In the womb of the narrow cellar
By the light of the night or the day
He lies there still as a blanket
And the abyss opens its eye.
Daughter, had we known
That our own lost Aleksei
In an unheated cellar
Half-forgotten, he lay –
And you yourself didn’t know
This man was your betrothed
And that on account of life
Being a feasting hall of souls
Even his un-Russian face
Lemon-sallow and strange –
Why it’s hardly surprising
When you and I are changed.
We’re shabby like tramcars
Grey-haired our crown
But he, like a waxen lantern,
Shines alone under the ground.
*
A train runs right across Russia
Along a mighty river’s bank
In third class they go barefoot
The stewards are drunk
In crusts of sweetly familiar grease
Chicken legs dance
Held upright in fists, like the trees
Shivering past
Through teeming carriages I go,
As a soul in paradise’s throng,
Wrapped in an army blanket
Singing my wild song
It’s a far riskier business
Than the conductor will allow
Because any right song
Always rises to a howl
In the purest voice, while women sigh,
To a whispered stream of obscenity,
I sing of poppies on the trackside
I sing of war’s pity
Piercing the carriage’s fug,
My voice, sharp like an awl
I made them miserable
They beat me in the vestibule
In the honest song there is such ferocity
That the heart is braced.
And all fortification
Stands like a tear on the face
*
Over the field the sobbing gun
Weeps for the man
Lying with chest undone
And waiting for his end.
Even the thunder of war
Is sorry: it’s forged too slow.
And a gun with a woman’s name
Laces the air with gruel –
She sends her mortars
To polish the clay
In the name of one she courted
But couldn’t save
Brushing the feathers from his tunic
On his fledgling flight
The steppe-eagle’s son guards his parent
Through the dark night.
*
Empty featherbeds cooling
With the inflow of a draught
At the hour when an empire’s ballerinas
Stand wearily at the barre
Stretching their engineered limbs
So one leg points to the hour
And combs lay on tables
And lamps are strung on wire
In the hospital corridors
The nurses converse, disperse
The pale green dawn
With quicksilver, imprisoned in glass
And here I am in prison
And here I am, sick to the gut
With the nameless powder I swallow
Dissolved in a cup.
Me, the butt of lags’ jokes,
Stubbed-out butt,
The mutt, scattering broilers
Loose from their hut.
I won’t live to break the law
Sleep presses my head
I remember the Greater Will
Like a glued boot does, a flood.
The further I walk, the less I know.
I’ve stopped mumbling: leave me alone
The boot swells with icy water
But the leg carries on.
*
Two classical athletes, Culture and Sport
Embrace at the column’s peak
And a little boy drops his panama
And stands quietly in the park
He’s outside for the first time, barefoot.
Feeling the universe’s cold hand
On his shoulder, and the sky
Distends like a toad’s gland
He’s run away – from his father’s military gait
From his mother’s silken tights
And he’s squared his chest to seem older
But today didn’t go right.
How he aches to be cultured, a sportsman
More bronzed, more related to glass.
Listen to the urns’ courtship
And the trees’ hollows gasp:
You want this park to like you,
You, and those plump little brides,
But can you be sure your betrothed
Is no frog, and doesn’t eat flies –
Or that the bulge of her goitre
In an unnatural blue
Is just a dome of sounds and lines
For the sky to breathe through?
Pop! Despair. The balloon disappears
Scraps of rubber fall and lie
Where a widow, crouched in the grass,
Shares a quiet cigarette with the boy.
*
Running, running
On our last legs
Across the prone empire
Along the longest drags
The tundra is never-ending
The dogs bark never-ending
The watchman is stood unbending
(though his job is dead-ending)
The curses are never-ending
The journey is never-ending
The heavenly valleys sounding
With machine gun fire resounding
From where the firmament is bending
And the body feels its own ending
But it’s like it’s been ground to chaff
And tastes in the throat like a laugh
Tickling and distending –
A kind of happy ending
And running, running to ground
Seems a lot like lying down.
*
By the church’s black fence
I sit with a crooked smile
On a standard issue bench
At Shrovetide
Heavenly birds are sitting
On my puffy knees
Bright-eyed, hopping and shitting
Such gentle scolds
Why am I holding
A box of metal and glass?
Why, for you to cast in coins
Whenever you pass.
In the church, nannies with babies
Inhale the heavy psalms
They emerge soft, like after the bathhouse,
And willingly give me alms
For my red brick body
Tight coil of my life
I’d be in the earth by now
If I hadn’t wanted to die.
But the doves rise with a crack
Their wings clatter, unfold.
Like a bush sprang from my back
Doves sprout on my shoulders.
And to the passing glance
I am both clothed and stripped bare
I am my own tomb and fence
My own mother, my own wife dear.
Kireevsky
1
The light swells and pulses at the garden gate
Rolls itself up, rolls itself out
Smetana, the very best – open up, mamma
Sweet lady, unlatching a casement – the best and the finest!
O black-throated Smetana, flame up
O white-winged Smetana, flare high
I’m no Lenten gruel, no scourge of sultanas
No faceless soup of curds for convicts
Don’t you dare compare my cream of ermine!
Are you pleased with a simple-minded cheese?
As the land rises and falls in hills and valleys
I’m shaped in living lipids and calories
Congealed unconcealed made gloriously manifest
Turned from one side to another and back again
Who will take up a silver spoon to muddy
My lilac-hued body?
And you, my light, barely at the threshold
Little fool, my light, never where I need you
You effulgent, I gently melting
I gently melting, I slightly smelling
And down there, where life rustles in the undergrowth
A tiny frog sits and croaks
Swells and croaks. Croaks and swells
And lifts its front legs to protect itself.
Smetana is Russian sour cream
2
In the village, in the field, in the forest
A coach rattled past, a carriage
A smart little trap with a hood like a wing
From the big city they came, from Kazan,
At the turning of the year, with caskets and coffers
To carry out an inspection, a census:
Oh the forest is full of souls, and the water’s flow,
Many souls in the hamlet, and in the oak tree, too
And day wanders the wood, walking into the wind
All its own self long, on the spoor of the hind.
And the circles of dancers – still traces in the ground
The lips of hired weepers – not yet shrivelled
And all of it, even the young Cleïs,