Nimble wrists and arching brows,
trained to make time pause—
and think thoughts yet unthought—
where did they go? Or,
to be more exact:
into whom could they pass?
For what is truly learned
is not what is merely known,
but what is long
and well practiced—
yet practiced so
that nothing is rehearsed
until the letter kills
what once moved.
Instead, we have a bland,
ironed triteness—
a routine, deadening Eden,
full of hearts
lost not to innocence,
but to needs sans measure.
Those ancient statues, at their best,
like mirrors of the otherwise unseen,
were born to hold us long enough
with symmetries and timeless nods—
in reverse of Medusa’s shock and fright,
whether sudden, shrill, or dim and quiet,
when engulfed, encrusted in the element
of a sea-like, soulless bolting void
where “all is one”—and thus, profound disconnect.
And so those carved and polished stones,
under a nameless master’s eye and hand,
would somehow speak and move to enact
anamnesis—even of a long-forgotten soul—
like a romance: the return of life’s first breeze.
По снегу следы ступней
уносят тишину
в мягком очертании
как вздох из нежных губ.
В память без забвений,
когда та под словом
переобразилась в стих,
а в белизне вокруг
прикоснулись сон и свет,
a каждый взгляд
касаясь ее глаз
найдет, что дрожит изнутри,
как будто это был всего лишь
переодетый поцелуй –
a тот слёзный, снежный след –
в неё и мимо – уходящий алфавит.
Assuming
that some doughty ancient hero
once managed to steal Cerberus,
the Gatekeeper of Hell,
and leave the Underworld
without its sentinel—
what, if such a theft were ever true,
would have happened then?
Would not Hell have lost
its confining shores and boundaries,
spilling over into our world—without end—
the living falling in, untimely,
without even the courtesy
of a visa stamp for the nether realm,
and the dead pouring outward,
with no one left to bar their escape?
And all—everyone, everything—
would be bemused and mixed again,
as in the Ionian fragments
of the world’s origins,
from that Dark Age before Socrates.
Or did someone strip Anubis
of his canine head?
Or was it that same reckless child
who made his mother lose her own
and set upon her neck
the head of a village cow?
Or was it a friend, a brother,
who dared such impious exchange?
And if Eros were in truth
the Lord of All Boundaries,
what of Heaven and what of Hell
would a headless Desire
wreak—or wreck—or remake?
And wasn’t this the unsaid point
still pondered by Mary Magdalene
in her cavern, darkened with vigil—
as she contemplates her skull,
a remnant surely not merely of a dead man
but of one decapitated—
a life severed at its limit?
And if today so much of humankind
longs for dogs and cats in their homes,
isn’t that—yet unbeknownst to us—
a rising pre-motion of premonition
that we may need to grow back
the heads of those long-lost guardians
of the deep and the dead,
those who can tell and scent
what evil is and how it smells,
even when unseen?
Not long ago a bitter woman mocked
a stranger as nothing but a coarse, uncouth peasant—
shriveling her own life with stifled rage
and turning abuse into her private wharf of faith.
Yet, strangely, such derision carries
a long literary pedigree and tail.
It is a magnificent puzzlement
that a gratuitous slur could bear
so much depth unawares.
In Yungchou on the Hsiao River in 806,
Liu Tsung-Yuan dared to call himself
“rusticated”—a proscribed man,
a government’s reject—
yet the word also slipped
into another layer of meaning:
of striking root in the earth’s own reality,
in the humble wisdom of place,
and in the wonder he “couldn’t keep
from passing on to those who come.”
A thousand years later,
Book II of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin
opens with a motto on that same note:
“O Rus! O Russia!—O country!”—
O the delights of rustic life!
“The peaceful land of refined taste
from an age gone by—lofty,
vast, and wide—where pensive Dryads
kept their secret bed and home;
and much else that’s rather passé now.
A fine solitary retreat, bright and gay;
there a lover of simpler desires
would thank the heavens for his fate.”
Without those roots and rural charms
there would have been no Onegin,
no Pushkin, and far less of Russian verse
or of its stories and great novels.
Had they ever severed themselves
from that life-source and its bond,
we all would now be on a foul
and anaemic diet—
even though—O irony of ironies!—
it is precisely such “Rus,” such rustication,
even such russification,
that bored Onegin and sent Lensky—
out of spite—toward hasty death.
And now, having written this,
I cannot help but cry out in dismay—
wasn’t that woman an angry ghost,
one who died with the wish
for a rustic poet’s death?
