***
I’ll never have
the home I want
impossible – my home is
books and pictures on the walls
and windows opening onto
a silent linden-shaded lawn
others have such homes
on the other side of reality
I have forbidden myself
from having
such a simple home
because I know
if I were to fall sleep in it
I would never
wake up
Frozen Earth. Embankment Street
What can I say to you, city sick with cold? That I breathe cautiously, stealthily, the sugar of your arcades? That your crows have grown irritable from the caffeine they pecked from paper cups, and can’t keep still in the maples above churches. That everyone is choking on your dampness as if on stale bread, publicly but silently, not wanting anyone to know.
Daubed by the lichen of bulbs, by parasites of light and hope, you stretch your pitted, salt-gnawed bones: soiled, bruised, beloved.
Office windows are on fire, electricity all to hell, water rushes in, gas hisses out. We turned everything on and we left, we went out to enjoy ourselves in the trampled square, under plaster prophets with dirty armpits.
I’m hysterically explaining to you how you should be: beautiful, of course, intimate, but you just open your mouth like an overpass and shut me up with a greasy train.
Blind Spot
The blind spot exists in the field of vision where the optic nerve enters the eye.
One can’t see anything in this spot. With some illnesses, this spot spreads,
resulting in a larger zone of blindness.
1.
it’s just a blind spot in the eye
a flicker of darkness instead of a face
the day ends sooner and sooner
so I see things by touch
I see my children’s heads with my hands
my dear love’s shoulder – I know
it must be full of grace
2.
it’s just the landscape peeling off:
silhouettes, mist, and wind
a dotted line of stones
the morse code of trees
blind repetition
P.S.
I’ll have to cross on red
I’ll hold your unseen
hand
I’ll close my eyes
Greece
for Jack Gilbert
I pushed through people alone. In the museums, I considered what will be left of us. A handful of particolored, sea-sucked coins. New ruins next to the old.
Cliffs. Silence. The limpid seascape teems with life and will continue to teem even after the seventh extinction event.
A man from the North – I’m here like a faded polaroid. Immortalized by the advanced technologies of the past. On the other side of the picture – a square of darkness.
Here, one can forget, fall into folly. Persist in the feverish present. Pay heed to water and stone. Prate on in the shade.
If grief can be burned out, burned into an empty vessel sheltered in one’s hands, it is only here. Left at the top of the mountain. New ruins next to the old.
German Street
A mortar of thickening shadow, resonant planks of sun, long pipes of wind – the rickety scaffold of summer. The everyday game of holding on.
The disheveled trees along the buildings toss handfuls of bees and freeze. They flinch when you turn your back, they tremble and hum.
My red anxiety, my blue fear, my gray mourning are glued with the hot tar of emptiness. The ovens and chambers of the courtyards open up.
You hear the string’s hum, the rhythmic voice, the unfamiliar language. Gravel bones, sand commas, and full stops. There is nothing here anymore, only our clamorous selves.
They have taken away everyone else. You have already taken away everyone else. We have already taken away everyone else.
Chernihiv Cherry
grasping the earth with the roots of time, it grows on the skeletons of history, on helmets and cannons and swords. the strained veins of the tree ripen into a harvest of blood berries. berries of blood and the whistling of shells, the wail of sirens never to be forgotten. where grass hides the pox of explosions, where pines cluster, bend and block the view: an emptiness. a childhood of broken windows, an executed education, a toothless language broken up by bricks. the sunflower painted by Olesia of the fifth grade still clings to its wall. an old woman rides a bicycle, crossing herself as sirens wail and wail. the world has been torn open, pierced like a ball. predatory, unfeeling darkness sticks its face inside for a look: everything is as usual… dandelions cover the ruins, a window frame hangs from a birch tree, and the fragment of a landmine digs deep into soil like a mole. oh, century-old cherry, I will return, having tasted your blood beads, I’ll clench my fist over your slippery, choking berry stones, I will walk through the churches of this city, where I finally understood the restrained beauty of the Orthodox aesthetic, and the scars of the sculptures will be healed, the book covers torn by shards will close their wounds, and I will learn once more how to speak.
sirens are wailing and wailing over the shrouds of Orthodox churches, over the river, over history, and there, where we parked our car – a crater and fragments of columns.
***
for K. M.
Miles and miles of the most beautiful empty fields, all land-mined, not a single living soul, only brightly colored pheasants running to and fro – this she writes from Eastern Ukraine, and I think about the surrealists, the madness of painting, about one’s talent and death. I think about meadows hazy with browns and greens, the wind carrying the scent of freshly thawed soil, I think about vast flatlands that do not exist here, about the ungraspable, the forbidden, the dangerous.
I’m thinking about landmines. I haven’t held them in my hands. I don’t know if they’re heavy nor how many and of what kind are buried there. All I know is that death will continue to dwell in them for another 50 years. And while I’m thinking this, life is growing and sprouting crazily once more, all around that same death.
Green meadows and fields of death. I look at that soon-to-be luxuriance and long for the hands of roots to squeeze the metal there, to wring the death from it like water. I want what’s left to be an empty shell, a failed flame. A revenge that rounds things out.
I’d like you to write about this, to save it in a poem – the message ends.
Well, I wrote it.
I just don’t know if I saved it or mined it.
Christmas. Sentimentally
The thaw has cut the snow into ground and trees and homes. Has it all become new, different? The message defies weather, wars, discord, even joy or expectation. It just comes. Inevitable. Unconcealed. I think about the cold, about death. Love. About retribution as light. Limpid and implacable. About fulfillment as message.
It is both easy and difficult to write all this in words, words written so many times that it is on their tangled web that this world holds. All I have to do is add the usual ending for this year – обіймаю.
I embrace you.
Paramedic
Light is still so young. She smiles as if her smile were just written into this world.
Light speaks softly, a little bit sadly, into the phone’s screen: “Мрію дожити…,”1“I dream of surviving” she says.
Light has just returned: washed off the sweat and blood, cared for the wounded, closed the eyes of the dead.
Light says with a smile that the future awaits her. Now I understand why Mary’s heart is pierced by swords.
The light is the swords.
“Гарвард почекає,”2“Harvard can wait” says Light.
The recording ends.
***
Dangerous times. Strange days.
No matter when you leave home – it’s night.
Night and the flames of camp stoves in the sky
As if a crowd of tourists had waded
Into a forest glade.
Be prudent and plain –
Like a haiku. Nice vegetables,
Coffee with cookies, a cup
Of tea – none of it exists.
Only sand rustles in the kitchens
Of the dead. Sand from the boots of soldiers,
Sand of the catastrophe running late.
Dangerous times. Strange days.
The morning quiet, the empty day, evenings –
Embers light up the sky. I gave up –
Didn’t remake myself. I ran late. I stayed.
– – – – –
Do you see the reflection of flames in the glass?
Do you see your own face there?
Or is that the devil in your eye?
