Voronezh Notebooks Read online

  First Notebook

  1

  I live in big-time gardens!

  Vanka the porter might step out of the past.

  The wind serves the factory for free,

  A boardwalk teeters to nowhere across the fens.

  Black-ploughed night at the steppe’s rim;

  Frozen light, a string of coruscating beads.

  Behind the wall the pissed-off landlord

  Paces and retraces in his Russian boots.

  And the floorboard groans, lavishly—

  This ship-deck coffin lid.

  Can’t snooze among strangers—

  Only death, and this little stool, for company.

  April 1935

  2

  Headphones! My little squealers!

  I’ll remember the nights in Vorónezh:

  A voice half drunk on champagne

  And Red Square’s midnight sirens...

  How’s the subway? Quiet! Keep it to yourself...

  And don’t ask me how the buds burst open...

  And you, bell strokes of the Kremlin—

  Pinched in a point—speech from space...

  April 1935

  3

  Release me, restore me Vorónezh:

  You’ll deplore me—or ignore me,

  You’ll spurn me—or return me,

  Vagrant Vorónezh; raven, edge...

  April 1935

  4

  Gotta keep living, though I’ve died twice,

  And water’s driving the city crazy:

  How beautiful, what high cheekbones, how happy,

  How sweet the fat earth to the plow,

  How the steppe extends in an April upheaval,

  And the sky, the sky—pure Michelangelo...

  April 1935

  5

  What street is this?

  Mandelstam Street.

  What a crooked name!

  No matter how you twist it,

  It doesn’t come out straight.

  Nothing in him was stuck on right,

  His morals sure weren’t lily white,

  Which is why this street

  Or, better yet, this slum

  Is called, correctly,

  Mandelstam.

  April 1935

  6

  Black Earth

  All praised, all black, all cosseted and coddled,

  All open air and watchfulness, all ranged in tiny hills,

  All pulled apart, all organized in chorus—

  Your soil soaked with my native land, my will...

  Ploughed at daybreak, black shining to blue,

  The work abides in it unarmed, without defense—

  A thousand hills whisper of cultivation:

  See? There’s something un-encircled in this circumference.

  Still, all in all, the earth...is hammer blow, is accident.

  No use insisting, no matter how you grovel—

  Hearing tunes a crusted flute,

  The ear freezes to a morning clarinet...

  How sweet the fat earth to the plow,

  How the steppe extends in April upheaval!

  Be brave, vigilant, you there, black earth!...

  There’s an eloquent black silence in work.

  April 1935

  7

  Having stripped me of my seas, my flight, my running start,

  And given my feet the platform of the violent earth,

  How’d you do? Just great!:

  You couldn’t still my moving lips.

  May 1935

  8

  It’s true, I lie in the earth, moving my lips,

  But what I say will be learned in every school:

  The round earth is rounder in Red Square,

  And its slope asserts itself, willingly,

  The round earth is rounder in Red Square,

  And its slope is vast, unexpectedly

  Sloping down—to fields of rice—

  As long as one last slave is left alive.

  May 1935

  9 –10

  I

  How dark the River Kama seems,

  When its cities kneel on oaken knees.

  Web-vested, cheek to bearded chin,

  The burning spruce fly by, in water born again.

  On one hundred four oars the water was pinned,

  Swept upstream and downstream, Kazan to Cherdyn.

  I sailed the river with the curtain tight,

  The curtain tight and my head alight.

  And my wife with me—five nights no ease,

  Five nights no ease, trailed by three police.

  II

  I watched the eastern forest draw away.

  In full flood, the Kama breasted a buoy.

  I’d like to peel the mountain back with fire,

  But you’d just have time to seed the trees with salt.

  I’d like right then to settle in—get this!—

  In the ancient Urals, full of folks,

  And I’d like to preserve this plain—dead smooth, crazy—

  And wrap it in a greatcoat skirt, for safety.

  April–May 1935

  11

  Stanzas

  I

  I don’t want to blow my soul’s last cent

  With wastrels, wet behind the ears—I want instead

  To walk into the world—and among the worthy—

  Like a lone man on the fields of the collective.

  I love the pleated coat of the Red Army—

  Its ankle length, its smooth and simple sleeves,

  Its cut like a storm cloud on the Volga,

  Which, bursting on the shoulder and the chest,

  Falls right, not wasting its reserves,

  And rolls away in summertime.

  II

  A cursed cut, an absurd adventure

  Separated us, and now—get this!:

  Gotta keep living, breathing and bolshevizing,

  And, before I die, aggrandizing,

  Still stick around and play with folks!

  III

  Consider how in pigeon-like Cherdyn,

  Where the Oba smells and the Tobel swells,

  I got into a spat twelve inches long:

  The goats spit insults but I missed the battle,

  Like a rooster in the limpid shade of summer—

  The grub, the gob, the something more, the slander—

  I shouldered off the pecking of that beak. One leap,

  and I’m myself again.

  IV

  And you, Moscow, my delicate sister,

  When, on a plane, you find your brother

  Before the streetcar touches its first bell:

  More tender than the sea, more tangled than a mixture,

  Salad of milk, and window glass, and timber...

  V

  My country gabbed with me, chided me,

  Made peace with me, put me out of mind,

  But, witnessing, when I became a man

  It was aware—and focusing,

  Suddenly, it kindled me on fire

  With a ray reflected from the Admiralty.

  VI

  Gotta keep living, breathing and bolshevizing,

  Work the world, not even listening, myself my only friend.

  In the arctic dark I hear the throb of Soviet machines,

  And I remember it all: my German brothers’ necks

  And the gardener, the hangman, who kills spare time

  With the lilac hairpiece of the Lorelei.

  VII

  I haven’t been robbed, I haven’t bent,

  It’s just that I’m completely spent...

  Like the Song of Igor my cord is tense,

  And in my voice, asthmatic, sounds

  The earth, which is the last defense,

  Dry nectar of the vast black ground!

  May–July 1935

  12

  A day reared up on five heads. For five whole days

  I huddled, proud of space which rose like yeast.
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  The dream was larger than sound, but sound was older—sensitive, established,

  The Bolsheviks raced after us beneath the coachman’s lash.

  A day reared up on five heads and, infected with the dance,

  The cavalry rode, the black-capped mass of infantry advanced—

  In a swelling of the aorta-pulse of power in those white nights—

  no, in those white knives—

  The eye turned into needled flesh.

  But give me a bit of blue sea, enough to fit the eye of a needle,

  That the double escort race smartly along on wings of time.

  Dry mint Russian fable, wooden spoon: Hey! Where are you,

  You three strapping offspring of the GPU, of those iron doors?

  That Pushkin’s profligate production not fall

  In hands of parasites, our tribe of Pushkin scholars

  Grammerize in greatcoats with revolvers—

  Young lovers of doggerel with immaculate dentition.

  Give me a bit of blue sea, enough to fit the eye of a needle!

  The train heads for the Urals. Before our gaping mouths

  Garrulous Chapaev galloped from the screen—

  From behind a timber palisade—on a scrim of sheets—

  To drown—to mount—his steed.

  April–June 1, 1935

  13

  Talking from a soaking sheet—

  Get this! Even fish can speak—

  The sounding screen advanced

  Over me, over you, over all of us...

  Sneezing at a grotesque demise,

  A lethal cigarette between their teeth,

  The officers marched, in the latest style,

  Between the plain’s gaped-open thighs...

  There was an audible low hum

  Of airplanes, burnt to bits,

  A heavy blade of Sheffield steel

  Scraped the admiral’s cheeks...

  O my country, take my measure, refashion me, revise—

  Miraculous warmth of stitched-up earth!

  Chapaev’s rifle has choked—

  Help me! Untie me! Cut me down to size!...

  (April)–June 1935

  14

  We’re still completely, totally alive;

  They all still stroll the Union’s city streets

  Decked out in shirts and fancy shifts

  Of Chinese cloth with moths and leaves.

  And still the number one machine

  Abruptly collects the chestnut bribes,

  And spills them—tresses at once

  Thick and wise—on clean white sheets.

  There’s still enough of swallows and of swifts,

  The comet’s not yet made us lose our minds,

  But draws, with its pragmatic, purple ink,

  The form of stars and comet tails.

  May 25, 1935

  15

  Ingots forged of Roman nights,

  Nipple where young Goethe nursed—

  Let me answer this stuff; I’ll take no guff:

  Outside the law, whole depths of lives.

  June 1935

  16

  Though she’s died, can I still sing her praise?

  So powerful, so far away—

  The force of an alien love has dragged her to

  A violent, an ardent grave...

  Swallows, severe, with rounded brows

  Flew toward me from her tomb

  To tell me they had rested on

  Her icy bed in Stockholm.

  Your family boasts great-granddad’s violin;

  Your neck made it more handsome,

  And you parted your pink lips and laughed,

  In Italian and in Russian...

  I still preserve your painful memory,

  Wild thing, bear cub, Mignon,

  But the mill wheel’s locked away in snow,

  The trumpet of the postman’s frozen.

  June 3, 1935

  17

  Dead lashes frozen on St. Isaac’s,

  The fancy streets have turned to blue—

  The organ-grinder’s dead, his bear pelt too,

  And a foreign fire fills the hearth...

  The warden’s driven the fire out

  In a clutch of spreading beams,

  The round earth tears along, this cozy sphere,

  And a mirror mocks the know-it-all.

  On staircase landings—mist and separation,

  Breathing, breathing, and singing,

  And frozen in a shuba* Schubert’s talisman—

  Moving, moving, moving...

  June 3, 1935

  *A Russian fur coat.

  18

  The extra length of Paganini’s fingers

  Would make any troop of Gypsies shake a leg

  In a quick Czech dance, a Hungarian czardas,

  Or picking out a polonaise.

  But you, kid, vain and brazen,

  Whose sound swells like the Yenisei,

  Console me with your touch, you Polish cutie,

  And that mound of curls on your head

  Would grace the brow of Marina Mnishek.

  Little Miss Musician, your bow is putting on airs.

  Knock me out with a Chopin with chestnut hair,

  With a sober Brahms—No! Wait!

  Hit me with Paris, savagely alive,

  With a carnival of flour dust and sweat

  Or the heady froth of a young Vienna

  That frisks, in a conductor’s coat and tails,

  On a Danube with fireworks and leaps

  And a waltz that plays from coffin to the cradle,

  A Vienna radiant, like drunkenness.

  So play until your heart explodes,

  Play, a cat’s head yowling in your throat!

  There were three devils, the fourth is you,

  The last, marvelous and in full bloom!

  April 5–June 1935

  19

  Wave follows wave, breaks the back of a wave with a wave,

  Hurls itself at the moon with a slave’s despair,

  And the callow Janissary depths,

  The new, sleepless city of the waves,

  Stretches, startles, scrapes a ditch in the sand.

  And through the shadowy, the turbid air appear

  The ramparts of a wall not yet begun,

  And soldiers of suspicious sultans pitch

  From staircases of foam, dropping one by one,

  And icy eunuchs pass out cyanide.

  June 17, 1935

  20

  I’ll perform the reeking rite:

  In the opal here in front of me

  Lie seaside summer strawberries—

  Carnelians, doubly sincere,

  The agate, auntie to the ant,

  But my sweetheart is the simple stone,

  The gray and savage soldier of the deep,

  With whom no one, ever, is content.

  July 1935

  21

  Not as a butterfly, white as flour,

  Will I return to the earth my borrowed dust—

  I want my body, intelligent form,

  In street and country to be transformed:

  Vertebrate body, charred to ash,

  Conscious of its own specific size.

  Cries of dark green needles of the pines,

  Pine wreathes from the depths of wells

  Extend our lives and precious time,

  Support themselves on death machines—

  Red-banner hoops made out of boughs,

  Enormous, elementary wreaths!

  Comrades of the final call-up rose

  To labor in the leaden skies,

  In silence the infantry passed by,

  Their shouldered arms like exclamations.

  And a thousand antiaircraft guns—

  Their pupils either brown or blue—

  Straggled in disorder—men, men, men—

  And who’ll come after them?

  July 21, 1935–May 30, 1936<
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  Second Notebook

  22

  Out of the houses, out of the forest,

  Longer than a string of boxcars—

  Sound for the power of midnight labor,

  Sadko of the factories and fields.

  Blow, old man, breathe sweetly,

  Like Sadko, in Novgorod a guest

  Of the blue sea in its depths—

  Blow forever from the sink of centuries,

  Siren of Soviet cities.

  December 6–9, 1936

  23

  The Birth of a Smile

  When a child first begins to smile

  The bitter and the sweet part company,

  And the sober limits of that smile

  Open, oceanic, into anarchy.

  To him, everything’s unbeatably good:

  He plays, in glory, with the corners of his lips—

  And he catches up a rainbow seam

  To learn the nature, infinite, of things.

  On its own two feet, from water, matter rose—

  An influx, an arriving, from the mouths of snails—

  And an instant of Atlantis strikes the eyes,

  In a languid pose of praise and of surprise.

  December 8, 1936–January 17, 1937

  24

  I’ll marvel at the world a little more,

  The kids, the snow,

  But like a road, a smile’s authentic,

  Disobedient, no whore.

  December 1936–1938

  25

  Goldfinch, friend, I’ll cock my head—

  Let’s check the world out, just me and you:

  This winter’s day pricks like chaff;

  Does it sting your eyes too?

  Boat-tailed, feathers yellow-black,

  Sopped in color beneath your beak,

  Do you get, you goldfinch you,

  Just how you flaunt it?

  What’s he thinking, little airhead—

  White and yellow, black and red!

  Both eyes check both ways—both!—

  Will check no more—he’s bolted!

  December 9–27, 1936

  26

  Now the day’s some kind of callow yellow—

  Can’t make it out,

  And the sea gates scout me

  Through anchors and through mists...

  Softly, softly through the faded water

  The passage of the battleships,

  And the narrow, pencil-box canals

  Beneath the ice still darker...

  December 9–28, 1936

  27

  Not mine, or yours—but theirs,

  Complete, the power of the race:

  Reed and fipple use their air to sing,

  And, grateful, the snail lips of mankind