Voronezh Notebooks Read online

  Draw to themselves the burden of their breath.

  They have no name! Enter their marrow

  And you’ll inherit their kingdom—

  And for plain people, for their vivid hearts,

  Their wandering in windings and unwindings,

  You’ll reveal their joys, and all that

  Torments them—at flood tide and at slack.

  December 9–27, 1936

  28

  Deep in the mountain the idol rests

  In sweet repose, infinite and blest,

  The fat of necklaces dripping from his neck

  Protects his dreams of flood tide and of slack.

  As a boy, he buddied with a peacock,

  They gave him rainbow of India to eat

  And milk in a pink clay dish,

  And didn’t stint the cochineal.

  Bone put to bed, locked in a knot,

  Shoulders, arms, and knees made flesh,

  He smiles with his own dead-silent lips,

  Thinks with his bone, feels with his brow,

  And struggles to recall his human countenance...

  December 10–26, 1936

  29

  I’m in the heart of the century. The road is dim,

  My purpose, with time, grows old—

  And the ash tree sick of the staff,

  And copper’s mendicant mold.

  December 14, 1936

  30

  The master, factor of armaments,

  Tailor of blacksmith monuments,

  Will say to me: Don’t worry, father—

  We’ll sew you up one even better...

  December 1936 (?)

  31

  It’s the law of the pine forest:

  The harp and viol’s common peal.

  The trunks are naked, knotted up,

  But still the harps and viols

  Swell, as if each trunk

  Began to bend into aeolian harp

  And gave up, took pity on the roots,

  Took pity on the trunks, on their strength;

  And with the harp had raised the sound

  Of a viol, ringing in the bark—already brown.

  December 16–18, 1936

  32

  With the skinny blade of a Gillette

  A cinch to scrape the stubble of sleep—

  Let’s you and I remember

  That half-Ukrainian summer.

  You, you splendid peaks,

  Saints’ days of shaggy woods—

  The glory of a Ruisdael canvas,

  And for starters—just a bush,

  A blush of clay in amber and flesh.

  The earth goes straight up. How sweet

  To see the pure strata,

  To be master of a seven-roomed,

  Embraceable simplicity.

  Its hills, like graceful haystacks,

  Flew off toward distant destinies,

  Steppe-boulevards of roads,

  Like a chain of tents in scorching shade!

  And a willow lurched forward in the flame,

  A poplar stood up proud and tall...

  Over the yellow stubble-camp

  The rutted tracks of frozen smoke.

  But still the Don turned silver

  Like a half-breed, awkward, shallow,

  And gathering water with a half-dipper

  Was lost—like my soul,

  When, on its miserable bed,

  The burden of evenings drowsed,

  And spilling from the riverbanks

  The drunken trees caroused...

  December 15–27, 1936

  33

  Night. A road. First dream,

  Seductive and new...

  What dream? A radiant

  Tambov, sleeved in snow,

  Or the Tsna—ordinary river!—

  White, white, mantle white?

  Or myself on the fields of the collective—

  Air in the lungs and life which turns

  The sunflower with its terrible suns

  Directly into the depths of the eye?

  Beyond bread, beyond a home,

  A great dream comes:

  A hard day’s work; a sleepy rising,

  Turned into deep blue Don...

  Anna, Rossosh, Gremiach—

  Blessed will be their names—

  The eider whiteness of the snow

  From the window of a train!...

  December 23–27, 1936

  34

  Distant banners of a passing column

  Through the windows of a mansion,

  Frost and fever

  Bring the river nearer.

  And what’s that forest—spruce?

  Not spruce, a spruced-up violet—

  And what kind of birch is that?

  Who’s to know or care?—

  Only a prose inscribed on air,

  Illegible; evanescent...

  December 26, 1936

  35

  Where am I? What’s wrong with me?

  The steppe is naked without winter...

  Maybe it’s Koltsov’s stepmother...

  You’re joking—it’s goldfinch country!

  Only the empty city

  In an icy observation,

  Only the nighttime teapot

  In its solo conversation,

  In the dregs of the air off the steppes,

  A summoning of trains,

  And the Ukrainian drawl

  Of their lingering calls...

  December 23–25, 1936

  36

  One by one they fell into the deep,

  Bucketful of endless storms,

  From the nobleman’s estates,

  To the ocean’s very core.

  They fell, swaying themselves down,

  Gently, threatening they fell...

  Just look: the sky’s gained height—

  Roof and house, a fresh new home—

  And, in the street, light!

  December 26, 1936

  37

  When the goldfinch, in his airy confection,

  Suddenly gets angry, begins to quake,

  His spite sets off his scholar’s robes,

  Shows to advantage his cute black cap.

  And he slanders the hundred bars,

  Curses the sticks and perches of his prison—

  And the world’s turned completely inside out,

  And surely there’s a forest Salamanca

  For birds so smart, so disobedient.

  December 1936

  38

  Like a postponed present,

  That’s how winter feels—

  From the first I’ve loved

  Its uncertain extent.

  Fear makes it beautiful,

  Something terrible might occur—

  Before this forestless circle

  Even the crow’s lost his nerve.

  But all that’s most powerful is tenuous—

  Bright blue of these convexities—

  Ice half-circles at the temple of the streams,

  Lulling to a sleep without dreams...

  December 29–30, 1936

  39

  All the disasters that I see,

  All before me comes from this,

  This usurious, feline eye—

  Grandson of hanging greenery

  And water merchant—of the sea.

  There, where Kaschei

  Stuffs on scorching soups,

  Hoarding stones that speak, for luck,

  He awaits his guests—

  He pries the stones with pliers,

  Nibbles the gold of nails.

  And in his house, in drowsy rooms,

  Dead serious, a tomcat lives—

  In his feverish pupils lies

  A treasure chest of squinting peaks,

  And in those pupils, freezing,

  Suppliant and pleading—

  Spark-sphere feasts...

  December 29–30, 1936

  40

  Your pupil
, with its cortex like the heavens,

  Turned to the distance and prostrate on the earth,

  Is rescued by the provisos of

  Those delicate, spare lashes.

  It will live, made God,

  A long time in its native land:

  The startled maelstrom of an eye—

  Cast it after me!

  Even now it looks with pleasure

  On the passing centuries—

  Bright, incorporeal, iridescent,

  And, for the moment, suppliant.

  January 2, 1937

  41

  Smile, angry lamb, in Raphael’s canvas—

  A painting of the universal maw, now something else...

  Dissolve, in the gentle breath of a reed, the pearl’s anguish—

  The ocean salt’s been etched the blue, blue color of chenille...

  Color of airy theft and cavern densities,

  Pleats of a calm within the storm are spilled about its knees.

  On a rock more stale than bread—a thicket of young reeds,

  And an enchanting power floats the corner sky...

  January 2, 1937

  42

  When a sorcerer introduces

  In the trampled branches

  A whisper, color

  Chestnut, or bay—

  The faded, lazy hero

  Has no taste for song—

  Nor the tiny, the mighty,

  Winter warbler—

  Beneath the cornice of the day,

  Beneath its beetling brow,

  I’ll more quickly board

  The purple sleigh...

  January 9, 1937

  43

  Near Koltzov I,

  Like a falcon, guyed—

  No porch to my house,

  No word arrives.

  To my leg is tied

  A pine forest, blue,

  Like a herald without tidings,

  Horizon thrown wide.

  Little hills roam the plain—

  And moving, all is moving,

  Overnights, all nights, little nights—

  As if it’s the blind they were guiding...

  January 9 (?), 1937

  44

  Yeast, precious, of the world,

  The noise, the trouble, the tears—

  The beat of the rain,

  Of toil, brought to a boil,

  From what ore will we restore

  The loss of all that sounds?

  And for the first time you sense,

  In destitute memory, the sightless trench,

  Full to the brim with coppery water—

  And you head off after it,

  A disgrace to yourself, unknown—

  And blind, and a guide to the blind...

  January 12–18, 1937

  45

  He’s up and off, the imp with soggy fur—

  Hey you? Where to? Where to?—

  To thimbles punched by hooves,

  To the hurried tracks—

  Kopek by kopek he extracts

  The printed air of settlements...

  He spatters the reflections in the ruts—

  The exhausted tracks

  Stagger on a little longer

  Without mica, without cover...

  The wheel groans its way downhill

  Then calms itself—it’s no big deal!

  I’m bored: This little to-do

  Babbles obliquely—

  Is overtaken by another,

  Which mocks it; knocks it askew...

  January 12–18, 1937

  46

  You’re not alone. You haven’t died,

  While you still, beggar woman at your side,

  Take pleasure in the grandeur of the plain,

  The gloom, the cold, the whirlwinds of snow.

  In sumptuous penury, in mighty poverty

  Live comforted and at rest—

  Your days and nights are blest,

  Your sweet-voiced labor without sin.

  Unhappy he, a shadow of himself,

  Whom a bark astounds and the wind mows down,

  And to be pitied he, more dead than alive,

  Who begs handouts from a ghost.

  January 15–16, 1937

  47

  Alone, I look into the face of the cold:

  It—going nowhere; myself—from nowhere,

  And the whole breathing miracle of the plain

  Is perfectly flat, is ironed without a fold.

  And the sun squints in milky penury—

  Its blink is consoling, fearless.

  Ten-figure forest—almost like these...

  And the snow crunches in the eye like pure bread, sinless.

  January 16, 1937

  48

  Oh, this airless, indolent expanse!

  I’m completely sick of it—

  Catching its breath, the horizon opens wide—

  A bandage, please, for both my eyes!

  Better to endure the fact of layered sand

  In the dentilled banks of the Kama:

  I would staunch its timid flows,

  Its ripples, margins, depths.

  We’d get on well—a century, an instant—

  Jealous of the rapids under siege,

  I’d listen, beneath the bark of flowing trees,

  To the fibrous procession of its rings...

  January 16, 1937

  49

  What to do with the slaughter of the plains,

  With the endless famine of their miracle?

  It’s just that the vision we discern in them,

  We see ourselves, we behold in sleep—

  And still the question swells: Where to? Where from?

  If after them another, crawling slowly, comes,

  The one at whom we cry out in our dreams—

  The Judas of the unengendered spaces?

  January 16, 1937

  50

  As feminine silver, burning,

  Does battle with admixture and air,

  So gentle labor silvers

  The iron of the plough, the song-maker’s singing.

  January 1937 (?)

  51

  Me, right now, I’m in a spiderweb

  Of light—light-chestnut, dark-stranded.

  The people need light and air, a luminous blue,

  Need bread and snow from Elbrus, too.

  And I have no one to advise me,

  Hardly likely that such I’ll find:

  Neither in the Crimea nor in the Urals

  Are stones so transparent, so lamenting.

  The people need a verse that’s secret, of their kind,

  To once and for all wake up from it,

  And with a surge of chestnut, of flaxen curls—

  With its very sound—to be cleansed of it...

  January 19, 1937

  52

  As a star-stone somewhere whacks the earth awake,

  A disgraced verse falls, paternity: unrecognized—

  Inexorable, to its maker, this discovery.

  No one will judge him—it can’t be otherwise.

  January 20, 1937

  53

  I hear, I hear the early ice,

  Rustling under the bridges,

  I recall a luminous intoxication,

  Swimming over our heads.

  From the cruel stairs, from the square

  With jutting palaces,

  Alighieri sang with greater power

  Of the circle of his own Florence

  With exhausted lips.

  Just so, the granite, grain by grain,

  Gnaws at my shadow with its eyes,

  Sees in the night a string of posts,

  Which by day turn back to houses,

  Or my shadow twiddles its thumbs,

  And shares with you a yawn,

  Or makes a stir among folks,

  Warmed on their wine and sky,

  And feeds its bitter bread

  To the petulant swans...
/>   January 22, 1937

  54

  Where can I hide in this January?

  Wide-open city with a mad death grip...

  Can I be drunk from sealed doors?—

  I want to bellow from locks and knots...

  And the socks of barking back roads,

  And the hovels on twisted streets—

  And deadbeats hurry into corners

  And hurriedly dart back out again...

  And into the pit, into the warty dark

  I slide, into waterworks of ice,

  And I stumble, I eat dead air,

  And fevered crows exploding everywhere—

  But I cry after them, shouting at

  Some wickerwork of frozen wood:

  A reader! A councillor! A doctor!

  A conversation on the spiny stair!

  February 1, 1937

  55

  I love a frozen exhalation,

  The steam of a wintry confession:

  Me—I’m me; reality—is reality...

  And a kid, red as a bulb,

  Of his own sled lord

  And master, tears by swimmingly,

  And I—in a spat with the world and my own will—

  Will make peace with this plague of sleds—

  Their silvered parentheses, their tassels—

  So let the century fall, softer than a squirrel,

  Softer than a squirrel by the gentle stream—

  Half-heaven in felt boots, ankles...

  January 24, 1937

  56

  Amid the noise and scurry of the people,

  In railway stations, steamship docks,

  The century’s signpost in its power stands guard,

  The flutter of its eyebrows starts.

  I get it! He gets it! You get it!

  Then take me where you want to go!—

  To the terminal, a wilderness of words,

  The waiting by the powerful flow

  Of the river—that stop’s now far away,

  The boiling water in the tank,

  The tin cup on the slender chain,

  The eyes obscured by mist.

  Gone the weighty dialect of Perm,

  Gone the dustup between neighbors in the coach,

  And they delight and torment me, those eyes

  Which from the wall observe me with reproach.

  Top secret, this matter of the future,

  With our pilots, the workers on our farms,

  With our comrade river, our comrade forest,

  With our comrade towns...

  What once was can’t be recalled for certain,

  The burning lips, hard-hearted words—

  And a rumor, arriving, of iron leaves

  Struck, fluttered the white curtain...

  And in fact, everything was peaceful:

  Only a steamship sailed along the river,

  And buckwheat bloomed behind the cedar,

  A fish moved in the water’s murmur...

  So I went to him—to his very core—