so happy
that I glimpsed the edge of the horse.
It was smooth,
without riddles,
clean and clear as a brook.
It shook its mane,
a little strained,
it said,
“I’d like a bit of soup.”
I was the chairman of the congress,
I had come to the assembly.
“Educate me, O Creator,”
and God answered, “very well.”
Sideways turned
the horse and
I looked
into its hand.
The horse wasn’t frightening at all.
I decided
I had sinned,
meaning, God deprived me
of body, mind, and will.
Yesterday came back to me.
In boiling water
there was winter,
in the stream
there was a prison,
in the flower
diseases acute,
in the beetle
a useless dispute.
I didn’t see meaning in anything.
God, maybe you’re absent?
What a disaster.
No, I saw it all at once,
I picked up the day’s mute vase,
I spoke out a funny phrase:
miracle loves to warm its heels.
Light appeared,
words appeared,
the world was spent,
the eagles fell silent.
The man became a demon here
in the meantime
like a miracle
in an hour disappeared.
I forgot about existence,
I again
contemplated
the distance.
1931–1934
[E.O.]
Four Descriptions
ZUMIR
Know, that in order to inform all people,
beasts, animals, and humans,
of our death, we shall today
converse with birdlike voices,
to laud the wood, the flood, and nature
intending. Did anyone exist?
Perhaps birds or officers
and even that’s unascertainable
yet still one cannot cannot cannot
ignore even these cases,
birds have no elbows,
who counted their seconds.
KUMIR
I’ll interrupt you.
ZUMIR
What?
KUMIR
Interrupt you.
ZUMIR
Interrupt.
KUMIR
I did.
ZUMIR
I resume.
CHUMIR
I lay in thoughts,
observing various things,
objects. I desired.
Everything around me burned.
Everything around me ran. It ran.
And yet when you attend to time,
everything seems to run,
the mountain seems to tremble,
the sea seems to amble,
sand speaks to a grain of sand,
and the flowers and the tea in the saucer
wrestle like halibut.
The moon with the moon,
star with star,
snow with water
and snow’s gray matter
and bread with butter—
everywhere battles are visible
even if they are invisible.
We sleep, we sleep.
TUMIR
What is there in the world? Nothing is, everything only may be?
KUMIR
What are you saying? The raccoon is. The beaver is. The sea is.
TUMIR
The contents of this world
cannot be counted.
Wineglass and song,
beetle and flattery,
the foxes running through the forest,
poems, eyes, crane, and tomtit
and the automatic water,
bronze, memory, planet, star,
simultaneously unfilled
they rock on the ledge of the wave.
We cannot see from every side
the crow or the spider,
at any given time
they lie like flies supine.
At another they sit up and wiggle.
Go catch them. Lo, they giggle.
We can’t make out the world in all its detail,
each thing we see is pointless and fracted,
and all this makes me sad.
KUMIR
Scary is the night and black,
life is made up of lack.
People pity each other,
they shed tears on hands,
press cheek to cheek,
hold on tight to the dream.
The dream is immortal.
A man lies
in bed,
he embraces a maiden.
A candle smokes on the table,
reaching for the unfathomable.
Wallpaper stays calm
and evenly the glasses breathe.
The night seems tranquil,
the mathematical lights twinkle.
Lust came upon this man
and so lies in the wife’s embraces.
He thinks, what the hell
everything around me is good and dead,
except this maiden wife,
so well constructed and alive.
He takes some foliage in his hand
and decorates her belly
and beautifies her with musical flowers
and sings to her in noisy syllables.
But the night will suddenly
start to teem,
the candle will wilt,
the wife shall scream.
She’ll flee to the shore of the bed
where breaks the surf of the night
and the froth of the wave and change
will range before them.
Stone objects will awaken
and wooden floors
and by the ceiling like planets
divine eagles shall soar.
TUMIR
So there’s no sure knowledge of the hour,
the hour is no detail of place.
The hour is fate.
O refresh me with iodine.
THIRD UMIR (AYUSCHIY)*
I wish to tell the story of my death.
Already for six months the war went on.
I sat in trenches. I drank no wine.
I saw no woman’s forget-me-not.
I saw no dreams. I had no cot.
I heard not one joke.
Bullets flew by with a continual whine.
The enemy’s German hands
did not fear our bayonets.
The enemy’s Turkish heads
were not frightened by our gods.
The enemy’s Austrian torso
valued itself only so-so.
All they cared about was winning.
We had no idea how we should be behaving.
We captured Przemyśl and Osowiec.
Each one of us was glad,
magnate Siberian or merchant
or general so old he lived in an armchair.
We were all laughing. It turned out
we put the enemy to rout,
conquered and killed him.
The enemies lie without heads
on the field of glory,
their widows cry ay ay ay,
their daughter Olgas are truly sorry.
We found ourselves in patriotic delirium
but this is only from a general vantage point.
The wood does not deserve contempt,
the river flows, simultaneously remaining in its shelf.
What shall I say about myself?
FIRST UMIR (AYUSCHIY)
I’ll interrupt you.
THIRD UMIR (AYUSCHIY)
What?
FIRST UMIR
(AYUSCHIY)
Interrupt you.
THIRD UMIR (AYUSCHIY)
Interrupt me.
FIRST UMIR (AYUSCHIY)
I did.
SECOND UMIR (AYUSCHIY)
I resume.
THIRD UMIR (AYUSCHIY)
I was lying in a trench as I read
Guy de Maupassant in bed,
becoming irritated by reveries
where I caressed some luscious Melanie.
O how I wished to manhandle some maiden
in the vicinity of my demise.
Such thoughts were bad and
believe me was I punished on my belly
by the scratching of fleas and the bites of lice.
All of a sudden
orderly Yermakov
screams and runs out
in a hurry to Pskov.
Sergeant major Putyata
abruptly enters,
shouts then goes off
wearing rich clothes.
And all the privates
loosening bayonets,
as policemen pass by,
they holler banalities.
The whole army runs
because everybody notices.
Warsaw abandoned,
Riga, Minsk, and Pavel Pavlovich Caucasus.
And I walked out on the riverbank
with empty vials in my hand
and sadly gazed at the inopportune defeat,
how swiftly the hapless battle came to an end.
An angel spun above,
dragging a soul to paradise,
he whispered, Your hour hurries hither,
you shall not sleep with your fiancée Lisa.
Out of the blue I heard a shot
and my breast shook.
Already I lay in a lurch
under a smiling birch.
I was at once wounded and assassinated.
It happened in the year 1914.
FOURTH UMIR (AYUSCHIY)
Yes, it’s true. One must think about time just as one must think about the soul. It’s true.
SECOND UMIR (AYUSCHIY)
I wish to tell the story of my death.
I was sitting in my living
I was sitting in my lacking
I was sitting in my painting
I was sitting in my antiquated
I was sitting in my not elongated
room.
I was sitting at a table
was not rowing with an oar
I was not composing parts
into ones.
I was waiting for guests
without bones.
And the guests came:
Maria Pavlovna Smirnova,
presiding judge Gryaznoff,
old, glum, fat, widowed,
and Zernoff.
A general with the missuses,
cadet Palmov
and hussar Boretsky, whose gut
made him look like a walnut.
The evening proceeded as spectacularly
as always, in food and conversation.
The general worked up a rage
for serf emancipation,
he was a rebel:
We must not free the peasants,
they find freedom an infernal torment,
they’d rather have kasha and the whip.
No, we should show compassion,
said the merchant Vaviloff,
fate has oppressed them enough.
An argument appeared then for an hour,
providing us with welcome entertainment.
Yet suddenly I felt unease
and dull anxiety I felt,
uneasily looked at the general
and at Vaviloff.
Boretsky was joking with the ladies,
the none-too-sturdy chair he sat on creaked.
I headed for the mirror in dismay
and then it seemed that someone followed me.
The mirror showed Skvortzoff,
he died eight years ago.
His eyes half-closed,
and his blue cheeks unshaven,
his dead and stupid gaze
beckoned me out of the living room.
They whispered, you are old and weak,
and it was then that I had my third apoplectic stroke.
I died.
It happened in the year 1858.
FIRST UMIR (AYUSCHIY)
Yes dead men, we drink from a joyless cup,
our memories lack comfort.
I too was once alive
and loved the Gulf of Finland.
I gazed at the pockmarked situation of water
and took in the crash of the surf.
Repin’s paintings about the barge-pullers on the Volga
had my affection,
and Isadora without stockings
was so interesting. Yes, all this once was real.
I read the poems of Balmont
and cherished the State Duma
like some wild puma
where deputies like roosters met in combat.
The excellent poems of Alexander Blok
like messy cockscombs on tormented seas
occasioned to caress our ear,
raising our spirit.
We bravely felt contempt for the Church,
we railed at God and clergy,
aviators were our love
as we crushed bedbugs unmusically.
We approved of the airplane.
Alone among the forests then
walked the theosophist,
and Count Tolstoy was no longer ready
to lie down next to a lady.
In the year 1906,
then 7, then 8, the one for which we prayed
ran and hid like the promised day
and tarried.
We all subsisted hour by hour
and often found ourselves in the cuckoo tower.
And many among us, picking up a gun
after a dinner of meatballs,
tried to swallow the gun as well,
to square ourselves with life,
to call it a day.
KUMIR
I’ll interrupt you.
FIRST UMIR (AYUSCHIY)
Interrupt me.
So I one day
took up this occupation.
I understood. How pointless is life,
upon this wide dark earth
there is no place for me.
So I grew lucid,
exclaimed, Farewell forever deputy’s daughter
and mineral water,
there will never be me again.
I was sitting in my cabinet
woebegone,
the trigger was glinting
of my handgun.
I put the gun between my lips
like a bottle of red
and in a second I felt
the bullet knock on the back of my head.
My skull split
into five and six parts.
It happened in the year 1911.
FOURTH UMIR (AYUSCHIY)
We fought. The civil broil raged
in the Crimea, in Siberia, in Murmansk.
Dnieper, Volga, Ob, Dvina.
On wheat, on buttercups, on clover
the corpses lay without cover.
We hungered. There was no soup.
The ends of this horrid battle
sliced like razor metal.
I even had no time for Our Father
when a diagonal bullet
knocked me over like a skillet.
Fellows, I cried, citizens,
but I’m a father,
I have infants at breast,
now these young kids
will have nobody to watch ’em grow,
and my two gorgeous wives
will assume lives of debauchery!
O if I only could recover,
but the commander said, Goodbye.
Think for yourself, if you are dead,
what can a d
octor do.
Pretty soon your blood-spattered looks
the worm will gnaw away from view.
I said to him, Commander, no,
the worm might gnaw my uniform
and devour
my meat in the span of an hour,
but as for my thought and soul,
they are beyond his power. I am not afraid.
But I no longer spoke. I thought.
And I no longer thought. I was dead.
My face objectively looked at the sky,
the sign of life streamed from my veins and arteries,
the number four reflected in my eyes,
and the battle, fight, combat continued without me.
That was the year 1920.
ZUMIR
We’ve attended to descriptions of death,
examined the messages of dying minds.
Now our consciousness
knows not the difference in years.
Space has grown less dense
and all words—spider, gazebo, man—are one and the same.
Grandfather, grandson,
daisy, warrior,
we are beasts of science
and we are all storied in death.
CHUMIR
They sleep, contemporaries of seas.
KUMIR
How can they.
1931–1934
[E.O.]
*umirayuschiy, dying man. See notes.
The Witness and the Rat
HE
Margarita open
the window for me quick.
Margarita speak
of fish and of beasts.
The shadow of the night descended,
lights went out in the world.
Margarita the day is done,
the wind blows, the rooster sleeps.
Sleeps the eagle in the skies,
sleep the legumes in the woods,
the future coffins sleep,
the pine trees, the firs, the oaks.
The warrior walks out toward disgrace,
the beaver walks out to rob and pillage,
and peering at tall stars
the hedgehog starts the count of nights.
Fish run up and down the river,
fish loiter in the seas,
and the starling softly holds
the dead temple in its hand.
And the blackbirds slightly sing
and the mournful lion roars.
God chases from afar
clouds onto our city
and the mournful lion roars.
HE
We don’t believe that we’re asleep.
We don’t believe that we are here.
We don’t believe that we are sad.
We don’t believe that we exist.
HE
The cold illuminates the mountains,
the snowy pall of the great mountains,
and the horse beneath carpets
dives in the snow like a loon.
A co-ed rides on the carpets,
she is obscured by the moon.
Alexander Vvedensky Page 8
