eMarkstikhi

in the accusative case

banal objects

“a child in a room…”

spiders

train

“like a glove…”

in the accusative case

when my five senses are lulled by a taxi

and transformed into a kind of gratuity,

i dream they're five herrings —

limp and putrid, yet edible.

that my spirit is a defenseless artificial limb

structured inside a chrome-plated rib cage,

that in darkness my fate acquires the weight

of a trolley car speeding downhill.

that, perhaps, talent's only a rib steak

one can eat under the canopy of the TsDL.¹

that i can hide my face in your belly —

the architectural vault, modeled within a body.

you'll kiss the pig-skinned suede of my lips

dyed with this fading aniline,

and press an empty body's cube whose armpits

smell like naphthalene against yourself

and you'll lean a face toward my pupils

glancing into their circles

to search out the geometry of vice within me

and then slowly raise two pretentious legs

constructed in a somewhat baroque style.

but the oblique country's acquired an hermetic style:

landscapes in the flasks of horizons,

stagnant water flowing into a bottle

among lucid scopes.

a visual language informed by this landscape

and a detailed consciousness is covered in the freed expanse,

having pressed my temple against the glass

and by pushing the draft's surface aside with my hand.

i read between the lines an unwritten story,

strive to combine your three dimensions

with that all so familiar civic background.

but the sky's lost its skill of speech,

growing dumbfounded before the microphone.

1) The Central House of Writers, a club owned by the Soviet Writers' Union.

Translated by John High and Ivan Burkin

This translation first appeared in Five Fingers Review, 1990, No.8/9.

banal objects

these years, myopic — hovering behind the

mirrored, peeling wardrobe,

a guilt-ridden smile, a baggy raincoat,

they don't resemble my father:

the frail figure

too bloated

melts away in a slow high.

or when you'll go into the garden through

the paralytic back door —

back to the garden where the passage is almost harmless,

even if the weather's fine

in the end, you'll only get your feet wet,

in evaporating puddles, a childhood once lived on alimony.

who brought on this terror

that shook you from the photo albums,

pre-war boys, connoisseurs of old sayings

and wrestling tricks — sent to the corner and absenced by life,

your facial expression coincides

with something forgotten.

your outstretched shadows

on the lunar surface of fear —

shadows of monuments, which once stood on the bare earth.

you feel feverish at the slightest agitation in your groin,

the documents in your shirt pocket

bring you chills.

the deaf compartments where life has ceased —

parallels the apartments you live in,

someone looks out from this place

as the General Secretaries stare out from their portraits

and our capital is bustling in its patterns of morning exercise

or then in the neglected stairwell —

you'll meet yourself

but not knowing what to say

no conversation occurs —

you only watch, in anticipation

at this other wearing a second-hand cap

— he says, let's stay a while,

no reason to hurry off.

like snails the things that go unnoticed in their living.

here, the lips tenderly mouthing the tube of bright lipstick,

two keys and a ticket —

are they evidence,

chance objects asking, disgracefully, for mercy.

this petty life extorts simplification from itself,

a handful of sweet tears

washing from the deceptions of childhood,

after a rain, having received absolution,

crawling from handbags, pockets,

why should they be spared

would that reflect the characteristics of a true killer —

and where can we go from here, and then if we return

for what, what can we find

or want to be convinced of —

that children grow up

and the earth continues to revolve.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

This translation first appeared in Five Fingers Review, 1992, No.11.

* * *

a child in a room,

now he's a boy, now a curtain,

the floor absorbs his sandals

his gaze becomes stone — an inquisitive chisel,

fidgeting in the drawer, overturning the table.

from his kidneys, an impudent ash-tree grows,

and in his right lung salt begins to blossom.

he's a complete fragmentation, visible, though muddied,

the hearing sprouts within him, shackled to a bean.

he's no longer split in two by chromosomes,

he's more simple and transparent than fish fry,

and all five of his senses are familiar to my touch,

and his whole soul is wrapped in a paper cone.

(i know that the soul is a flexible hose,

inside, the blood completes its death work

— that our internal space is an uncomplicated aqualung,

but in the boy the soul grows, breathing nitrogen.)

the grass will take root inside him, and he'll let fall

some chance object from his hand to the grass

so that i might find either stars or comets there,

and collect them in an crushed, empty milk can.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

This translation first appeared in Five Fingers Review, 1992, No.11.

spiders

delicately, they carry the lens of their eyes

unable to trust in sound

like sailors waddling —

across the lid of the toilet

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

This translation first appeared in Five Fingers Review, 1992, No.11.

The following translations first appeared in Crossing Centuries: The New Wave in Russian Poetry, a new anthology of contemporary Russian poetry in English translation from Talisman House, Publishers. For more information about the anthology, visit the Talisman House website at — www.talismanpublishers.com

train

plants grow, racking the air,

urging a watery sap through the stems,

these blue-baby birds cry out in their nests

restless, thrusting out frail voices.

a train, derailed by partisans,

ripped loose from the rails — a senseless screeching

with a head full of steam and wasted brakes —

trampling brush and piercing a dense thicket.

like a curtain the plants closed around it,

spreading a deep sleep along the ditch, the embankment,

and here, the startled grass began to crawl toward the train

now concealed by a heavy, freighted shadow.

grass scuttling into the busted boiler,

into the engine guts where steam still angled up

from crushed pipes — its watery brain silent as radar,

raised from the depths of anabiosis.

and sliding on mould along the flue,

it penetrated the fire box — the coal cooled, a whistle,

and the air, liquefied by rude breathing,

flowed out, the engineer floating in it.

falling, he clutched his uncoordinated pieces,

but a sticker bush grew into his larynx,

wrist slung off, some broken thing,

his pulse plunged like a ball of mercury.

the fireman flung on his back outside,

wind rustled his eyebrows like leaves,

eyes hollow the pupils dissolved into pools,

mirroring a scuttling, squeaky ant.

but grass already surged alongside the boxcars,

waves pulsing as in a wind tunnel,

a draft from the cast-off platforms blew in the freighters

and ripples flitted across the coupe windows.

in that vestibule where we held each other tight,

the lips’ painted impress clotted in air

once we joined in catalysis here,

now silence forms a cube.

we came together so that, once parted,

we’d not see the washed-out features in the other,

still how were we to know that from now on two parentheses

of emptiness would be our punctuation mark.

it appears that we, like water, were spilled

in the past tense, in relic-like forests,

yet memory is still capable at half-speed

within me sustaining an oblong fear.

and now I catch a clotted moan, like a fly

pushing a transparent palm, like a shot,

I no longer want your blinded glance, surviving us

to slide along the coupe windows.

after death it’s easier to reinvent your story

aimlessly, but verbatim, in the language of grass

and all its words without noise, capacious —

unites in speech, tightening the stitches.

but better to shake off the remnants of touch,

as this speech becomes comprehensible and mute,

accessible to all, you unclasp consciousness,

which takes wing from your hand and flies homeward.

later, when grass scuttles in here through the cracks,

as in a vase, shoots up through a broken toilet bowl,

I want the two of us to spy

how grass occupies all, but will not find us.

and the remains of a train will hide in the grass,

and an access appearing in the grass’ rustle,

and a dream of grass creeping from boxcar to boxcar

and a tree growing, beautiful as an explosion.

thus by growing the grass thought

and the thought resembled grass

loving the object, holding it afloat in consciousness

from the very first touch.

and in the depths of its soul, grass was pleased

that it was, in fact, grass,

the rest not of grass belongs

involuntarily to the periphery of the world’s life.

once peering at the reflections in a pool’s glassy surface,

the grass, striving to understand what it was,

followed the elemental path of reasoning plants

from photosynthesis to intellect’s core.

and if it were to stop at grass,

were evolution to end with grass,

then life would would proceed without risk of end,

entrusted to steam-driven locomotion.

this is why the grass, having understood

the barrenness of other ideas, hurried

with rightful agitation toward the exploded boxcars,

where people were strewn on the grass.

and standing on tip-toe, it regarded itself with interest

in slippery bogs of sightless eyes:

the points of grass to grass seemed a forest

and evolution, it seemed, had succeeded.

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry

* * *

to Nina Iskrenko

like a glove, peel off your body

sashay before all as an unclothed soul,

what's there to torture over, a small bosom —

you're no longer wearing it.

meeting God is an uncomplicated business,

like proceeding as a class to the x-ray room,

at worst, all alone in the gynecologist's office,

in the end it's not important as being pregnant, or not,

but that the Gynecologist act with grace, nothing unseemly.

and after the check-up, you can walk with your head held high,

you see, the hedges of paradise are decorously arranged, like a park's,

a bit boring, sure, but these are the customs:

culling of the herd and this vegetarianism.

no longer in the crosshairs, unharnessing that heightened sense,

no whiff here of the Railway Construction Ministry,

or Shamakhanian¹ sausage²,

purely ethereal, no underwear even,

well, why so shy, what did you expect?

are you already convinced that life's trivialities and

blunders make up this earthly lot?

already seen enough of us from your rightful height?

found taller, thicker hedges for those arriving in your wake,

where we might sit for a snack and some other simple turn?

are you whistling off some biting verse, as you always could?

will you read it to us? does it matter that we'll be nagging,

like fools,

if life is only a text then death, too, begins from the preceding line

after an insignificant, lethal absence.

_____________________________

1) "Shamakhanian" refers to the Tsarina of Shamakhan (Shamakhanskaya tsaritsa)

from Aleksandr Pushkin's famous "Tale of the Golden Cockerel" (Skazka o

zolotom petushke).

2) This line as a whole refers to a passage in Nina Iskrenko's own untitled

poem dedicated to Mark Shatunovsky. The last stanza of that poem reads: "And I

stand muzzle still / on the minstrel's head / and I catch a whiff of the

Railway Construction Ministry / and of Shamakhanian sausage".

Translated by John High and Patrick Henry