EX VOTO
To Jonathan Aaron
Something like a field in Hungary, but without
its innocence. Something like a long river, short
of its bridges. Above, an unutterable umlaut
of eyes staining the view with hurt.
A posthumous vista where words belong
to their echo much more than to what one says.
An angel resembles in the clouds a blond
gone in an Auschwitz of sidewalk sales.
And a stone marks the ground where a sparrow sat.
In shop windows, the palms of the quay foretell
to a mosquito challenging the facade
of a villa — or, better yet, hotel —
his flat future. The farther one goes, the less
one is interested in the terrain.
An aimless iceberg resents bad press:
it suffers a meltdown, and forms a brain.
GALATEA ENCORE
As though the mercury’s under its tongue, it won’t
talk. As though with the mercury in its sphincter,
immobile, by a leaf-coated pond
a statue stands white like a blight of winter.
After such snow, there is nothing indeed: the ins
and outs of centuries, pestered heather.
That’s what coming lull circle means —
when your countenance starts to resemble weather,
when Pygmalion’s vanished. And you are free
to cloud your folds, to bare the navel.
Future at last! That is, bleached debris
of a glacier amid the five-lettered «never».
Hence the routine of a goddess, nee
alabaster, that lets roving pupils gorge on
the heart of the color and temperature of the knee.
That’s what it looks like inside a virgin.
LETTER TO AN ARCHAEOLOGIST
Citizen, enemy, mama’s boy, sucker, utter
garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht;
a scalp so often scalded with boiling water
that the puny brain feels completely cooked.
Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden
rubble which you now arrive to sift.
All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven.
Also: we didn’t love our women, but they conceived.
Sharp is the sound of the pickax that hurts dead iron;
still, it’s gentler than what we’ve been told or have said ourselves.
Stranger! move carefully through our carrion:
what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells.
Leave our names alone. Don’t reconstruct those vowels,
consonants, and so forth: they won’t resemble larks
but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours
its own traces, feces, and barks, and barks.
SEAWARD
Darling, you think it’s love, it’s just a midnight journey.
Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,
as from the next compartment throttles «Oh, stop it, Bernie»,
yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.
Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,
alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!
Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,
and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.
Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.
Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells.
Still, you can tell yourself in the John by the spat-at mirror,
slamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels.
Only the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure.
Man shouldn’t grow in size once he’s been portrayed.
Look: what’s been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon’s blade.
VARIATION IN V
«Birds flying high above the retreating army!
Why do you suddenly turn and head toward our enemy,
contrary to the clouds? We are not yet defeated, are we?
True, we are scattered, but we still have some energy».
«Because your numbers diminish. You are less fit to listen
to our songs. You are no more an audience.
Vultures swoop in to replace us, and Valkyries. And the eastern
wind slams the fir horizons like jagged accordions».
«Cuneiform of the beaks! Explosions that sprout a palm tree!
Your tunes will be blown out of the sky, too, by the screaming westerly.
We commit them to memory, which is a larger country.
Nobody knows the future, but there is always yesterday».
«Ye-ah! but our life span’s shorter. There is no tomb or pyre
for our kind, but chamomile, clover, chicory,
thyme. Your valedictory runs ‘Fire! fire! fire!’
We are less comprehensible. That’s why we need a victory».
BELFAST TUNE
Here’s a girl from a dangerous town.
She crops her dark hair short
so that less of her has to frown
when someone gets hurt.
She folds her memories like a parachute.
Dropped, she collects the peat
and cooks her veggies at home: they shoot
here where they eat.
Ah, there’s more sky in these parts than, say,
ground. Hence her voice’s pitch,
and her stare stains your retina like a gray
bulb when you switch
hemispheres, and her knee length quilt
skirt’s cut to catch the squall.
I dream of her either loved or killed
because the town’s too small.
«SLAVE, COME TO MY SERVICE!»[15]
I
«Slave, come to my service!» «Yes, my master. Yes?»
«Quick, fetch my chariot, hitch up the horses: I’ll drive to the palace!»
«Drive to the palace, my master. Drive to the palace.
The King will be pleased to see you, he will be benevolent to you».
«No, slave. I won’t go to the palace!»
«Don’t, my master. Don’t go to the palace.
The King will send you on a faraway expedition,
down the unknown road, through hostile mountains;
day and night he will make you experience pain and hardship».
II
«Slave, come to my service!» «Yes, my master. Yes?»
«Fetch water, pour it over my hands: I am to eat my supper».
«Eat your supper, my master. Eat your supper.
Frequent meals gladden one’s heart. Man’s supper
is the supper of his god, and clean hands catch the eye of Shamash».
«No, slave. I won’t eat my supper!»
«Don’t eat your supper, master. Don’t eat your supper.
Drink and thirst, food and hunger
never leave man alone, let alone each other».
вернуться
15
This text dates back to the eleventh or tenth century B. C. and is known among Sumerian scholars as «The Dialogue of Pessimism». In antiquity it was regarded as a philosophical text; now some argue that it is, rather, a skit. For my translation, I used two interlinear renditions; one was taken from Babylonian Wisdom Literature, by W. G. Lambert (Oxford, 1960); the other, from Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, by James B. Pritchard (Princeton, 1955). — Прим. авт.