From The Kenyon Review, New Series, Winter 1979, Vol. 1, No. 1
Translated from Russian by Alan Myers and the author
Birds don’t fly through my skylight nowadays.
A girl, like a beast, guards her noble place.
If I chance to slip up on nobody’s
cherry-stone, I don’t fall since friction’s
increased with the failed velocity.
The heart, like a squirrel in brushwood, is tossing up
ribs. And the throat celebrates the atrocity
of old age; lists its huge afflictions.
Ageing! Hail to thee, senility.
Blood flows as slowly as chilly tea.
Limbs, former pride of the whole vicinity,
hurt my vision. And rather gingerly
I stuff the threatened fifth field of feeling—
when taking my shoes off—with cotton fillings.
The man with a spade is now a fitting
sight. As the knife said to the injury.
Rightly so! The body repents its proclivities.
All these singing, weeping and snarled activities.
As for my dental cave, its cavities
rival old Troy on a rainy day.
Joints cracking loud and breath like a sewer,
I foul the mirror. It’s premature
to talk of the shroud. But you may be sure,
those who’ll carry you out besiege the doorway.
Well met, then, joyful, young, unfamiliar
tribe! Buzzing around my jugular,
time has discovered at last its singular
sweet-meat in my resilient cranium.
Thoughts are uncombed and a pogrom scours
my scalp. Like Ivan’s queen in her tower,
all fibres sense the dark breathing powers;
I scramble the bedding but try to carry on.
Frightening! That’s it, exactly, frightening.
Even when all the wheels of the train keep thundering
below your waist-line, there is no faltering
for the flight of fancy. Like the amnesia-
stricken gaze of a graduate with his freckled face,
who confuses a bra with a pair of spectacles,
pain is weak-eyed and death in its speckledness
looks like the vague outlines of Asia.
All that I could have lost has been totally
lost. But also I’ve gained approximately
all those things I was in for. Oddly
enough, even a cuckoo’s crooning in darkness
moves me little—let life be vilified
by her plangent notes, or affirmed and verified.
Ageing is growth of a new but a very fine
hearing that only to silence hearkens.
Ageing! The body reeks of mortality,
that is, of what’s useless to life. From my metallic brow
the radiance cast over this locality
vanishes. And at noon a black search-light harbours
in my sunken pupils. The strength, the gallantry
are stolen away from my muscles cowardly.
But I do not search for a gallow-tree:
shameful to take on the Lord’s own labours.
The point is, most likely, pure cowardice.
Fear. The technical side of the enterprise.
It’s the imminent necrosis’ menacing old device:
any erosion begins with willing,
the minimum of which is the heart, the basis
of stasis. Or so I learned while in that oasis
of school. Remove, dear chums, your faces!
Let me out into open valley!
I was much like the rest, that is, lived a similar
life. Would appear in halls with glycinia.
Drank a fair bit. Dragged my fool under the skin of a . . .
Used to take what was given. The soul didn’t hanker for
what wasn’t hers. Had a stable ground,
fashioned a lever. Or would produce a sound
from my hollow pipe fitting the space around.
What still to say before curtain-fall!
Listen, my boon brethren and my enemies!
What I’ve done, I’ve done not for fame or memories
in this era of radio-waves and cinemas,
but for the sake of my tongue, of my native letters.
For which sort of devotion, of a zealous bent
(“heal thyself, doctor,” as the saying went)
denied a chalice at the feast of the fatherland,
now I stand in a strange place. Name hardly matters.
It’s windy, dank, dark. And it’s windy. Hence
midnight flings boughs and their leafage onto fence
and roof-tiles. Now I can state with confidence:
here I’ll live out my days, losing gradually
hair, teeth, consonants, verbs and suffixes,
with this hat of mine ladling the ocean surface, as
with Prince Igor’s helmet, just to reduce its size,
munching raw fish, behaving naturally.
Ageing! The time of success. Of acknowledging
truth. Of its sullied linen. Of banishment. Of discouraging
pain. As for the latter, I neither nourish it,
nor dismiss it. If it gets hard, annoying,
I’ll yell out: self-restraint is just dumb and morbid.
As for now, I can take a bit more of it.
If an ember still glows inside this monolith,
it’s not reason, just blood that keeps circling, going.
This song isn’t the desperate howl of deep distress.
It’s the species’ trip back to the wilderness.
It’s, more aptly, the first cry of speechlessness
whose domain could be thought just a total feat
of sounds voiced by a once scarlet and
wet—now hardening into a moribund
more or less matter—strong vocal vent.
Change for the better. Or that’s my view of it.
Lo! that’s the point of my speech, I’m proud of making it:
of the body’s conversion into a naked thing,
object-against a vast, vacant and
empty space, be it lit up by so much fire.
Still, change for the best, since fright, horror, shudders
are alien to objects. So little puddles
won’t be found under objects like under others,
even when your small object is to expire.
Just like Theseus out from the lair in the Minos ring,
coming up for air with the pelt of that menacing
beast, not a horizon I see but a minus sign
on my previous life. This line is clearly
keener than a hero’s sword, and shorn off by its cutting blade
the dearest part. Thus they take away the costly blend
from a sober man, and salt from the bland.
I feel like crying. But it’s pointless, really.
Beat then the drum of your faith in shears
where the fate of all matter these days inheres.
Only a good-sized loss in the local spheres
makes a mortal equal to God. (This arching
observation is worthy of real emphasis
even in the view of amorous nakedness.)
Beat, see how much sticks and drums can take of this,
marching along while your shadow’s marching.
