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Endarkenment
Selected Poems
By Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Eugene Ostashevsky, Lyn Hejinian, Genya Turovskaya, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, Elena Balashova Wesleyan University Press
Copyright © 2014 Estate of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8195-7393-3
CHAPTER 1
From On the Shores of the Expelled River
Let us halt. Leaves, dry air, the absence of insects.
Here is the Pergamon frieze of changes,
shadows replace the missing parts of the eye —
the faience forced out.
Who can doubt their power,
yet dust devours the heroes, dust devours itself
circling in the light, in the sun, in the light of night —
alone its circling shivers the heartwood
of the incessant letter, the fruitless battle ...
Take another step. Do not move.
That is how it's done here. That is the rule.
And there is no occasion to doubt it.
[B.S., E.O.]
To a Statesman
As requested by Arkady Bliumbaum — and
the following evening with Zina and Evgeny
Pavlov over Moldavian Cabernet
Sauvignon; drifting banter
about New Zealand.
When you, Statesman, speak dreams across the notebook,
because the rest menaces night with blue graphite,
and crumbs don't captivate, nor cast-off clothes,
nor doors, nor veins along the calf, nor eyes,
nor glass in Aegean linens —
for you Stymphalian nightingales magnanimously whistle,
and someone thinks just before sleep that once, long ago
you played circular football, smashed your knee to pieces,
the rain washed over your heads and no one was anointed, slated ...
But how much childhood grief was in the clay
that clung to us like ivy, Statesman,
how much tender pain in the loose gravel, the crunch; later
we raced to the stream through the Sunday crowd and the crowd
didn't know
that we had lost that game, but then again, maybe we won it —
protocols turned to dust in concrete castles;
I don't remember why evening spread itself over the table, when
she pulled off her jeans and in return asked for a book
the name of which I can't remember ... and the pines at night?
O Statesman,
don't forget how you pulled tadpoles out of the rain barrel.
There algae swayed — Phrygian, pentatonic trifles,
and you caught sight of yourself and tried to launch a yacht in the cistern,
its depth over your head (you would have choked on water)
and the breadth just so, no higher than the waist, so that the little boat
seemed to be made of bread, and later,
empty years passed, lean as the rafters of a fire.
Was it not the obvious end that drove you not into the raspberry brambles
but the dry leaves, to the scythe's swing through the clover. Were you crying
when you understood that the voices didn't reach you. That is,
they did reach you — called you to supper, to come home — but they passed,
as it were, through you,
so you decided that would be it, you would get up,
put on a jacket, read a story about heroes, but the mint leaves
muttered that there is lots of sorrow, that there is no one there,
mother is there, from where the raspberry, the dry hedges,
the gold beetles call from, but there'd be no answer because
the seasons are different,
and you have been a grown-up for a long time,
Statesman, you conceive laws,
forgetting that you failed to grasp the rules of simple mathematics;
the same as in school when for the first time you sensed the smell of the girl
you shared your desk with,
when empires crumble like chalk on the lackboard, and you didn't
get your hands on the dress and if someone did,
then it was no one.
Where you didn't exactly lose, there just isn't enough time,
you grew tired, that is, when you arrived everyone had already gone
except for the spindle bush, the white raspberry, painted-over windows.
This is from where, as we leave, you appear
full of bewilderment,
or retribution —it would have been easy to talk about football:
we bombed miserably. The sky is excessive. Money doesn't yield to
patience.
Out of us someone extracts —name, declension. Some have access
to only one dream, others to two: there is no difference —
they see the same thing: an attic, summer heat, sluggish hands
brushing a cobweb from the palm of the wind.
[G.T.]
Dreams Photographers Appear To
a silkscreen for Anatoly Barzakh's leg cast
"We are dying." Does this mean that flowers are wilting, how.
Does it mean they are crumbling with the prattle of ash —
while we are in other countries, without passports,
no transportation, some Casablanca, a station.
Touch anything and then, much later,
"in the meanwhile" will stratify afterwards.
Just "merely." Does it mean that the gesture shimmers
like a draft in a passage, where a point
can never surpass the measure of ripples,
when you equal the sum of your pupil and moisture;
the sunset curled into it like a pledge. The air is dark —
who breathes it? Clenched and stale.
Dry. Like a beach, untroubled. You're just a thistle,
an assimilation matrix for the stoma of color,
a grainy film on the tongue, acid amusement
of a free afternoon. A glass print
of a brass key on a wax string.
Ice or thaw — either one being
habitual to doves on the amethyst.
In any case, words give no work. With us are: "slopes," "heel,"
"numbering" of bowstring co-oscillations. Also out of tune
song. Yet no ... there's the window
half a meter away, within reach —enormous,
like chewing croutons with your gums.
Besides, it's long been open ... No hemorrhaging,
immortality in rusty quicklime. Nothing
darkens the hand, no ink falls on the white field.
[B.S.]
The Weakening of an Indication
To see this stone and not experience indecision,
to see these stones and not to look away,
to see these stones and comprehend the stoneness of stone,
to see these stone stones at dawn and at sunset,
but not to think of walls, no, not to think of dust,
or else, deathlessness,
to see these stones at night and think
of the reverie of axes in liquid solutions,
accepting as evident that, at the thought of them, stones
add to their essence neither shadow, nor reflected light,
nor defeat.
To see these same stones in a thunderstorm, see them
as you see the pupils of Heraclitus, in which
the indifference of stones recurs, recalls gravel.
To examine the nature of resemblance, without resorting to symmetry.
To turn away and see how stones hover —
night for their wings,
and this is why they are higher than seraphim,
hurtling as stones toward the earth,
burning, as excessively long hair, in the air —
toward the earth that in one fell spark
will lie down as the last stone in the foundation
of superfluous essence —
for how much longer will the signifieds smolder, coals of hoarfrost,
at the parameter?
For as long as the stones that are dreamt by the act of falling.
Earlier, toward spring, faceted clusters of wasps
rose to a boil under the rafters.
Earlier, in spring, sand would awaken,
spread as a spiral in the wind,
thousand-eyed, like snow or a cliff-carved god — the hawk of airborne raids
advancing into the continuous country of a single-letter alphabet.
Only as a grimace along the margin, in the tension of sinews,
as a blind rose,
crystal captured in a flash, like an island annexed by the sea.
Or possibly as subterranean grasses over streaming footfall,
except entering into the contours of bifurcation,
the acrid oxide of rupture.
What is it? How is it translated?
What is the measure of the past?
Where does it come from?
What is its motive?
Yes, I do not hear: such is the pendulum's string.
Trembling of the eyeball.
The narrow sail of the sand.
[G.T.]
Not dream, but the flowering of an invisible trace —
what can be simpler in that place where, in the pupil's depth,
a lake rises over a lake.
The sum of forms, carried beyond the limits of the object,
like a fissure beyond the limits of space.
Weather is the sole event that time passes into.
Evening's freshet. Loops of resinous foliage,
the cries of children in the delta. The story began
without resistance, as a rumor, a conch shell in the fingers.
Blood, seeping into stone,
imprisoned in fragments of quartz,
again grants the root its lengthening greed
in this hillscape: we look from a distance:
the trees are the same. They differ
in their leaf lines,
and also the stages of death.
Names come later, resembling diaries,
lagoons, lanterns, chalk. Later still, in common speech,
"now" encounters the word "now."
This can find no answer in any silence,
deliberate pause, or single reverberation of the unconditional
and ephemeral — but nevertheless real — story.
Time that has become weather, the object's expansion.
Anyway, I have not yet decided
where best to meet your eyes. At the zenith?
There the hiatus breeds a perfectly blinding hope.
Or in the lowlands, where you are indistinguishable from the fog,
and besides, there the sole of the foot will not be touched
by the trope of noiseless gravel.
[G.T.]
Six Hours to Waking If You Don't Sleep
for Lyn Hejinian
(January 1, 2004, 1:03 a.m.)
It's no longer possible to gather up all the empty bottles,
the needles, thimbles, money ...
nor understand where the light ray lies, where the steel thread
stretching across the road, though undoubtedly
it's at the bus stop diagonally across the way, where the kiosk sours,
like the sky.
Like — well, all the rest pertains to the roof of the mouth,
lifting within itself the complex and rather folded-up
material of nonexistence.
A cocoon, darkness, and in stammering — lightning and exile.
The 39th hexagram is nothing like this. It is also not possible
to gather berries, unless I'm wrong,
nor the tossed-aside neckties from wherever they fell.
Nor to write an ode on the rising of dust.
Not to whisper in an ear, "O, how I would have wanted!"
And yet it's possible — yes, absolutely — the possibility
of going out still remains,
without smashing the glass with your forehead, without shredding
the colored papers, tickets to the world's edge,
or empty gauze —its crackling is dry, like the morning's
clocks, devouring crickets.
Like the Tibetan windmills of hope.
These white millstones are gentle, or, rather, restrained,
but immeasurably lacking in water.
The stirring of the wind brings no joy.
[L.H.]
[Russian Text Not Reproducible in ASCII].
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Endarkenment by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Eugene Ostashevsky, Lyn Hejinian, Genya Turovskaya, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, Elena Balashova. Copyright © 2014 Estate of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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