova, Roslyn, PA: REM Press, 1992.
The author is grateful to Mr. John Ashbery, Mr. Charles Bernstein, Mr. Michael Graves and Mr. Remington Murphy for insightful ideas, encouragement, and generous help.
Time
Flowers wither and bloom.
Even the snow is different each snowfall.
Seeing how frail are the flowers and snowflakes,
think about humans.
Fragile stems of carnations,
delicate souls of children
grow, ripen with strength,
and stiffen.
The stiff stems of the flowers break.
Petals of snow
and flakes of flowers
are falling down on earth
turning into Time.
Two Poems on a Given Theme
1. A Photogrammatic Poem
Down the slope of the Indicative Mood
slides our life,
indicating, mocking, showing itself —
the film is developed,
we stare at the negatives,
not quite recognizing ourselves,
realizing too late
that the verbs are already "Imperative."
Later we'll find ourselves
paging past "was," "lost," "acquired," "did not participate"
in the photo album of recollections.
Happiness would have been
so close to us in the future-in-the past,
Subjunctive.
2. A Study of Art
The full soul loatheth an honeycomb;
but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.
Proverbs, 27:7.
At first — a watercolor, a dim light:
the hay appeared and the tender grass showed itself,
then — all the turbulence of the midsummer's oil
when beating wildly in the fields,
everything formed ears:
the ear of rye, of wheat, and man,
breast, mind, and loin,
but the full soul loatheth an honeycomb
before the crop of sufferings is ripe,
and a scholastic evil is eager
to frame you in a picture, where
you won't escape your limits
unless you tear yourself out,
having realized that only rhythm
in which the image of eternity is alive
will give you strength and tempo to tame
intemperate passions, a temperament.
The pains of being are overcome
in spite of evil, the sufferings well-tempered —
that is the only profit of our losses:
not a framed picture, but a perspective
of our eye-the creator, soul's all-seeing eye,
a sleepless wanderer of the Universe.
Census
A secret universal census is in progress.
What is the native tongue
of the builders of the Tower of Babel?
What is the birth rate in Tyre?
the Death rate in Gomorrah?
the life span in Sodom?
Is there a righteous man?
The angels are flying,
doing a secret census
before it's time to reveal the results.
A Parable
"A one man show," said Cain,
as he multiplied seven by seven by seven.
Thus he walked, and multiplied
until he composed the multiplication table,
the system of measures and weights,
the periodic table of Mendeleyev,
discovered the theories of probability and relativity,
split the atom, executed tests at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
and at leisure remembered Abel and wrote memoirs.
He also wrote the Bible. At leisure.
To teach others a lesson.
The War
The being of human beings
is substantial: the trails
of civilization are all over the Earth.
The descendants of Tartars, Scythians,
Greeks, Romans, Huns, and other Crusaders
left footprints everywhere.
They battle still
for their ideals, shrines, and gods.
Can anyone tell me how long
will the Trojan war last?
The Angel of Peace
1.
A cloudless sky is hovering over Hiroshima,
and it is still calm, my friends, in Nagasaki,
but the Angel of Vengeance is again devising
his righteous wars in the name of Providence.
In the world where we are fighting for truth
with a brine of hatred on our lips,
there will be no love, no kiss,
no grass, no birds, nor even God in Heaven.
2.
The Angel of Peace is stiffen
with a begging hand
stretched to the world —
as always, he’s blind and invisible,
for only the Angel of Vengeance
with a punishing hand is invincible,
but the Angel of Peace as ever
comes to us only in dreams.
Life
The day is done,
the harm undone,
but the damage remains,
and the morning retaliates.
In the long run
life is
a long run.
The end and the beginning
The end is the point
where everything is clear
while a new beginning
is always confusing.
A Dead-End
I stand at my wits' end.
My fading faith is fainting
at the sight of carnal incarnation,
the multiplication of
the matrixes of atrocities,
of the black-mailing list of hate
alongside thoughtless jubilation.
Vanity Fair, they say?
Alas, Flea Market.
Laws of Physics
The friction
of eraser against paper
grows as palimpsest is being rewritten.
Inertia is overcome
with a stick
driving hens
from perch.
Gravitation
is overcome
by repulsion
or rather disgust.
Despair
Is when you do not dream of dreaming
Nor hope of hoping.
We can share our despair.
If we don't spare each other,
who will?
it's much more difficult to spare
than to kill.
In these days of disgrace,
show us some grace.
In the age of dissipation,
show us a dream of salvation.
Messiah
We are waiting for the Messiah
To crucify him.
Messiah has to be crucified,
otherwise he is not the Messiah.
Save Us Savior
Save us Savior
save our money
save our bread and caviar
save our honey
save our time
save our health
save our prime
save our heath
Save our Souls
save our psycho
Save us Savior
and recycle
Save Changes
Save changes
before closing
your eyes before
shutting down
your mind
before a break-down
before dawn
Self-Portrait in Brooklyn
Windows are open.
Villains are often
Noisy and bragging.
Widows and orphans
Bear the burden.
The poor are begging.
Life is so ragged,
Anguish and rage —
This is my age.
My brains are brown.
My mood is down.
My lungs are grey —
This is my day.
Night shadows come,
They chant and charm.
I do not weep,
I’d rather sleep —
Or drink some rum.
A Family Portrait
He was an expatriate patriarch,
an expelled pilgrim,
grave as a graveyard,
the essence of senselessness,
saltless mica salis;
she was his promising
and promiscuous land,
always standing behind
her man but showing
her back to others;
their daughter, topless
and partially headless,
had a very round bottom
and would stroll around
with her bottom up;
their promising son
was a pop-singer,
he was not exactly dumb,
but somehow lost his focus
on profit and loss
and would mess and toss
his left ring finger
with his right thumb;
otherwise they are rather decent
and more or less well off.
A Portrait of a Lady
She has an air
of someone who deserves more
than she gets from life,
always underpaid, throwing pearls,
dishes & wishes in the den
of crooks and liars.
Where have real men gone
in the age of feminization
and artificial fertilization?
That lovely little woman
was smiling in her sleep
snoring like a drunk sailor.
A Talk-Show
I saw you on TV the other night
I saw you in a dream the other night
I saw you in a nightmare I guess
I talked to you but you were on TV
I talked to you but you were in a dream
I talked to you in a nightmare perhaps
I talked to you but you never said a word
You talked a lot but never said a word
In that nightmare dream on the TV
You looked around but never looked at me
Then you turned back and turned away alas
Went back to business or perhaps to sleep
Or maybe to a party — who will know?
God knows what happened there to you and me
Since I turned off that nightmarish TV
Virtual reality
He sets his alarm clock at six am every day
and swallows his quick oats & runs
to be swallowed by the subway,
plunging diligently in bullshit
from 9 to 5, an hour for lunch,
devouring information ton by ton,
and trots home loaded like a mule
only to be swallowed by the world-wide web.
He makes virtual friends, virtually loves,
even drinks virtually to their health,
he became virtual himself, virtually lives,
but one day he will really die,
and his friends will say their virtual “Good-bye.”
Enormous World
In that enormous world,
unlimited and eternal
everything is turned into sold
by 21 century ltd., Sachs & Gold
man or some other infernal
power.
We urge you not to submerge
but to emerge and thaumaturge.
Dialogues
1.
—RSVP ASAP
— OK
Some time later:
—ALAS
—Excuse me?
— ALAS
— When?
— Two days ago.
— My condolences.
2.
—I have no more ribs to share
and no more time to spare
— eat that apple then
3.
— I can’t figure it out!
— You take this and move it there
then you take that and move it here.
You march and demarche,
chant and disenchant,
you decuple couples — that’s inevitable vitality;
you mimicry & cry,
you decry & you decree
any decrement of mobility;
you mobilize mob & demobilize demos
or vice versa
you mobilize GOP & utilize GOR & GDP and
you recruit NYPD and re-route GOPD —
united we stand!
Oh, say, can’t you see it’s as simple as that!
— I could have applauded
if I haven’t been appalled.
You’re a roosting chanticleer!
Give me a break through!
Give me another example,
some kind of a decurrent event.
— Everyone is someone else
and someone else is everyone.
Life is such a splendid mess:
up & down and down & up,
updown and downup,
sometimes more and sometimes less,
you define and defy,
you defray and defraud,
increase IQ & APR
you lost gain but gained loss.
— But that’s a fabulously ineffable fable!
You’re a demoniac maniac.
Don’t you have practical advice?
— Keep a low profile on a high-paying job.
Save a brainy day.
Stick to your own stick.
Stick to your own shit.
Join MLA or just MP
NJDL or just njg.
Act at your own indiscretion.
Advertisements
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Miss
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Please
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we have
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Please don’t
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I have no More Ribs to Spare
I have no more ribs to spare.
i can barely sleep aware
of my homemade nightmare.
You’ve been my revelation
and inspiration
and exhilaration,
then probation
& exhortation
& consternation,
Now it all ended
in constipation.
We were allies, now alien.
The next stage is rebellion.
Give me a break through.
Favorite Holidays
A-Day
Ash Wednesday
Bank Day
Birth Day
Columbus Day
D-Day
Doomsday
E-Day
Election Day
Father’s day
Flag Day
Fool Day
Ground Hog Day
Good Friday
Halloween
H-bomb Day
Independence Day
Jackson Day
Jack Frost Day
Judgment Day
Kamemameha Day
K-Mart Day
Labor Day
May Day
M-Day
Mother’s Day
Memorial Day
New Year’s Eve
Open Day
Payday
Presidents Day
Queen’s Birthday
Ragtime
St. Patrick’s Day
Thanksgiving
Unbirthday
V-Day
Veteran’s Day
Wall Street Day
Waldbaum’s Day
Witch and Wizard Day
X-Mas
Yom Kippur
Yule
Zoo Day
Zoom Day
Carnival
1.
Carnalis — carnival, feast of flesh,
a narrow escape for the homely people, when
the soul, tired of the daily toil and of itself,
refutes its name and masks itself,
eliminating time for instant's sake:
king for a day, a crowned fool strolls,
Easter laughter rings through the town,
a guffaw walks streets and plazas,
pouring out a dance of stamps and roars,
the flesh of babies and elders wrinkles,
Punch's mask shrivels with laughter,
and Death himself laughs heartily,
observing his arena
where the head master is
a headsman butchering flesh, —
for flesh a scaffold and for spirit time,
while for the soul — laughter, tears, and carnival.
2.
What has kept you, soul,
on the edge of this world?
A wanderer, you have endured
a bit of life, a bite of life, and the stings of humans:
of those who were passionate
and of those who were compassionate,
of those who stole
and of those who brought the gifts
of plastic bombs wrapped
in colorful covers,
bright as Easter eggs,
but then you revived again, recovered
consciousness, recollected your name,
and named the nameless,
bringing it back from unbeing,
for nameless things belong to Heaven
and inanimate to God.
Therefore leaving the feast of lights
you, anima, come back
to your native bosom,
while the wind disperses ribbons and guises
along the pavement, raises the dust of confetti,
the timber that tomorrow we will use
to kindle recollections
at coffee-time or at lunch.
...The wedding gown is placed in the wardrobe
and will be exposed tomorrow
as a legend to a granddaughter
or donated to Salvation Army,
while the granddaughter with her groom
gazes politely at the pictures
in the family photo album.
3.
And here we go (the routine bells are
striking eight) through spring and fall,
through summer, winter, no-man's land we stroll
to where our eyes and business lead us all.
The eyes torture us, while spirit soothes pain,
yet spirit suffers — the eyes are never satisfied,
like Abbadon, are always lusting for novelty,
the soul is tossing between the two worlds as if two voids,
yet, cut off all that tempts, toss them away
and pass them by, you still will realize:
your soul is never satisfied, it is a burden on your back
as long as it's alive: only celestial Heaven is light.
BESTIARY
1. Mole
Forcing the way to the light
all your life,
you will rebound,
zealous, weak-sighted mole,
from the dazzle of freedom
and begin to convince yourself
that being addicted to light
you’ll neither distinguish
weird relics
in memory’s dusk
nor penetrate with your sight
into the soul of the elements,
of substances, center of waters --
into the soul of Earth,
into the core of Truth.
Why should you care
for this vain secular light?
2. Ostrich
...Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
but merely vans to beat the air.
T. S. Eliot
Camel-bird, hide your head beneath your wing:
Your callous paws tread earth in despair.
Staring at the inaccessible orb, unapproachable sky,
wearing out your trampling life,
you’ll entrust your children to the Sun and Fate,
hoping your descendants,
or descendants of descendants
will overcome
their winglessness,
or shake off the burden
of meaningless wings.
3. Hypnale
The gentlest guide to momentary death
whose scaly cord will coil you in embrace:
he nestles in, while, taking your last breath,
you dazzle the worldstage with grace.
When your triumphant sun turns dark,
you’ll call your slave — a dexterous hypnale,
and having signed the book of fate — your final mark,
enjoy your blissful sleep: this poison doesn’t fail.
Why should their giggles mix with mortal cries?
Let the astonished mob just gape and stare
at your unfurrowed brow — and Cleopatra tries
to press the snake with hope, and love, and care.
4. Salamander
You'll quench the fire
and poison the water,
you give people
your virulent venom —
let them shudder,
looking at salamander:
she purifies her skin
in fire.
5. Siren
Praising life in rhapsody,
A siren’s singing in my brain.
She calls, “Come on, my boy, and reign.”
She shows her charm, seductively.
She screws her greenish eye, she’s cunning.
She calls, “Hold on, my boy, a storm is coming.
I’ll cleave to you amidst the waves and rocks.”
Ha! What a tempest: foamy flocks
in the dirty beer-mug of existence.
Poor, she weeps and keeps her distance.
6. A Frog
I'll call the rain
and kill a frog,
I'll burn a frog's skin,
I'll burn and destroy
the bridges behind.
I'll kill that slippery creature
and burn my own skin.
7. Swallow
As if scissoring a hole in the sky,
come to us, a herald of spring,
cut an air-way into the blue!
If we could try
to be like you,
bird of heaven, if we knew our time...
You labor day by day,
not sparing your wings,
and build the nest on the roof of our world.
Foreseeing a disaster, you try
to warn the humans
and share with them your visions.
Drawing the signs,
you circle the air over your nest,
over a serene world, as if cutting the threads
with you forked, scissors-shaped tail
and cry over the wingless humans
and fly, leaving a doomed house.
8. A Cinnamon-bird
Why do you build a fragrant house
from a cinnamon-tree, a weird bird?
Is subtlety an extravagance or a duty?
Your pride in your bronze-colored nest
will not last long, alas:
your dreams will be ground into powder,
ruined cinnamolg nests will become
symbols of vanity.
9. Halcyon *
When a midwinter warm breeze blows
and rough icy seas are tamed still,
the mind is still skeptic, but the time
is waiting for king-fisher's off-spring.
A hallucinating halcyon dreams of the spring,
seven days of creation, hope of wonder:
as if built from nowhere to never,
a fragile bridge aims at the future.
Seven more days among the warmer stars,
and a living word will break an egg-shell soon;
then you'll suffer and bite your tail again,
dreaming of an unfaithful thaw.
________
* In the medieval Bestiary from the St. Petersburg Public Library,
a medallion shows a halcyon biting its tail.
10. Scarab
Crawling in the manure,
a charmed scarab
drags a precious load on its back.
Humans discerned the Sun's imprint on it,
and having wiped the dung away,
transformed the beetle into an amulet.
What does he see
who looks on us from his height?
11. Reptiles
— What do you know about reptiles, Elizabeth?
Take, for instance, lizards.
They are cold-blooded and seek sunshine,
just like you are craving for fame, Lizzie.
And don’t they cast off their tails when in danger?
Remember, how you cast away your high-heeled shoes
when you ran after that handsome ranger?
What’s the matter, Lizzie?
Are you cold?
— I would have applauded
if I hadn’t been appalled.
12 Household Mice
Mice dart in the kitchen,
picking crumbs
of bread and cheese
and dragging them
into their holes.
Mice have a bite
taste a bit of a crumb,
and make their judgment
of the whole crop.
Tomorrow again
I'll throw them
some crumbs
by which they will judge
the world.
13. Rodentia. Gnawers
Squeaking rats
with the bloodshot eyes of maniacs
rave, fly into rage,
gnaw the walls, devour the papers,
crack pillars, and crush the grounds of science.
The rats don’t give a damn
about the present’s venom. Time is
to throw the stones we haven’t gathered.
Legions of sly,
malicious harvest mice
trot fields,
devastating the stores of the past.
It’s time we ploughed again.
14. Dolphin
I dreamed I was a dolphin.
Humans wanted
to teach me their language
with the help of electric shock.
I understood,
I understood it all.
No, I was not mad
at them: I was just sad...
But oh, again — electric shock.
15 . Saura Lizard
Hermit and liberated slave,
wherever you go, you are doomed
to stay in the incandescent desert:
getting used to desolation
and everlasting thirst, you’ll have
to struggle for life.
Having fed on bitter herbs and wormwood,
keep in your veins a poor moisture of words.
You are doomed to gaze
at the sun's blaze,
blinding, at the end - you’ll creep,
senescent, to the East
upon the darkening Earth,
having fixed your sightless eye-balls on the rising light,
you’ll stare without a blink at obscure fire
in a desperate hope of recovering your sight,
lizard, you'll believe in vision...
A Vision I
A sharp eyesight is like
a dagger cutting horizon,
and the treasures of the earth
are filling your body like poison.
A keen perception is
a suicide’s knife:
you’re shivering either from thirst
or are just agonizing.
A deep exultation is
taking a deep breath,
then a short exhalation: “Oh, God!”
God is revealed perhaps
or maybe you’re seized by fright
that beauty will blind
or you can’t endure delight,
and void is dazzling your sight.
The First New York Elegy
Uniqueness of an ever-changing life:
a liner fleetly cuts the Hudson River,
and a yacht disappears like a bird
piercing the haze with resilient wings.
Uniqueness of a mutable life —
“Is that how it looks like?”
you scream like a dimwit, recovering senses
after it has vanished without leaving stitches
on the horizon, like an old wound, and you
are ready for new ones.
Heat rings. The day swells.
Yells of salesmen rip the air, their hands
tempt the world with goods and odds,
and a protean world resounds.
The second New York Elegy
The Hudson buzzes like a double-bass.
A sultry afternoon faints.
The dough of being grows and thickens.
The hum of a swelled sky
is scattered around the park.
The strings ring and fade.
The sky is breathless
over the mirroring river.
If the sun could wipe out
the sweat from the mirrors
by the essence of sense
and reveal the depth of the sky,
the world would shine again,
and every instant would revive.
The Third New York Elegy
A leaden river is mantled in mist,
a long rain is falling askew,
a filthy fog covers the island like film
disguising the skyscrapers and the sky,
hanging over our heads;
only furious blades of grass
are fighting against the dull gray
trying to tear the disguise
and cure the skies and the eyes
blurred by a filthy film, which blinds
like nyctalopia, and you, my dear,
pulling down the leaden blinds
of this dank day, will hear
the jingling of the leaves of grass
beating against the edge of being,
and the splinters of chime
will drift on the Hudson like sails;
seeing that the lushness of verdure is back,
your soul will rejoice,
and you will recover your sight.
Aspiration
Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers...
T.S. Eliot
Soaring, the soul, aspires blindly
to vision, revelation and surrender:
the only sensible trace
might be the rapture of the aorta.
Until the soul is frozen into stone,
“the soul’s sap quivers
between melting and freezing.”
And you are longing to disgorge a word
out of your hoarse and wounded throat,
and, having hurt your gorge,
you spew an ugly thing.
Of all the stiff things in the world
the most intractable, the word;
that is why it may reach to Eternity,
tearing the veil of Time and Being
adorned by tiny golden stitches of instants
and – by stars...
II Tributes
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Each time denying himself,
he sailed up to different shores
in order to never return.
He left “the lost” searching for sense;
non-believer, he came up to faith denying agnosticism.
He was longing for the beginning,
yearned for the first gates
into the world without passions
where Love is free from desire;
and finally reached the third stair.
Destroyer, he constructed a high harmonious building
of the haven of spirit and until his death
kept silence for two decades,
scared, perhaps,
of himself, preserving
the high harmonious temple...
Homage to Ezra Pound
Kai Moirai’ Adonin
Make it new, but make it few
Lines like “an apparition of the faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.”
You were great and I was born too late
to show you how to fuse my East-
uary with your West, my zest.
PLEASING THE CARTHAGENIANS: PUSHKIN
Your crystal ball after your fall
Into the pitfall of fascism
Still shines, and love survives
Though gone as lightning
Enduring your blackout.
Amazing maze! Going crazy
But keeping Ubi Amor Ubi Oculus est
In haze and still keeping time
Rhyming light with love and hatred
In a knot of Paideuma,
a revelation and a blunder,
Knowing less than drugged beasts.
You claimed your paradise on earth,
if not under,
following your hero, Odysseus,
you are one but asunder,
following your gods and lights that drift out with the tide,
The sea’s claw draws the lamps outward.
Tamuz! Tamuz!
Falleth,
Adonis falleth.
Will your gods return?
Jorge Luis Borges
All his life he’s been dreaming,
having seen in his dreams
the other history of the world,
striving to change the universe,
to re-create this world created
by an awkward student’s hand.
The forking paths were circling around him.
He contemplated the circular ruins, the universe
whose center is everywhere, the rim – nowhere...
Books. Hundreds. Thousands of thousands.
Forcing his way through the depths of Babylonian libraries,
a studious blinding mole,
he was losing illusions along with sight,
but he wasn’t embarrassed by that:
the blinder he grew,
the sharper he saw,
parsing the black and the white
into hundreds of shades.
As into the pictographs
on a red leopard’s skin
he was scanning his dreams,
writing and re-writing them,
transforming the world with a metaphor,
and, having lost count of his years,
lived scores of lives.
The forking paths were circling around him.
He’s been writing the same book of visions,
but he woke up once
and died.
Lives
One smashed her car against the wall,
her silver bell jar against God’s will
achieving her long-cherished dream
and leaving two unloved young boys.
The other has arranged it all,
put her manuscripts in order
before donating them;
trying to shape her afterlife, she
made her daughter her trustee
and made her understand
that life and love had gone.
Then she committed suicide
in the most civilized way.
The third was scared of senility,
decrepit age, when neither mind
nor body would obey,
so she decided to outwit her fate
and plunged into the river
desiring to be dissolved in nature.
The fourth knew love and death from birth.
She “saw a great darkness coming”
and died unknown, or rather was “called back,”
and endured all, even being
misprinted and misread
for more than half a century after her death.
Death no more or no less?
Manuscripts do not burn.
They outlive it all,
even suicide.
III. The Answer of the Tongue
WORD
The weapon
which I forged and sharpened
has never ever saved anybody
the sharper and stricter it is
the more mercilessly it bites
boomerang
cuts chimerical air
and strikes the ghosts
under the sky
of desperate prophecy
Is there a shield
to shield myself
from myself?
Utter or Mutter a Word
Utter or mutter a word,
put it in for those at the gate,
it won’t absolve their sins
nor your own misdeeds that await,
and the gatekeeper will take you all wrong
if he ever gets through,
but a word after word is gone
into a thin air though.
I doubt that meek angels will hear
or bless me, but who will here
do this hopeless task
instead of me, may I ask?
The Ultimate Verge
There's only a flash of quiet
and a flash of light
on the bound of despair,
on the ultimate verge, for that
tomorrow I'll get
only thorns, burdens, chains,
a drab tattered dress and a wanderer's staff,
greeted by hobgoblins and owls,
but I also get my reward
in this wide open world
where bringing delight
darkness turns into light.
A Fatal Arch
For N. K.
A fatal arch, a curve
of the eyebrows,
a bend of the bowstring:
Will art or archness
Flow from it?
…A kingdom for a glance!
Envy, a spent arrow’s gone,
so is rage.
My soul strives on the verge
between the two voids —
what will you meet, my soul,
the light or gloom?
Eclipse
For the eclipse to be
the sun must shine first.
One learns what life is
having known death.
The rings spread round a tree-cut
under the rind of life;
only a glance behind “I”
gives me strength to survive.
There, behind the edge
of fire and the verge of dark,
I dissolve in “not-I”
and give birth to “We,”
and we get to know the dark,
which brings the light to the world,
when the apple of an eye gets dumb
and the tongue fails;
and we get to know the light,
which brings the dark to the world
and hides in the heaven the answer
inconceivable to the mind.
Vacillation
My shaky being swells,
a bridge links the two worlds,
and a deep moat
gapes between.
Only a glance above
and beyond either side of the world
gives me strength to survive,
dazzling my sight.
Having recoiled from
both the heaven and void,
one can go ahead
and embrace life.
Dungeon Man
Why do you lie idly on a couch of lies —
do you really love a copy of substance?
If you could only imagine the treasure of essence
gleaming in the wakeful womb of the Earth,
but you'll never see or enjoy the wisdom of love,
a language of petals — beauty
of the opening flowers and of worlds
being mysteriously born in the depths!
What will you, a stepson of truth, hear or find
in the dead-end dungeons, in the caves of your mind?
A snake of false knowledge that seems to delight
twists on your blue bloodless lips.
Starving and growing cruel, you will
gnaw at your own heart, poor prey,
to show the triumph of death
as a proof of your theory of death and decay.
The Answer of the Tongue
Where to start?
Everything cracks and shakes,
The air is trembling with similes,
No word is better than the other.
Mandelstam
The preparations of heart in man,
and the answer of the tongue, is from the Lord.
Proverbs, 16:1
I.
When the years have gnawed your guts,
it seems there's no difference where to start:
from cold cuts
or from a cold shower of Ecclesiastes,
or perhaps, from a cup of hot coffee
and a newspaper thrown on your porch,
like a foundling, waiting patiently on your stairs.
So we begin, though
where to start when
it's time, my friend, it's time
you looked for a shirt, a tie,
and a smile in the closet (envious of Cheshire Cat):
let's start our fight with a smile,
let's talk, my soul, to each other
as a star to a star.
And then we'll start:
half a pump, a shift of the gear —
oh, my sorrow, let's plunge in there
where you can fish nothing
but watch only the circles of indifference
widening on the waters of being
and carrying trifles linked to each other.
II.
At dawn, a warm membrane
of a homely womb breaks,
and we enter a blinding world
before the eyes get used to light:
there homo homini is a partner
caring for his own profit,
and a man to a state is a tax-payer
(or a crooked sponge);
there the art of eloquence reigns —
more spoken, less said.
Can I quench my thirst
with a ginger ale of common places,
with a puppyish exaltation of communication
at the dull parties when
my inner man hears how
"deep calleth unto deep
at the noise of Thy waterspouts?"
For "the Fear of the Lord is to hate evil:
pride and arrogancy," but we
fear the Fear, we hate loneliness,
we're uncomfortable in the shells
of our inner selves
leaving them for the sake
of the warmth of your best fiend and close foe,
parting with the soul as if with a wife,
"I won't be long, dear," —
not going too far though,
for we fear the look of closeness,
the dusk of the other's soul —
is it ripe or raped?
A scum of experience clutters our veins
and mantles our souls;
wishes burn to ashes,
mirrors of evil and good filmed by filth,
become crooked:
a friend turns into a fiend,
dignity into vanity;
scared to lose self in a fit of self-denial
you fear to find treason instead of a treasure,
a grave instead of a grove,
dead hopes in the soul of the other.
And not daring to dare,
cutting the self from the others,
and the others from self,
one denounces the world
though continues to stroll its pavements
wrapped in a coat of doubts,
because equally frightful is
a naked abyss and a yawning peak,
an instinct forces you to look for a solid soil
where chill and warmth take turns
and darkness turns into light.
III.
You may also leave by staying where you are:
by discovering a brave new and furious world
with the help of a remote control:
you can browse Martian channels
of this spacious small world
when the knowledge that someone
lives much worse than you do consoles you,
or — take a drug of violence
to escape the boredom of life
and find an excuse for your own worthlessness.
You may also laugh heartily,
guffaw with a taste of a soap opera in your mouth —
laugh your bitter laughter;
or look for the experts of temptation,
for some artful seductress
hooking men with honeyed words,
the wine of love changed
into the vinegar of lust:
"with her much fair speech
she caused him to yield,
with the flattering of her lips
she forced him," as king Solomon said, a sage,
who knew it from his own experience,
and burned his festering sins, like sores,
by the Fear of God.
TV-cameras stand
"in the top of high places,
by the way in the places of the paths
to call those who walk in their uprightness."
They call to plough the fields of lust
among exhausted mirrors:
frigid lecherous dummy
with the eyes of a Barbie,
and a bust blooming with lust,
breasts that will feed neither Romulus nor Remus,
seduces a bullish superman.
Then, following the laws
of reflection and repulsion,
the war of sexes breaks out
in the mirrored world,
because homo homini is a partner:
both are anxious of their own profit
and an extra piece of a pie,
"but he knoweth not that the dead are there,
the guests in the depths of hell."
IV.
"Wisdom was brought forth when there were no depths."
"When He prepared the heavens, I was there...
Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him:
and I was daily His delight,
rejoicing always before Him, rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth;
and my delights were with the sons of men."
A son of a man asked another son of a man,
"What is truth? For I have my truth,
and you have yours, and each of us
has an interest of his own,
so everything is relative
in this world of relativity."
Then they started readings, misreadings,
a wide range of wild resonant words:
everyone listened to each other,
keeping his own truth in the pocket,
ready to cock a snook at his neighbor;
tired of disagreeing discussions,
they decided to measure the truth
by the height of the buildings
and by the standing of the stock markets;
they praised the Lord in the words like a "landlord,"
turned their temples into steam-baths
to wash their sins off;
getting fat from donations,
priests sold their blessings
wholesale and retail;
to ensure their own well-being,
they put other prophets in deep wells
and stop the flood of threatening prophecies.
They respected wasps more than bees;
those who did not gather honey
span a web of entertainment
to catch ripe souls, children of boredom;
for their less fortunate children they arranged
food stamps of encouragement,
a stale bread of consolation
or a prison ration of punishment
and the grace of absolution
when a sinner sick with a terminal disease
starts to confess, stuttering in confusion —
humble folk having no place to retreat
imagines time as the Birnam Wood,
life as a dead-end or
a precipice's edge, jaws of the abyss,
scared to go forward and meet
the Wood marching on them.
Carrying a soul away,
a boat of being
is whirled in a merciless vortex.
For, as Solomon said,
"The fining pot is for silver,
and the furnace for gold:
but the Lord trieth the hearts."
V.
A bird sings because it can't help singing,
but a poem is not just a nightingale's warble,
a poet is not a black grouse at a mating-place
thrilled by his own trill.
When you hear something
you cannot translate
to any of your thousand tongues,
you'll accuse them of lying
and start cutting them off one by one:
the tongue of sweet euphony,
the tongue of wild metaphors,
the tongue of abstractions that elevate souls —
neither of them has known
a bloody sweat of toil,
a salty taste of the soil;
you will also cut off
a jargon and a saucy slang
of streets, squares, and subways
for their rudeness and crudeness;
and finally comes the turn of the tongue
of threatening prophecies
when a naked truth scares
like a child dying from starvation in the ghetto...
you'll regain consciousness
and find yourself amidst a bloody mess
as insane Hercules after slaughtering his children,
and a deadly silence
that was before the Creation
will surround you.
Only then, if God hears you
and gives you the answer of the tongue,
you'll start, like Adam, naming
the world already unknown to you
and will know where to start.
To My Father
…And right above me is my star,
my glowing star, his dazzling fire
blazes over barbed wire,
he breathes in infernal smoke,
dying and again reviving.
Yes, right above me is my star:
He is neither yellow nor blue nor red:
the colors of existence are
all mingled in one as if His head
was touched by snow
that turned Him gray.
The People of the Book
The last unbreakable inch, the last patch
of the land promised as blessing and as bliss,
not El Dorado, not the Wonderland,
but the Wilderness, where a chilling voice is heard,
and stone is heavy, and sand is weighty,
and a bush burned without being consumed,
here God made his covenant with Abraham
and granted twice his Testimonies to the people;
they finally convinced the other nations that
this strip of land was sacred and loved by God,
and they were driven out to clear the space
for others to stand closer to God;
they were dispersed, and left with their Book
and lived in it and were bound in it.
Diaspora
The readers like
the life-lovers
whose sister is life,
yet feverish lips
would murmur of famine,
of disaster and plague.
The tyrants like
to be consoled – not by a slave,
by a voltaire –
so, let them celebrate
this feast of life
until a hoarse cry
cuts the air
and strikes them with the whip of fate.
So, Jeremiah,
in triumphant prophecy,
take your revenge
over the mob...
But he cried
and tore his robes, while
the others were dragged
into exile.
On the Ways of Job
1.
Bless us with the breath of autumn
but leave a gap of blue sky,
make a hole in this misty cover
this veil too dense for my hapless eye
to reach beyond it for light.
If the light that's in Thee
grows dark, then what's the darkness
within us, who are unable to tell
dawn from dusk or day from night?
We see but a dim reflection, a spark
that dies in the heart of this darkness.
Whom shall we tell that we are
dissembled and scattered
like bones in the valley of Josapath,
waiting for Messiah as for a falling star,
waiting to be reborn and revived
on the Mount of Olives or on every hill,
by the Golden Gate and by any gate —
how long shall we wait until
God reawakens within us?
2.
"Blessed be Thy name,
Light, the source of light,
the Almighty, divine,
inconceivable and nameless,
endless and fathomless,
King of the Universe, the only Lord.
I entrust my soul
every day and every night
into Thy hands that have kindled
light and life in me
and granted my soul to me."
That was how they were praying,
reading the Shema,
reading the Kaddish,
in Treblinka, Dachau, and Auschwitz
waiting, like Job, for an answer and for death.
And God saved them from pain.
3.
They lit Yitzkor candles,
They lit Yahrzeit candles.
They prayed and remembered
Six million of Abels.
Yahrzeit candles flicker,
Yitzkor candles flicker,
while a restless Cain
roams the world in vain.
Sacrifice is sacred,
but Cain is not forgotten.
Sacrifice is a heavy load,
our eternal burden,
sacrifice is our hecatomb,
while Cain fights for the truth
with a nuclear bomb.
Yahrzeit candles flicker,
Yitzkor candles flicker,
while every Cain is reading
Kaddish for his Abel.
4.
Should we stay only
A lesson for the posterity
on what scales should we weigh
the death of an innocent baby?
Are we traceless like wind?
Are we passing like birds?
What if this life in a dim
light is but a dream?
Is my fate to become
just a mark on the page?
Mighty roots of the trees
are breaking the tombs asunder,
that's how I mark where I wander.
Is my fate but a dream?
Is the crematorium chimney, through which
Korczak and his children escaped,
the only way out of pain?
Here's your gift of life, take it back!
5.
Job called in affliction
and begged his friends to show pity:
"If you would comfort me
or just could hold your peace,
but judgement and justice take hold on you,
and you are forgers of lies
for the righteous is robbed,
and the wealth of robbers is secure;
God brings abundantly into their hands;
And the light in their tabernacles never dies.
Why Thou condemn me?
Thy archers compass me around,
and on my eyelids is the shadow of death:
am I not just clay before Thee?
Thou art higher than Heaven and stars.
Man that is born of a woman
is of few days and full of trouble;
no one is born clean.
Can a man measure the weight of wind?
Man setteth an end to darkness
and searches out for perfection:
the stones of darkness and the shadow of death.
But where shall wisdom be found?
And where is the place of understanding?
The depth says, "It is not in me,"
And the sea says, "It is not with me."
It cannot be gotten for gold,
The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it.
Only Thy thunder
Can break the earth and Heaven asunder.
Thou pour contempt upon princes,
and overthrow the mighty,
remove away the speech of the trusty,
and take away the wisdom of the aged.
Only Thou have an almighty eye:
Thou discover deep things out of darkness
And bring out to life the shadow of death.
Thou multiply the nations
and destroy the nations,
Thou enlarge the nations
and straighten them again.
Thou take away the heart
of the chief people of the earth
and cause them to wander
in a wilderness where there is no way:
they grope in the dark without light
and stagger around like a drunken man,
but I desire not the night
when people are cut off in their place.
Behold now, I have ordered my cause;
I know that I shall be justified.
Withdraw thine hand far from me:
and let not thy dread make me afraid.
Then call Thou, and I will answer:
or let me speak,
and answer Thou me."
6.
You talk of your merits
But it's not too hard for the rich
to be righteous and virtuous
giving a crumb of your wealth
to the poor, to widows and orphans,
but what is it without love?
Can your faith fight in distress
against doubts on the eve of millennium?
There is no rebirth without death,
nor timelessness without time,
and the people will be back in their place
and arise in due time from oblivion:
without love there is no rebirth.
Thoughts About Oblivion
On a visit to Brighton Beach Home for Senior Citizens
1.
They started to forget what happened yesterday, last year,
enjoying the sun like children or
like those who are destined to start
on a new voyage — in this very life,
preparing for a new beginning and another death.
Sitting at the beach in wheelchairs, they
peacefully drink oblivion of the Lethean waters
of the Atlantic: sharing only the memory
of their own bodies,
a handful of words, particles of the language,
fragments of dreams in remembrance of a flight,
some almost unsolderable links of the chain
of earthly being in which they understand
best what the birds tweet,
yet in dreams they still see this life.
2.
God grants us grace and mercy
stripping us of memory,
erasing the boundaries between life and unbeing,
that is why, perhaps, the soul might be
so reluctant in the morning to come back
into this world — a wanderer
looks at it wondering or puzzled.
But that first exile remembered all,
in the sweat of his face eating his bread,
courageously caring for his wife,
he gave his labors, days, his blood and sweat,
his life and death to her.
He called her Life.
He cultivated his own garden
though it was only a poor copy of Eden.
Yet he was lucky
not to foresee the future — otherwise
how could he have endured his burden,
remembering all and knowing
that he was doomed to share
the curse of Cain, living in his descendants?
What fate might he have had —
the killing of his own son or
living marked by the sign of fratricide?
3.
It was a blessing that having known good and evil,
they hadn't eaten from the tree of Life,
otherwise nothing would have been forbidden
to them who had been taken from the dust —
from age to age indifference might have grown
in their souls lacking the gifts: creative power,
the gifts of passion and compassion, and of joy,
the blessing of sleep, oblivion, and death,
the crown matching our frailty —
or else the Creator wouldn't have known
the ways of His creations.
Do not turn back
I.
Go on, do not look back
at the stones of the Tower.
Listen not: ears are still filled with
God’s unending thunder.
He has divided us so that the mire
rising against the heaven wouldn’t ascend
at the sound of the Trumpet. Yet
He did not let
us forget that yesterday and
the flames of the hundreds of tongues aspire.
Hold your torch tight.
Go on and don't look back!
The blind are blest :
the bards of fate
or Beauty. Is beauty granted to us
as salvation or merely as consolation,
a reward for studious zealots?
What wealth has it brought to you,
warriors of Achaia?
The site after fire
crowns the question mark.
Forking in tongues, the flame still blazes,
concealing the sacred,
ineffable mystery from us.
A stranger, dumb and deaf, still gazes.
So go ahead
and don’t turn back!
The blessing and the curse of God,
our tongue, is split,
distorted into tiny splinters,
for the Tiger and the Lamb redundant
or, as Dante said, for angels —
it’s blind men’s tentacles
in wilderness and void.
So, go ahead
and never turn your back!
II.
A child sits on the sand,
and sand is streaming in his sand-glass;
a myriad of splinters in his hand,
an hourglass in the other, and
it’s long before the midnight stars.
He plays his tricky game with time:
there’s plenty of it still far ahead;
space doesn’t burden him yet,
by his own frailty he's not upset;
so go ahead and don’t turn back.
He draws a circle on the sand,
trying to shape a quadrangle in it;
he would be happy to invent
a round quadrangle in the end.
...The splinters twinkle in his hand.
Time has been driven by centuries,
he still believes he’s born for joy,
the splinters are his favorite toy,
a nail is another toy of his,
and soon he’ll play with the Crucifix.
It
Desperate to seize the day,
we're peeping into the future,
secretly stealing the present from ourselves
in the name of life or just well-being so that
everything is not worse than in our neighbors' houses.
The fumes of momentariness are thrown
out from the exhaust pipe, while you drive
amidst the mirages, leaving them behind.
So would you demand common people
cease being common? if only the chosen
can elevate themselves by acquiring vision,
can you despise the others then? or scorn yourself
if your day has been lived out and wasted
not in the way your mind imagined it at dawn?
A powerless hour lacking friction
is trembling in the air, weightless,
unable to gain weight or power
to overcome the Earth's gravitation.
You dream on winter evenings, longing
for snowdrops, lily-of-the-valleys, strawberry fields,
you thirst for snow in summer:
last year's snow was good,
but then you were constructing
your crystal castles, but huge things
did not withstand the fiery sun,
and now you roam in an unearthly desert,
dreaming of an earthly human hearth,
but could you not at least destroy,
nor deconstruct what homely people build?
Could you go along this way again,
with all your present knowledge:
all by yourself, using your own power,
enduring the gravitation, since now you know
that no one has to share your ordeals?
You have no right to lead astray the others,
you'll have to pay for that yourself or even worse:
you'll make the innocent pay for all your deeds.
2.
The word roams between the two worlds,
reflects their light and dark,
but the matter is unfathomable,
obscure like water in the clouds.
Before the word is deeply rooted in the soil, it lives without flesh, weeps without soul, speaks without tongue, laughs without joy, and nobody sees it.
At first a ghost, a splinter, a fragment, an echo,
making its nest in consciousness a while:
it laughs with a mocking-bird, echoes with
a cuckoo-bird, at night it weeps with an owl,
it lives in you and takes away your sleep
and makes you slumber in the real life; it steals
your reflection, shadow, robs you from yourself;
drop by drop, it drinks your blood every day,
little by little, replacing it
with the strongest poison — you never notice how,
but then your friends can't recognize you
and you pass them by, unnoticed.
Yet you are getting to know yourself better and better:
being unable to illuminate the others,
it's exploring the depths of your soul
with a sonic depth-finder, and therefore
each step of you gives birth
to a many-voiced, resonant wilderness:
rumble, roar, hum, laughter, whisper, weeping,
but look around — you are alone, my friend.
You'll bring again your mirages to people,
already in a humble way, not pretending
to change their world, extend it nor turn it upside down,
nor even trying to reveal them in your word.
3.
How clear was the first day: the dark was spotless
over the void; there were no eclipses —
heavenly bodies, luminaries, were shining,
reflecting the Word by which they were named
and brought to life; the firmament was firm,
the verdure green, when the unclouded dawn
was rising and dividing dark from light.
We are wandering in the twilight,
yet once you saw it in your dream, so
why complain that only echo, shades, and shapes,
ghosts, fragments, and splinters are left
from your visions: you have to verify
the picture of a somber space to them,
so, carry on your torch and don't look back.
The Peak
Dense signs tremble in the air,
the lens of the skies is focused on this world,
its rays burn your melting guts.
Enchanted, you go along the ray
and gradually lose your will:
condensed into the crystals of symbols
and lined up in a row of images,
words seize you and lead
to the edge of the precipice.
Icy fences around a bottomless abyss
leave you no chance of retreat.
Before you reach the edge,
you lose your warmth, but icy rocks
having consumed your body's warmth,
start melting at last:
the air is soaked in melting ice,
snow monsters shrink and rush
in glassy streams into a resonant pit.
The world is changing its shroud.
...You shake off your stale coarse skin
and run on light-footed,
regaining sight, hearing, perception,
psyche aspires into the domain of sapphires,
elevated, she runs ahead of you
and, having pierced a gray curtain,
reaches a greenish hillside
with the streams of crystalline bells
running along it.
Looking back at footsteps,
you notice the fountains of snowdrops
running out of green holes.
If you only had enough breath
not to suffocate in the downpour of light.
The art of running
is the art of breathing
and — that of listening to Fate.
Heart's impatience may lead
to explosions, to the rapture of aorta.
If you could avoid going blind
looking at the constellations' radiant dances
in the starry void!
If you could help hovering blindly:
self-denial often leads
to the denial of others;
blind fascination of others
makes you fall into the pit.
If you could stop in time
or you'd pierce icy fences
and fall down without
seeing the Peak:
the flabby, soft sky of this season
won't hold you.
The sun on its pinnacle
has melted frozen eternity,
leaving a landmark of spring snowdrops.
Heaven's starry map is lighted.
Path winds along the edge
of day and darkness.
On the verge between heaven and void
I follow a twinkling ray,
feeling with every step my skin
getting thinner and thinner...
IV Midnight Elegies
On the Edge of Midnight
On the edge of midnight a mystery trembles:
a mysterious quivering becomes clearer,
more vivid, distinct, acquires flesh and form
of sounds, images, words:
wild, awaken sounds,
suns of words burn in the night,
fill you, and you follow them,
but with the power of your will
you condense them into the crystals,
constellations of verses,
as the history of the Earth
was condensed into the crystals of millennia —
one can observe this in the open cuts
of mountains and minerals,
as the night is condensed in the nocturnes of Chopin,
while a creator, having been a slave of Time,
now becomes eternity's ambassador,
reigns in the night,
governs the moment,
look: the essence of sense
blooms in the Star of creation.
At dawn,
with eyes burnt out by knowledge,
an artist tries to find his way
from the inner side of life
to the main road,
and the world astonishes him,
and he amazes the world.
The Return
Things decay, are covered with dust,
disintegrate into powder,
while you live (eternally, it seems at times),
each time you are the other one, surrounded by others,
not always admitting that in familiar forms
new persons are hidden, whom
you didn't meet before;
yet once in the streams of a winter sun
on a slippery blinding snow track
or in a murky corner,
drinking Pepsi or coffee far from the capital-city,
you discover that those talking with you
are not talking with you, but with some sort of a dude,
almost an impostor, that lived you right out
of your shell, adopted your name,
even took up your habits,
and then you suddenly met
in one and the same fate,
and walking away from others unnoticed,
you come to your previous dilapidated home,
where a web of cracks have spread across the walls,
or it might be the tentacle
of an odd octopus, that
is punishing you for having left this place
by ruining an abandoned home;
it steadily and even so, visibly
wipes away the traces of your being here,
following you, crossing out
your previous lives;
and being unable to understand
whether the changes in you are good or evil,
you stand silently, as if
you were burying someone, and
tomorrow the mirror will multiply your reflection,
and you notice how the lines have sharpened...
From that point you'll begin
to notice changes in many people you knew,
inside and out, and the mystery that
in their shells others settled long ago
fills you with worry:
are you really surrounded by phoenixes
and one day there will be no strength
to come back after
burning yourself for the last time?!..
Even so, it's sad, when castles crumble
(which was, inarguably, your childhood home),
and even the homes whose walls
you didn't manage to strengthen,
to put up ramparts or dig moats.
Construction each year
gets tougher,
and the bricks get heavier
every time you come back.
The Wall
The wall of my bedroom fronts my sleepless nights.
I crush my forehead and heart against it,
yet a web of cracks spread all over it:
I'm waiting when the light breaks through the cracks,
but I hear only the howling of the venomous voices of chimeras —
a chimerical laughter of hyenas is more real than reality,
the past grasped out of oblivion
by the magic lantern of memory,
acquires shape, flesh, voice, movement;
I can no longer change anything —
neither insert some successful scenes
nor cut out any stupid ones.
What we have outlived belongs to us no more
than a book taken from a bookshelf and opened at random
or a movie shot by someone else.
Night is the time of burning down the regrets.
In the morning, I shake the ashes from my bed
and hurry to pay the tribute
to my present expectations.
Our construction site is the Universe
built by constructing ourselves,
but every word, glance, every touch of hands,
every embrace or a furious gesture
is embodied once and forever,
no drafts allowed;
having realized this, I stiffen in despair
at the imperfection of creation,
I stiffen in silence
lest I bring more chaos into being.
We would stand in such a manner,
stiff and dumb, unable to take a step
to each other, until suddenly
a sparkle falls on us or
a lightning strikes us,
and instantly we revive,
having realized our frailty
which inspires us to act.
Therefore, I am trying to get through
your shell to you.
I test your shell for its solidity —
I wonder whether the nestling of your soul
will be able to break the eggshell,
or has it frozen in a cold distrust and the lack of love?
I don't want to catch you by surprise
and grasp you with a dead grip.
I'm not better than you, even much worse,
but I've gone through the agony of fire, through the dark,
I've burnt my desires in the furnace of insomnia,
I tempered my soul in the cold water of loneliness
and now I am calling you to endure the brass of the trumpets.
I'm neither a destroyer, nor a constructor,
since the things I create are based only
on my belief that a word is a deed.
I disclose my depths in order to warm you,
pull yourself together,
parts and particles,
make peace with the world
and acquire a peace of your soul.
A soul will crush a chaos of hesitation,
answer the call, and blow the horn of hope.
The Lakes of the Past
The lakes of the past are measured to the bottom:
measurement is a gap, but mystery is
a lacuna on the map, a vacant space, a lot, a sparkle,
a loss turned into profit,
a frog into a prince, a beautiful beast fading like smoke,
while a stern smoke of homeland astern,
having mixed with the fires of passions and holocaust pyres,
draws signs of doom in the sky.
The soul 's land is where the soul wrestles against fate,
and a native tongue is deeply rooted
in a complex ornament of rhymes and syllogisms:
an ancient elm which tries to reach
the heaven with its helmet,
and while this struggle lasts,
a whisper flies from the leaves into the open air
echoing the word that lives deep
in the blood of the roots and the crowns.
Try to uproot it, and you’ll reach a void,
beholding which you'll lose the gift
of speech given to us in place of
the silence of gods. And you
will go towards silence through
gains and losses, victories and pains,
and in the end of your way home
you'll stand forever still like a tree
looking into a lake.
Roots and Crowns
Roots and crowns are interwoven —
blind crowns are vividly seen
while foreseeing roots are hidden from sight,
for the roots nest deeply in soil,
but the homeland of the crowns is solely the future,
the place from which Chronos shades
his fading light on them by thus alluring them into the twilight,
while the roots sap the memory
from the darkness of being, from the depths of the soil.
The fruits ripe in the dark and give the crowns
the power to foresee the past and the future
until the blizzard of forgetfulness fells on them as a bliss.
Humans Are Like Trees
Humans wither and dry like trees,
though much quicker:
humans are dried up to the roots or
are instantly burned by the lightning,
for they bear the lightning inside
and give birth to fire and light —
a flash in the depths of millennia, a flicker
before they burn down to the roots.
Chemistry
It would be probably less bearable
to live in a madhouse. Pound wrote
that the dead walked there, and the living
were made of cardboard. Life is lichen
of relations, scale of trials;
a crust of hardships hardens,
inside is a soul bound in mummy-cloth,
anima hoping to reanimate, craves
to run barefooted in a dewy grass,
to fly like a lady bug or a butterfly
closer to heaven and God.
A rustle of recollections in the branches
of lime and oak which were cut down long ago:
Philemon and Baucis are used for kindling
of our hope. A carpenter –woodpecker
does not peck my body because he is a frantic monster,
that’s his nature. Fanatics care for faith,
meaning good. Our society is good-natured:
they will fix a tooth, prescribe glasses
before a mortal injection. An eye for
a tooth, and for a tooth — 40 Martyrs
or just one, Thomas Beckett. Martyrdom is a reflection
of a nation’s guilt, a guilt is a loss
of innocence, yet there is faith
of Daniel in a lions’ den and Job’s doubt,
who can weigh them?
What’s left to us, hoping to live
and hopping thrilled by life or by death
or by ourselves? Only that third
component without which
the reaction is impossible: reagents
do not interact, there’s no acceleration,
wings are drooped, a jet-liner
lacks fuel, and our grieves and bitter
tears acquire sense only when we
read the letters of Abelard to Eloise.
God’s Love
The solution of creation is being dissolved in God.
We can only guess
what the Providence is,
the vision of the divine laborer
who is busy cleansing the world
from filth, sweat and blood,
and the world becomes clearer
and receives communion of the mystery of creation
in the sacrament of May thunders
and thunderous torrents.
To see God’s love, though, is not less difficult
than the thunder of His wrath:
we can only bend down
and caress with our glare
the reflection of the heavenly dome in the lake.
Hell and Paradise
Dead Mozart doesn't call for vengeance.
Prince Myshkin, falling in a feat of epilepsy,
stretches his hand to Rogozhin, exclaiming,
"I don't believe you wanted to kill me!"
Yet humans easily learn to believe
judging by experience only;
they invented elaborate punishments,
even God they made the Supreme Justice,
being unable to believe only in God's love.
Looking at the world's broken mirror
it's so easy to paint hell
in a Florentine manner or the English way:
an artist's sketch, a study of nature.
But even a genius can't reveal
God's dazzling love.
A Treasure
To the memory of Bruno Schulz
God granted us a treasure and a trifle:
How parents foster this frail trinket,
Life wrapped in diapers and pampers,
Fighting against measles and mumps;
then teachers try to bring you up
while you resist them having come
to conscious possession
of this priceless trifle, soul,
you build it up constructing
the edifice of life sifting
the gold sand of the events and things,
mixing it all with the mortar of thought —
a sacred thing, a trifle, a frail
and, therefore, a priceless vessel.
But an alabaster vessel can be also put
in a pig-sty or in a king’s latrine —
to entertain swine or kings,
or it can be broken by one flick on a skull,
by a bullet in a forehead,
and a broken crockery is swiped away.
Judging by those splinters we can only guess
how beautiful and how divine
God’s world could have been.
The Ultimate Measure
Moderation dies its own death,
extremity perishes
since world's ultimate measure
of boundlessness has always been death.
Immortality's only hope is faith.
A Stream of Time Between my Fingers
A stream of time between my fingers,
my being leaks through me unnoticed,
but life itself is a flow, a flood,
it pumps and pushes out my blood
until the source of thought is dry
and my ripe eye is exhausted or
a helpful stranger passing by
cuts my throat and stops the pain.
A Vision II
There is no rest, no sleep, no day, or night,
I see neither a void nor heaven’s veil.
What is a roof, a hearth and home, and kinship?
I’ve stripped my life as naked as a wire,
and like a lightning rod, alone I stand
amidst a vast and devastating vale.
My worth or worthlessness will be revealed
when the Lord’s lightning hits me as a revelation,
and my life, which has been hidden in a dream,
will be illuminated by God’s light
that’ll make it real or will burn to ashes.
Inspiration
Creation is conciliation:
there’s only a gesture, a look, a sound —
the words are extra,
silence is the only companion of admiration,
but the impressions ripen as wild cherries
while love, and pain, and joy
are festering like sores
and burst as inspiration.
Newness and Novelty
Newness, the outer side of novelty,
is a label, a trade mark,
a sign of fashion and modernity:
approaching us from the outside,
it tries to look like novelty,
but novelty soars like a bird,
foreseeing the eternal laws
under the covering design
of the hot issues of the day,
it pursues nothing but the truth.
Contemporaneity
Contemporaneity is temporary,
so are we, my contemporary,
sometimes my compatriot,
sometimes co-dissident,
sometimes competitor or co-discoverer
and co-keeper of time,
sometimes my codefendant
sentenced for holding time
or for halting time —
how was it? “Instant, halt!” —
or perhaps we both suffer
from the incontinence of time,
sounds like a disease, but the diapers do not help:
time leaks — as tears, blood,
or as a radioactive rain,
at best, as ink on a piece of paper,
bur this is not modern, alas,
it could have taken us to the past century
or even well before, to the edge, the age, covered
with snow that has melted long time ago,
it’s all Black water under bridge,
I mean the Black River,
and all bygones are bygones, gone,
even our hearth and home
and the graves of our loved ones,
to say nothing of contemporaneity.
One recollects dates at random,
such as, June 6, 1799,
dreaming of liberty and peace
hoping for glory and good,
then out of the blue
one sees a leaden stick writing something
on a slate board,
if it peels off,
it falls off to eternity.
6 June 2004
A Palimpsest
The friction
of eraser against paper
grows as palimpsest is being rewritten —
the resistance of erased generations.
Oh, Clio mia, you look sadly
at the deeds of your cunning serfs:
devoted priests devouring the past,
serve the instant aimed at
the gaping heights of the future —
there, to the cannon of nonbeing.
Elysium of shadows,
a parade of hell-paradise
visions of the vanity of imagination:
there eternal nothing shines
to the servants of science,
insinuating erasers,
hard-working gold-diggers
in the mines of the moment —
a gaping moment
is their monument.
Who said they would writhe tortured in hell?
They, thriving scholars,
will eternally stay
in caustic footnotes
when the blood of the erased generations
develops on the palimpsest.
A Stream of Consciousness
A stream of consciousness,
an echo of a distant river:
a forgotten vernacular —
precious pieces of crockery broken
by a careless and overconfident gesture;
unable to keep our heritage
we now try to glue the pieces
of God's mysterious vessel.
Incantation
Incantation is as perilous as immolation.
It's forbidden to wake up the night's dark, a host of ghosts;
if you repeat a sacred name in vain,
it loses power. Neither can you
turn back and look —
you'll lose an image, dissolving in your eye:
vague forms are stirring there, in a dim light;
a shapeless heap is gradually growing
out of the dusk — should you rush it,
the contours of mystery will stiffen forever
piled as a mass of spheres and angles,
importunate paltry details.
Memory is a Cameo
Memory is a cameo, it can't be broken into splinters
and puzzled back again —
Camena takes of Gorgon's form, Gorgon that of Camena's,
serpents of hair coil in dreams,
spreading fiery points, and you,
hardening into stone, will stiffen
from that supernatural chill, unable
to shield your face or —
put a millstone around your neck.
God Smites the Curious
God smites the curious —
staring at His deeds is forbidden:
only stones, rocks and water,
unconscious creatures or innocent babes
can endure the weight of His look or foot.
So before you dare remove a single veil,
examine carefully the reflections of the rocks
of the city of the dead in the Dead Sea.
Imagination
The images roam your imagination:
worlds are born from your head,
like Demiurgos, you watch the newly-born
tremble on your palm with navel-strings uncut,
their fate cannot be shaped without care,
in an instant, Galatea might stiffen into stone:
obsession with the play of fancy is perilous;
you have no right to play indifferently either —
into the blinding shards the world will burst,
disjointed time will wander in your winding mind:
abundance to deficiency may turn,
and you will lose yourself in the diversity of forms,
roaming in a fog of shifting images —
Proteus oblivious of his original essence —
the gift of God is never granted gratis.
A Vessel
To fill the vessel of the world with thought and word:
humbly accept your gift and master it
in harmony with the world; make it your home,
your dome, domain, dominion
at whose gates you stand thinking how to sift
novelty from news, how to evoke
the art from vision when you see
an outline, not a line, contours taking shape;
don't rush your vision into being lest
an awkward movement, a wrong word,
a false sound will turn a miracle
into a monster; watch this wonder
born from a spring, akin to earth and skies,
a kin of you and others,
a forerunner running unnoticed yet,
before it has turned into a wordy river
or a redundant flood, and, therefore,
it is unseen, unheard, and subtle
when you pass it by
aimed at the rapids of purpose in distant lands
(not going too far away from it
but not approaching either);
this purpose is fragile in its holy wholeness,
you cannot hold it — just behold the sky
in the mirror of a lake,
embrace it like a cloud, a beloved shadow,
a reflection of the dear face;
you cannot seize it as the Fire-bird's feather:
it will burn to ashes in your hand
or, leaving a shining void on the glassy surface,
it'll vanish in the looking-glass.
Is This Sky a Part of Me
Is this sky a part of me,
and I belong to it?
It is much easier to think that it
has absorbed me entirely,
such is the spell of space,
a near edge, a closer distance.
How can one measure it by oneself?
The closer to it, the further one is drawn
away by the horizon, and
what used to be at hand,
is drawn away while one amid the seas
foresees, like Greeks, the boundlessness of the world,
for they were conquering space conquered by it
and idolized the substance and the matter –
all that exists: a ship and sea,
a cup and wine that had absorbed the sun
through the vine blessed by the gods;
the sap of earth, the murmur of the springs,
the torrents of the sun
that overwhelmed the cup;
honoring gods, they offered the first cup
to them and then showed love
and friendship to each other
by giving a cupful of the sun
that blended gods and mortals in its body.
Oh, being drunk by being! Aren’t we
absorbing worlds in likewise manner —
invisible and seen, and close, and distant,
and Time that overwhelms us and imbibes?
Aphaia
Two rows of columns flying into the sky:
how open to heavens and to the sea,
how credulous to the almighty gods
is your light forest of the colonnade, Aphaia.
Here, on Aegina, the birthplace of the runners,
who defeated Athenians at the Olympic games,
and of the seafarers, who brought fame to Greece;
here, on Aegina, covered with the rust of greed
and trade, a rattle of tourists and resorts;
here on Aegina, I realized that the lightness of love
is readiness to lose and faith in gods;
the rest is in the power of mortals,
that they should do here and now,
and that is why the temple of Aphaia forever flies
and forever stays resisting the river of time.
Ithaca
He had a reason to cry for his Ithaca:
What is immortality without love
and beauty, and home, and a son?
He seeks oblivion who is weary,
whose spirit is dry, who is deaf and dumb,
even stray dogs disdain him;
but he is young, his hair be gray,
who’s open to all the roads and all the winds.
There is a magic creek on some isle.
Good-bye, Calypso! My wife and son,
my dad and friends, and even my own foes,
curved bays and a high house
are all waiting for me on my isle.
Alienation
Alien boys are yelling in alien tongues,
foreign firemen fight alien fires,
alien joy will bless an alien hearth,
and even grief looks strange in alien bounds.
The world is bounteous,
full of temptations and charms;
its granary is brimming with wonders,
but a wanderer is a stranger even in heaven and hell;
yes, poor in spirit
do not seek treasures on earth,
yet, bare roots are shaking from chill.
A Burden
“Gods dwell here as well,”
said Herakleitos once to visitors,
as he was warming himself
near the oven.
The genius of place
is essential, but a royal spirit
reigns and resides where it wills,
subjected to God and faithful to Him
by its free will. It’s not the place where we dwell,
but the essence of our being that is essential to us:
it makes our being fit
to fulfil what we are called to;
standing before Him and the field of our life,
having answered clearly to a call,
we make sense of its meaning,
grasping the essence of our destiny,
and then we make it real, fulfilling our calling,
which was the law for ancient Greeks.
True, it’s a burden, when sick time
falls apart breaking into splinters
under the yoke of the day:
One has to guard it and heal it from oblivion
by the tincture of memory brewed on herbs and
on the roots of language — under the guidance
of the tongue’s keepers kept by it.
Now, without muddling the drink
you have to sip it tenderly with thrilling lips,
but having tasted it, you’ll learn
that you’ll be tormented by thirst
to the rest of your days,
finding no place to stay,
no hearth, no home, no roof,
neither on the battlefield
nor in a safe haven among your kin
will you find rest;
your eyes will grow homesick,
your heart hearthsick,
your life roofless,
and you will regret it many times,
until both you and the time are healed
by a wholesome wholeness of the tongue.
Archetypes
Paris was chosen to judge, Achiles to fight,
to burn like a meteorite in battle's heat,
yet forever he rushes embattled
and dazzles us forever with his shield,
and the arrow eternally follows his heel;
king Oedipus deprives himself of sight,
king Lear tears his tattered robes apart,
and lady Macbeth eternally washes her hands —
what is the wealth of an archetype?
without an image, flesh, or gesture,
it would have turned into a stone,
a kind of exhortation, but
that place has been already taken by the Tablets;
therefore, Medea, enraged, flies in her chariot forever,
and we forever remember Jason's final dream.
Mystery
The tongue of paganism: fertility of flesh:
the substance was begotten and born
from the Ocean and Mother-Earth,
out of the father's head and of the horses' nostrils,
from the Sun and the Moon, the winds and the elements —
it was fertilized, regenerated, and,
acquiring forms and flesh, it grew
in the unconsciousness of a blind
and self-engendered life.
The substance prophesied and ordered
Leviathan and centaur to grow;
the bull kidnapped the maiden; Psyche
invited the handsome god into her depths,
until she dared see his face,
the forbidden fruit was tempting her,
and in an instant everything was lost:
the mystery of unknowing was dissolved
in a drop of wax, from that time on
she was doomed to roam between the two worlds
in order to regain the lightness
lost in a surplus knowledge:
a bird, a butterfly, she was doomed to fly from dark to light
and strive, and throb again in the blindness of the night.
The Twilight of Gods
Gods dwelled on the mountain peaks,
Kings reigned in the palaces below.
Mortals were wretched and lonely without gods,
That’s why the mysteries
lasted here long until dawn.
Then the strangers came and claimed:
“Your gods died.
Serve our gods or perish!”
Gods watched the last of the devoted die,
and when none of them left,
they either died
or hid themselves forever from the mortals.
The Absolute
I turned my inside out
and then became myself again.
I burned my fear, hope, and doubt,
and lost myself in a round of transformations:
I do not recognize my former self,
and only a rough wine of endurance
turns darkness into light, and lightning into life,
my metaphors into metamorphosis.
My footprints run ahead of me:
a demanding snake-like circle of life
leads me to the wall of Scriptures,
where Cain still learns “Though shall not murder,”
Aaron “Though shall not make a carved image,”
King David, “Though shall not covert your neighbor’s wife.”
As if to childhood, all roads lead
to the beginning where the springs are pure.
Relativity reigns amid the stars,
but the absolute law rules on Earth.
Seeing and Foreseeing
If you could cast half of your eye upon it,
if you could listen to it with a half of your ear,
if you could take half of a note, of a tone, of a sound,
as if from nowhere, just by chance, and then —
seeing, foreseeing, foretelling
either the past that might come back in the future
or the future seen already in the past, as if reading it:
it will dazzle you at night
and make you blind in the broadest daylight,
a shaft of sunlight will flash like a lightning,
a razor blade ray —
soothsaying is fate,
Cassandra knew it
and Medea knew it:
tomorrow a thunderbolt
will fall out of the blue on the people,
but today only the chosen can see
the unseen signs burning on the wall,
Cassandra whispers,
Tiresias murmurs something,
but This is already approaching,
and Jeremiah tears his clothes apart,
John pales with horror,
and quietly Cassandra enters Clitemnestra's house.
In The Beginning
In the beginning the flow of seconds went wrong,
then minutes collapsed
and something happened to the hours;
months were mixed up in the general mess
and new months kept arriving,
but there was no room to put them;
the boundaries of the seasons were blurred,
and the genius exclaimed, "Marchember,"
feeling the shakiness of time and space,
the lameness of chronotope;
then the centuries were compressed:
age pressed into age
on the tree of eternity,
so that it was impossible to tell
Marie Antoinette from the Russian tsarine Alexandra,
it looks like only tomorrow
Socrates will have to drink his cup,
Troy is in flames, Aeneas sets his sail,
Ulysses too, winged with victory,
and the mighty Agamemnon
takes his prey, Cassandra, to his kingdom;
Caesar has just crossed the Rubicon,
Jeremiah writhes in the dust of his visions;
it's not so clear
when coming nearer to our era:
who mounts the pyre: Joan of Arc or Giordano Bruno?
who denies: Peter or Galileo?
Everything the mortals wrote
has been condensed into One Book —
the Scriptures and the Word
that was in the beginning.
He
1.
You model your visions from a clay-like flow of being,
giving shape to absurdity, uncertainty,
to accidental phrases, colors, sounds,
to the roar and the murmur of the ocean
that tosses with the tide,
to your losses and commotion, stupid acts,
even to the betrayal of your sworn friends
and faithful foes; to the snow flakes and the tears
of the lily-of-the-valleys — once, as if it were
in your previous life, they struck you
by their timid beauty; here, side by side
grow the thistle and dead-nettle of your desires.
A stiff dough of words is thickening and rising,
having been transformed into your fate,
that later on you'll read aloud to others
in a restrained manner: some will grasp it,
some voluptuaries will trample it
with a persistent foot — back into mud,
and you're alone again or just suppose you are,
while hundreds of wires have been stretched,
connected to your fate, and the flocks of letters,
reach you like geese at dusk.
............................................................................
Yet, have you thought of Him, who lonely
millennium by millennium works ceaselessly,
looking perpetually at His own creations
being crushed by those
who blame Him for their imperfection?
2.
Throughout eternity He sifts the grains of worlds,
searching for flakes of life
and golden nuggets of spirit:
dividing ceaselessly the light
from the darkness, day from night,
He is cloaked forever in the ancient chaos,
that inner lining of His life,
He walks along, granting light to galaxies...
On this world the dark will fall again,
and then He'll light the stars again.
3.
It is alive: it roars within its seas,
it burns us up with wind and chokes with heat,
builds its Scyllas and Charybdises and stretches
its tablecloths of the steppes that dizzy us
with the wormwood of forgetting — there we could
have forgotten hours, days and years, but
for time: it flows rhythmically
from the clepsydra of worlds
age by age, heartlessly conquering space,
enslaving us with its eternity, and having chained
permanence and mutability together —
its spirit conquers even those
who despise the burning issues of the day.
How human are the Trinity and Crown —
He reigns forever in the fourth dimension —
unseen, uncounted, and unknown.
Crystal
A curve of the eye’s crystal
brings neither consolation nor salvation,
but altering your eyesight, it
leaves hope for regaining vision.
Glued to the world turned upside down,
the pupil tries to turn it back
while the light bent by a curved eye
overflows its boundless ground.
The world, however, stays the same and changes;
It is eternal as mutability itself…
The pupil of my eye runs like a dog
Exploring terrifying spaces,
and having passed the utmost edge of earth,
it ruins Euclid’s triumph looking how parallel lines
merge completely far ahead
and close again behind my back.
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