Voronezh Notebooks Page 4
Entering the Kremlin without a pass,
Sundering the canvas of distances,
My head, heavy with guilt, bowed low...
January 1937
57
Where’s the strangled, shackled cry?
Where’s Prometheus—support and sidekick of the rock?
And where’s the kite—the yellow-eyed lock
Of his talons, glowering as he flies?
That can’t be—there’d be no more tragedy,
But just these aggressive lips—
But these lips lead straight to the core,
To the Sopho-woodcutter, the Aeschy-stevedore.
He is echo and hello, he is signpost—no, a ploughshare...
The swollen-time theater of stone and air
Struggles to its feet, all want to see them all:
The living, the destroyed, and those not masters of their fall.
January 19–February 4, 1937
58
Like Rembrandt, that martyr to chiaroscuro,
I dropped deeply into silenced time,
And the bite of my burning rib
Is neither by the watchmen of the dark protected
Nor by this soldier who sleeps out in the storm.
If you forgive me, marvelous brother,
And master of the green-black dark, and father—
But the falcon-feather’s eye,
And the candescent casket in the midnight harem
Disturb without pity, disturb for no good reason,
The anxious tribe, with skins of twilight.
February 4, 1937
59
Breaks in round bays, and shingle, and blue,
And a slow sail continued by a cloud—
I hardly knew you; I’ve been torn from you:
Longer than organ fugues—the sea’s bitter grasses,
Fake tresses—and their long lie stinks,
My head swims with iron tenderness,
The rust gnaws bit by bit the sloping bank...
On what new sands does my head sink?
You, guttural Urals, broad-shouldered Volga lands,
Or this dead-flat plain—here are all my rights,
And, full-lunged, gotta go on breathing them.
February 4, 1937
60
I sing when my throat’s wet, my soul—dry,
My gaze just moist enough, when my thoughts don’t lie:
Is this wine OK? These skins good stuff?
Is it healthy, this throb of Colchis in the blood?
Silent, without language, my chest’s uneasy:
I sing no longer—now it’s just my breath,
Ears sheathed in mountains, head deaf...
Selfless song of praise—by me, for me:
Solace for friends—pitch for an enemy.
Cyclops song; sprung from moss—
Solo-voiced gift of the hunting life,
Sung on horseback, on the heights,
Mouth wide open; with all one’s might,
In rectitude and anger; only wanting this,
To bring the young pair sinless to their kiss...
February 8, 1937
61
Armed with the eyesight of skinny wasps,
Who sip the earth’s axis, the slipping earth,
I take it all in, whatever comes my way,
And I learn it all by heart, uselessly...
And I don’t paint, I don’t sing,
Don’t rosin the black-voiced bow:
Just empty myself into life, and love
To envy the seditious, imperious wasp.
If only I, stalling sleep and death,
Could somehow, someday catch
The chirp of the air and summer warmth,
Hear the slipping earth, the slipping earth...
February 8, 1937
62
Their vision was keener than a sharpened scythe—
From a drop of dew, a cuckoo in the corner of each eye—
Even so, at full stretch, they barely managed to discover
The wealth of stars in solitary splendor.
February 9, 1937
63
He still recalls my worn-out shoes—
The slick splendor of their soles,
And I, his: like him tin-eared,
Black-haired, a neighbor to Mt. David.
Touched up with chalk and whiting,
The ascending pistachio streets:
Air—stair—farrier—mare—air,
Oaklets, plane trees, lazy elms...
And the feminine chain of leafy letters,
Vision-tipsy in the membrane of light—
And the city, so capable, takes off into timber,
Into youthful, aging, summer.
February 7–11, 1937
64
My dream defends a dream of the Don,
And the maneuvers of the tortoises unfold—
Their high-speed restless carapace,
And the carpets, curious, of people’s speech...
In battle, straight talk moves me—
To defend the living, to defend my country,
Where death sleeps like an owl by day...
Between chiseled ribs the glass of Moscow burns.
Irresistible, the Kremlin’s words—
In them is the defense of the defense;
And head and brow and battle dress,
Amicably assembled with the eyes.
And this earth—and other countries—hear news
Of war, falling from the choral cornucopia—
No slave will be slave, neither woman nor man—
And cheek to cheek the clock and chorus singing.
February 11, 1937
65
Like wood and copper, Favorski’s flight—
In the coopered air we are neighbors in our times,
And, together, the layered fleet compels us,
Fleet of sawn-up oaks and copper-sycamore.
And in rings the pitch is angry still, and drips,
But perhaps the heart is only startled flesh?
It’s my own heart’s fault, and the heart-part which
Is an hour swollen to infinity.
Hour which satisfies countless friends,
Hour of menacing squares, with happy eyes...
With my own eyes I circumscribe the square,
All this square with its wilderness of flags.
February 11, 1937
66
Into the fastness, into the lion’s pit I pitched,
Sinking deeper and deeper and deeper,
Trembling beneath the sound of the downpour—
Stronger than a lion—than the Pentateuch more powerful.
As nearer and nearer came your call—
To the tribe’s commandments; to those who came before—
In the deep of ocean pearls,
In the meek baskets of Tahitians...
Continent of castigating song,
In the depths of that rich voice come nearer!
The sweet-savage face of wealthy daughters
Not worth your great-grandma’s little finger.
My time is still not ending,
And I accompany the universal joy,
As an organ, in an undertone,
Follows a woman singing.
February 12, 1937
Third Notebook
67
Verses on the Unknown Soldier
I
Let this air be witness
To his long-range heart,
And in the trenches, hyperactive, voracious,
Ocean without window—vital substance.
These stars are such informers!
They have to see everything—Why?—
In the judgment of the judge and of the witness,
In the ocean without window, vital substance...
The rain, stingy with its seed,
Recalls its nameless manna,
As a forest of crosses marks
&nb
sp; An ocean—or a battleground.
People will come, freezing, sickly,
To kill, to suffer cold and hunger—
And in his famous grave lies
The agreed-on, unknown soldier.
Teach me, sickly swallow,
Who’s forgotten how to fly,
How to cope with this airy tomb
Without rudder or wing.
And in Mikhail Lermontov’s stead
I’ll give you the bitter news
How only the grave cures all ills,
And a socket of air sucks us in.
II
With hurled grape
These worlds threaten us,
And they hang, sequestered cities,
Pavilions of the spreading constellations,
Like golden malaprops, like slanders,
Like berries of the poisonous cold—
Golden grease of constellations...
III
Arabian mash, chopped-up bits,
Light of speedsters, ground to a ray,
In my retina the ray resides,
Its shoe soles sticking to the side.
Millions of dead—yours for almost nothing!—
Have worn a path in nothingness—
Good night! I wish you all the best,
On behalf of this earth’s fortresses.
Sky an incorruptible fosse,
Sky of endless, wholesale dead—
For you, from you, together,
I follow my lips headlong into gloom—
Behind the craters, the rockslides and embankments
Where it delayed, embayed in mist—
The sullen, poxed, and smoke-wrapped
Genius—torn asunder!—of the tomb.
IV
Well dies the infantry,
And well sings the chorus of the night,
Over the flattened smile of Schweik,
And over the bird-pike of Quixote,
And over the chivalrous metatarsal of a bird.
And the guy makes friends with the gimp—
There’ll be work for both of them for sure,
And the little family of wooden crutches
Knocks on the century’s palisade—
Hey, friendship!—earthly sphere!
V
Is that why the skull must spread
Side to side—across the head
So that armies cannot colonize
The beloved orbits of its eyes?
Life itself expands the skull
Side to side—across the head;
It’s teased by the purity of its seams,
Gets clearer with its dome of wisdom,
Bubbles with ideas, dreams its own dreams—
Fatherland of the fatherland, chalice of chalices—
Hat stitched with stellar ribs—
Shakespeare’s father—cap of happiness...
VI
Ash-tree avidity, sycamore sagacity,
Heads for home, blushing slightly,
As if uniting in fainting fits
Both skies with their dreary fire.
But for us there’s only union in excess,
Before us not disaster but a test,
And a battle for a minimum of breath,
A glory which inspires...no one.
And uniting my consciousness
With half-unconscious existence,
Do I, indiscriminate, choke down this slop,
Consume my own head beneath this fire?
And why prepare this magic-box
Beforehand in empty outer space
If the white stars, turning,
Slightly blushing, head for home?
Can you sense—stepmother of a Gypsy camp of stars,
Night—what now is, and what’s to come?
VII
Aortas strain with blood,
And running through the ranks a little whisper:
“I was born in ninety-four...”
“I was born in ninety-two...”
And clutching in my fist the worn year
Of my birth, with the crowd, all together,
I murmur with a mouth drained of all blood,
“I was born in the night of the second and third
Of January, ninety-something-or-other,
An unreliable year, and the centuries
Surround me with fire.”
February–March, 1937
68
I beg of you, France, your honeysuckle and earth,
As a sign of your pity and favor,
The truths of your turtledoves, the little white lies
Of the vines in their gauzy divisions...
In mild December your closely cropped air
Is frosted—wealthy, offended...
But a violet in jail—gone crazy with space!,
Whistles—sarcastic and careless...
Where it once seethed, cleansed itself of its king,
The street in July is broken...
And now, in Paris, in Chartres, and in Arles,
The boss is good old Charlie Chaplin—
In a potful of sea, with precision confused,
For the flower girl he swaggers akimbo...
Where, with a rose on its breast in a two-towered sweat,
The shawl made of webs turns to stone,
It’s a shame that this carousel, grateful for air,
Turns, breathing, in time with the town—
Then bow down your head, little godless one,
With a nanny goat’s golden glances,
And so, with your scissors, lisping and curved,
Tease the mounds of your miserly roses.
March 3, 1937
69
I saw a lake stood on end,
Fish played with a rose, trimmed
In a wheel, house fresh and new.
Fox and lion fought in a canoe.
Miseries peered from within three barking arches—
Enemies of other unhidden arcs.
A gazelle galloped the violet span,
The cliff retired suddenly to its towers—
Sodden, the honest sandstone rebelled,
In the middle of the handmade cricket city
A pip-squeak ocean will rise from the clear river
And fling cupfuls of water at the clouds.
March 4, 1937
70
On a game board, scarlet, crimson,
On the knight piece of a tumbling mountain—
Three times satiate with snows,
Carried high, sleigh-bound, sleepy,
The half-coastal home for horses, the half-city,
Harnessed with a halter of red embers,
Warmed through with yellow mastic,
Burned, complete, to caramelized sugar.
Don’t look for the heavenly fat of winter,
The downfall of the Flemish skater,
Nor caws here, cheerful, half-cocked,
The midget band in earflap hats—
And since the simile’s OK by me,
Cut short my plans, in love with difficulty,
As the smoke whips away the root of the maple,
Fleeing on stilts, dried out...vital...
March 6, 1937
71
I’ll sketch this out; I’ll say this quietly—
Because its moment is still not evident:
The game of the unconscious sky will be
Accomplished later, with experience...
And beneath the time-soaked sky
Of Purgatory, we frequently forget
That the blessed storehouse of the heavens
Is our home, limitless and present.
March 9, 1937
72
The sky of evening fell in love with a wall—
Sky slashed to bits with the light of scars—
Fell over it; burst into light,
Transformed itself in thirteen heads.
Here it is—my sky of night,
I stand before it l
ike a kid:
My eyes ache; my back grows cold,
I gather strength to batter it—
And at each tolling of the ram
Stars without heads rain down:
New gashes in the grand design—
Smoke of unfinished timelessness...
March 9, 1937
73
What to do?—I’m lost in the sky.
Let him answer—he who’s nearest by...
Easier for you all to ring
The nine discuses of Dante.
It’s not for me to separate from life—which dreams
Of murder—and ends up with caresses,
So that in the ears, the eyes, the sockets of the eyes
Strikes a Florentine sadness.
Don’t crown me, don’t crown me
With laurel, with its spiky tenderness,
Better you split my heart in two,
Into bits of ringing blue...
And when I die, all used up,
Friend in life of everything alive,
Let the echo of the sky ring out
Throughout my chest—far and wide!
March 9 (?), 1937
74
What to do?—I’m lost in the sky.
Let him answer—he who’s nearest by!
Easier for you all to ring
The nine discuses of Dante,
To choke, turn black, turn blue...
If I’m not past date, or all used up—
You who stand over me—
If you’re a bon vivant, or in your cups,
Pour me strength unmixed with empty froth
To drink to the health of this tower which spins,
A light blue, crazy and pugnacious...
Dovecote, birdhouse, blackness,
Shadow figures of the deepest blue—
Vernal ice, best ice, last ice of spring,
Clouds—enchantment warriors—Hush!
They’re leading a storm cloud in harness!
March 9–10 (?), 1937
75
Maybe this is it, the point of madness,
Maybe this is your conscience—
The knot of life, in which we’re known,
In which we come into our own...
As in cathedrals of hyper-vital crystals,
The conscientious spider of the light
Looses its rays among the ribs, and then,
In a single beam, gathers them again.
Grateful shafts of limpid lines,
Directed by a quiet ray,
Will sometimes be gathered up, will join again,
Like houseguests with an innocent expression—
Only here, on this earth, not in heaven,
As if this house were filled with music—
Don’t wound them; don’t frighten them away—
Wonderful if we live to see that day...