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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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—
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