description - arkadii dragomoshchenko

7/23/2019 Description - Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

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DESCRIPTION

RK DII

DR GOMOSCHENKO

Translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova

Introduction by Michael Molnar

'

0

c : 1

s c un

Moon Classics: 9


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Arkadii Dragomoschenko, 1990

Published through agreement with

VMP,

the Soviet Writer's Union.

Some

of

these poems have been published in

The

Soviet Union in

the book

Nebo

Sootvetstvii.

Translation Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova, 1990

Introduction Michael Molnar,

199

Cover: Wave

Lave Lace

Pescadero Beach

California 1987

by John Pfahl. Reprinted with permission from the artist.

Design: Katie Messborn

Library

of

Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Dragomoschenko A. (Arkadii)

Description Arkadii Dragomoschenko: translated by

Lyn Hejinian

and

Elena Balashova :

Introduction by

Michael

Molnar. - 1st.

ed.

p. cm (Sun & Moon classics: 9)

Translated

from

the

Russian.

ISBN 1-55713-075-2 ; $11.95

I.

Hejihian, Lyn. II. Balashova, Elena. III. Title. IV. Series.

PG3479.6.R28047 1990

891.71'44--dc20 89-85476

FIRST

EDITION

s

4 3 2

Sun

&

Moon

Classics: 9

Sun Moon Press

6148 Wilshire Boulevard

Gertrude Stein Plaza

Los Angeles, California 90048

CIP


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ARKADII DRAGOMOSCHENKO

Born in 1946 in Potsdam, Germany, Arkadii Dragomoschenko

spent his youth in

the

Ukraine of the Soviet Union. He was a

student at the Russian Philological Department in Kiev, and later

worked

as

a reporter for

P

News in Kiev while attending the

Institute

ofTheatre

Music and Cinematography.

In 1970 he moved to Leningrad where he was first employed

as

a

night watchman, then

as

a street sweeper, and later

as

a stoker at

the Leningrad State University Psychological Department while

working on his eight book-length collections

of

poetry and two full

length plays. He was a founding

member of

the famed Club-81.

Joining her husband, jazz saxophonist Larry Ochs, on a tour

of

the

Soviet Union in 1983, American poetLyn Hejinian was introduced

to Dragomoschenko, who was described by the Soviet

samisdat

publishers and readers

as

the great contemporary poet

of

Leningrad. A friendship developed between

the

two poets, and

over

the

years, through dozens of letters and, later, course work,

both struggled to learn each other's language, resulting in

Hejinian's role

as

translator and introducer

of

Americans to

the

new

Soviet poetry, and in Dragomoschenko's playing host to numerous

American writers, publishers, and scholars.

In

1988

Dragomoschenko toured the United States, and again in 1989 he

read and performed in

New

York City. To date, one book

of

poetry

has

been

published in the Soviet Union, ebo

Sootvetsyvii

With works

of

fellow poets and artists such as Aleksei Parschikov,

Ivan Zhdanov, Alexander Eremenko, llya Kutik, Nina Iskrenko,

Andrei Karpov, Ivan Chuikov, and others, the writing

of

Dragomoschenko represents a major new development

of

Soviet

art at once completely original yet aware

of

the international art

of

the present and past.

For Dragomoschenko language

is

not a mere expression

of

the poet

and his imagination, but is

an activity

of

society. Poetry comes

in the act

of

anticipating the fact

of

possibility which begins

as

an

unknowing and proceeds as a transformation

of

reality.


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INTRODUCTION ...

...

though

in

translation Arkadii

Dragomoschenko's

poems

actually need less explanation than their Russian originals.

f

the landscape is unfamiliar at first sight, the poet's own reface

provides a

set

of intellectual

map

references and to a large

extent the poems themselves embody their

own

commentary.

t

is

in

fact

the reader with some knowledge

of Russian

literature who may be most puzzled by this poetry, since it is

unlike anything else being written in the Soviet Union today.

This poetry does not fit the image that exists of a Russian

literature founded upon individual consciousness and social

responsibility. t has other commitments and the main one is

mentioned

by the poet at the

end

of

his

preface-

responsibility in

an absolutely

literal sense as

both

conscience

and

response. My aim in this introduction is to

reclaim these poems for a Russian literature into which they

have

not yet been

accepted. The

humanist tradition

which

excludes them has reached the end of its effective life,

but

there is another, older vein which these poems bring to the

surface, and one that goes back beyond the Enlightenment to

the very beginning of the literature.

Where to begin?

Everything cracks and shakes.

The air quivers with similes.

No one word is better than any other,

The earth is humming with metaphor ...

(Mandelstam, The Horseshoe Finder, 1923

This ''beginning occurs in the middle of the

poem

and at

the

end

of an era and the question it raises is ontological. The

world is saturated with imagery and signification: there is no

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room left for the old poetic self which only connects. t has

been crowded out and the poem finishes with the words ...

and

there is not enough of me left for myself. The moment of

consciousness

marked

by this

poem

recognizes thematic

exhaustion and the end of language as self-expression. t might

have founded a new poetics, but the time was wrong.

In Russian poetry of the

1930s

and '40s social and personal

voices became polarized but both were founded on a virtually

unquestioned faith in their own origin. The first true response

to Mandelstam's tentative

undermining

of the foundations

came from outside. Paul Celan translated The Horseshoe

Finder and dedicated his iemandsrose

1959)

to the memory of

Osip Mandelstam. But within Russian literature that hesitant

self-orienting voice was hardly heard again until Drago

moschenko began a more systematic topography ofbecom

ing-through-language.

What Mandelstam experienced as the edge of coherence,

Dragomoschenko is using to found a new order, Gradually

opening a mode of existence to simple landscape' language

( Observation of

a Fallen Leaf as the Ultimate Basis

of

Landscape ). His descriptions precede any being, they

describe the

act

of describing: a movement towards

landscape/language that exists only as

moments

of

transformation:

I'll stay

as long as description transforming the tree into experience

here ...

The Observation of a Fallen Leaf is preceded by

an

epigraph

from Chuang Tzu: ... although what prompts this

is

unknown. In a way that answers the question of metaphysical

grounding,

but not

of literary background. Tradition is a

suspect explanation: it reduces constellations to a narrative line.

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And in general the confidence of narration is antagonistic to the

circlings of consciousness in

Dragomoschenko's work.

Nevertheless,

in

The

Islands of

Sirens

he

toys

with

The

mercy of pseudonarration and it is at this very point that he

invokes The Lay of Igor s Campaign-the real beginning of

Russian literature.

A problematic beginning, however,

and not only because the

authenticity of the text was for a long time a matter of dispute,

but also because the anonymous author begins the ay with the

question of how to begin:

Would it not be fitting, brother, for us to begin in the

manner

of

the ancient lays

the grievous tale

of

the

campaign of Igor, of Igor the son of Svyatoslav? But

rather let this song begin in accord

with the events of

our

own

time, and not with the design of Boyan.

(The Lay

of

Igor s Campaign, c

1185

t is clear that an established oral heritage already existed in

Boyan, one of the bards of a previous age. The answer the

writer

chose

was

to reflect the age self-consciously, using

tradition as

an

echo chamber,

and

Boyan is

woven

into the epic

as the narrative's mediator between fact and expression:

f

you

had sung

these campaigns, flitting, 0 nightingale,

through the tree of thought,flying in your mind

beneath

the clouds, weaving together the glories of both halves of

this time ...

An

eclipse of

the sun divides the

Lay formally

into two

halves, according to Propp's analysis which Dragomoschenko

rephrases: Sun eclipsed by Song-sign

turning,

it

began its

descent into another realm.

But another eclipse also divides it along a different axis. This

is the occultation of the already spoken

or

written by the

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present action.

One

narrative voice sweeps across another: a

plane

of source imagery

is

eclipsed

by

reality. This

is

epitomized in the negative metaphor, the archetypal trope of

the

byliny

(medieval oral poetry): But, brothers, it was not ten

falcons that Boyan would let loose upon a flock of swans-but

he would lay his magic fingers upon the living strings ...

In the humanist idiom a real world observed by the poet is

transformed

through consciousness

into metaphor that

transcends its origins. But the epic world of the ay and the

byliny begins as negated imagery, and this dialectic is its poetic

impulse. This is one of the neglected directions Arkadii

Dragomoschenko has chosen to follow: his images contain no

reality, they are triangulation points along a route.

Another loophole epic and folk traditions have to offer a

modern

poet is not any specific technique

or

intonation

but

simply a space to breathe and allow language and sense to

meander at will. A classical tradition still dominates Russian

poetry. In its focused form, as in the Acmeism of Akhmatova

or early Mandelstam, it stood for heroically distanced emotion

and a European cultural intertext: a debased form has reduced

its

signs

to

ruthless

metricality

and

relentless

rhyming.

Russian is richer in rhymes than English and its word order

more flexible, and consequently rhyme is more compatible

with

reason; the western antipathy to strict versification has

had little effect

on

contemporary Russian poetry. t is also

possible that the quirkiness of Pasternak and Tsvetaeva

rescued Russian rhyming from total stultification. Even so

an

antiquated formal concept of the poetic still stifles the roots

of poetry. (In the March Elegy a derisive homage to the

poetic is produced by transposing a sequence set

up

by the

most notorious commonplace of 18th

century

Francophile

versifying,

the

rose / snows rozy/morozy) rhyme, into

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pseudo-Slavonic terrain where a bitter werewolf-poet forages in

the folklore.)

From Lomonsov in the early 18th century to the Symbolists at

the beginning of this century, Russian writers read nature for

messages, signs, and lessons. This Cartesian cleavage between

observer and natural world established the model for poetic

consciousness

as the voice of

domination. This

drove

Khlebnikov, for one, forward into science fantasy and the idea of

a revolutionary new interrelation of humanity and

world-and

also backwards into Slavonic epic and folk tales. In the parallel

landscapes and natures of the

Lay

the two worlds of history and

poetic imagery are equally real-or equal elements of a single

world

system

that is alien to

the

essentialist tradition that

dominates present-day Russian poetry.

But the prevailing literary world view was already collapsing

from within, overloaded with significance. What Mandelstam

witnessed is also sensed in Bunin's prose, with its landscapes

like supersaturated solutions on the verge of crystallizing into

some entirely different form. The new form they would take is

the

work

of Andrei Platonov. Grace and elegaic melancholy

have mutated into anguish and systematic ineptitude, character

and scenery are funnels into chaos, a drained, stylized language

leans emotionally on the reader. The rich European heritage has

gone and

nothing

has replaced it: despair

is

balanced by

freedom.

f Arkadii Dragomoschenko has managed to elude so many

of the traps set by the classical tradition, it is not entirely

through craft, there is also a biographical factor. In ''The Island

of Sirens there are two irruptions of outlandish speech. This,

in the original, is Ukrainian, which Steve McCaffery and Lyn

Hejinian have rightly

and

effectively converted into medieval

English, for Ukrainian has a familiar though quaintly archaic

ring

to

a Russian. Ukrainian is Dragomoschenko s home


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language. Although he and his wife Zina have spent all their

adult

lives in

Leningrad, they

both

grew

up in Vinnitsa, a

town 100 miles southeast of

Kiev

in the Ukraine. (He

was

not

actually born in the Soviet Union at all,

but

in

Potsdam

in

1946, when his father was a colonel in the occupying forces).

In

some

ways cultural

relations

between Ukrainians and

Russians parallel those of the Irish and the English, with the

difference that the Russian nation and its literature emerged in

what is now the Ukraine (the Prince Igor of the ay was a

subject of Kievan Rus). Consequently Dragomoschenko grew

up with

an

off-center perspective on metropolitan Russian

culture, its language and its traditions. His work is out of place

in the inbred conservative context of present-day Leningrad.

Contemporary Leningrad poetry has modeled its dominant

poetic voice on a certain Acmeist image of Mandelstam and

Akhmatova or

on

Blok' s shamanism. Its language is a moral

stance and a set of cultural attitudes in the possession of the

poet, a position of reified authority. This is not

in

accord

with

the intellectual events of our own time. What makes Arkadii

Dragomoshchenko's work so interesting and valuable is that

he continues to

withstand

the pressure of that authoritative

voice and its misplaced confidence that the right language

need only be invoked to constitute an ideal subjectivity.

Those traditions that at present prevail in Russian poetry are

by and large to

be

dated to Pushkin s time; the accepted

concept of poetic persona

and

its formal devices (meters,

rhymes, themes) were established around that period. When a

Futurist manifesto called for Pushkin to be thrown overboard

from the steamship of modernity, it achieved half its purpose

in outraging the bourgeois,

but

failed to divert tradition. The

Futurists had even less time than Pushkin to bring about their

particular revolution, and they

had

lost their coherence as a

group

by the early

1920s.

Mayakovsky s

persona was

to

become canonized; Khlebnikov was moving towards rhymed

folk tales at the time of his death in 1922. The most resisted

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aspect of their

project

was

not so much the esperantist

aspirations of z um (the universal poetic language as the

attempt

to

liberate

Russian

poetry

from

the restraints

of

classical form

and

everything implied

by

the Pushkinian

heritage. A browse through shelves of present-day Russian

verse reveals that this enterprise is more urgent than ever.

Much Russian poetry has degenerated into claustrophobic

clusters of expected rhymes, rhythms, and emotions.

t

needs

room to breathe.

Other contemporary poets have recognized that need for a

new intellectual space, for example the Conceptualists who are

associated primarily with Moscow and the work of Vsevolod

Nekrasov, Dmitri Prigov, and Lev Rubinshtein. But they have

concentrated on deconstruction and parody of literary genres

or have turned to performance art. Among his contemporaries,

only Aleksei Parshchikov s poetry has certain affinities with

Dragomoschenko:

imagery displaces identity in Parschi

kov s elaborate metaphorical constructions,but myth fills gaps

Dragomoschenko leaves open.

The landscapes of Dragomoschenko s earlier descriptions

contained rivers,

lakes,

sandbanks, clay sediments, and

outcrops of quartz; there were pinewoods, swallows, clouds,

oblique sunlight, and even city streets and apartments reduced

to their natural

features-stone,

water, light. Most importantly,

there were those gaps, spaces left by consciousness refusing

identity. Up to the early 1980s this world was refracted through

syntactic

complexity-a

language-prism that represented the

interferences of expression and perception. All the work in this

book dates from 1983-84 onwards and marks a new phase.

Landscape

and

language

are

sediments

left

by

the

flow

of

perception and a

poetic

self in constant motion shuttles

between the written and the writing. A philosophical drive is

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producing a new configuration, experiments with the limits of

description that bring

into view

undefined spaces around

language's

marked

features.

Arrested wandering is the country of grammar,

but

the scene

of the action in these poems is movement

up

and down the

registers of discourse and across genres. Russian literature, as I

have mentioned, begins self-reflectively

in

a dialectic of static

imagery and unformalized actuality. The fluidity of continual

reflection and reorientation is

the lost sense of its

best

tradition. Dragomoschenko is restoring to Russian literature

intellectual strategies

t

cannot afford to forget.

These translations themselves form

part

of that subtlety and

craft, as a movement across boundaries:

Didn't they speak in all languages in the city where he

spent his youth?

And what

a blessing, to begin to move

in one and to finish in another. ( Xenia )

Shifts in levels of response are hidden within tradition. In the

same way translation glosses over gaps. In the case of

th s

translations

t

is right that the process should

be made

visible.

The poems in this volume are not literary fetishes but the

evidence of collaboration between

poet and

translator-or

rather

between

poet and poet. For

most

of this century the

state of East-West relations has fatally distorted any attempts

at

interaction between Russian

and

Western cultures; even

during the last three decades those Russian poets who have

been translated have generally been subjected to media-hype

and become

victims of their sociopolitical curiosity value.

Against that background this volume is unique-for the first

time it opens up the possibility of a dialogue between the

leading edges of

two

living poetries.

The original meeting between Lyn Hejinian

and

Arkadii

Dragomoschenko was an accidental side-effect of a concert

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given in Leningrad in 1983 by the ROVA Saxophone Quartet.

Chance became design, as in the

improvised

music

that

backgrounded

that

event. Each poet discovered

in

the other,

at

what may first have seemed like a galactic cultural distance, a

compatible perspective

on

language, and the translations here

are one echo of that initial recognition. They are not the only

one-the

constant correspondence between the two poets since

that time has

been the nexus

of

an

unprecedented cultural

interaction between Leningrad

and

San Francisco. Arkadii

Dragomoschenko

has translated some of

Lyn s work into

Russian and has sponsored translations and readings of other

American poets

from William

Carlos Williams to Clark

Coolidge. Lyn Hejinian

has

given

readings

of her work and

lectures

in Leningrad in 1987

and

again

in 1989,

and-improbable though

t seemed

at the

time of

the

first

contact - Arkadii Dragomoschenko was able to come to the

States to give a series of readings and talks in 1988. The series of

exchanges is still widening into further translation projects and

future readings. In short, one of the most exciting things about

these translations is not simply that they are an opening into a

new

poetic

world but that

they

are only a

beginning. The

interplay of two literary scenes that they represent will not stop

here and its consequences cannot be foreseen. There is a new

space waiting to be occupied.

Every translator

has

to be two people-one sensitive to the

poetry of the source language, the other to the target. In Elena

Balashova

Lyn Hejinian

has found an ideal and unusual

c o l l a b o ~ a t o r a native Russian speaker living in Berkeley and

alive

to the

subtle

gist of

Arkadii Dragomoschenko s

landscapes. Together the translators have shifted their

author s

responsibili ty his conscientious responsiveness) into English.

The result is meticulous and inspired-and these two virtues

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are rarely combined.

My own involvement in this project releases me from any

obligation to view this collection objectively

and

I offer this

introduction only as one perspective

on

the work.

t

requires

others and especially those its American audience will bring to

it. These poems should be read by that audience as American

poems but ones with a side dcior into another

dimension a

dislocation

that

returns readers to their native culture from

another angle. Michael

olnar

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OPS

IS

SYN

T X

All this is familiar; still it needs to be repeated. In its very

essence the decorative grid of the Chinese interior

is

inexhaustible. Repetitions do not exist as long as there is time.

Thus noncoincidence, deviation, residue, all requiring a

different approach.

An

ornament consists of holes or of transitions from one

void to another. Where does the distinction between one void

and another lie? Distinction is not a

noun;

location is

impossible. Nothing changes, by changing itself. Wandering

and wandering: The goal of

one

is

to

observe the

disappearance of the old, the goal of the other is to observe

change (Lao Tzu).

t is just as

ridiculous

to divide

up

a hole as for me to

represent the poet with marble wings and a flaming mouth.

Does the imagination picture the way in which this particular

tongue crumples itself in the living scale of saliva, is kneaded

like clay

in

the fingers and is yet like the fingers themselves,

rises to the palate, hangs there for a moment waiting for the

explosion to dissipate, turns away .. does this image haunt

the imagination when the

hand

goes from wandering to

wandering ? It's Khlebnikov who comes to mind when we

talk of the wandering furrow: minotaur of its own labyrinth,

an

overturned

mirror under the Heavens, a

mole

(see

Mandelstam) that has fallen

into

a trap of roots in search of the

indivisible particle of speech, the 'center, Form, points of

Being, the way physics fell into a linguistic trap in its quest for

the indivisible particle. But

we

have

to

talk. Does the word

exist?

17


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The preference given in ancient China not to the quantitative

characteristics of number but to qualitative ones suggests that

the

hing

is

not

a

handbook

on

aleatorics

but

the

first

research into syntax. Thus "language did not fall from

the

sky," "language is an activity" of society. I think of a pitcher

because it's a cocoon. Revolving gave birth to ornament.

On

one hand the concept of a "person" forces me to talk about the

sum of certain characteristics, more precisely about a bundle

of

them;

on the other hand, I,

based

on experience,

can

imagine a person whose violence and suffering make him

indifferent to his surroundings. Wherein lies the difference

between a person and a rock? Self-expression requires a

certain I which demands expression. Memory signifies only

some other memory.

We

are born twice, the first time in the

"separation" of self from the mother.

Not

signification

but

stratification.

The second time,

until death itself, we are

endlessly born into the world-that is, in this infinite dividing.

As the world creates itself, inscribing itself in me, I change it,

abiding in the noncoinciding of birth and death. Seeing is a

process of deferral. A process whose pace does not coincide

with the speed of understanding. "To see-to create." The

word

create is a

word

with a

dual

anchor." However,

seeing is backed by blindness. What does language teach? I

don't

hear. I say that it is

not

experience and not the

expression of experience

but

an activity; language finding

itself

encapsulated

by the

transparency of

representations

opens itself to the future (all this is familiar,

but

still it needs to

be repeated), to that which was never there (in experience?)

but which is forever enclosed in it as a possibility-mobility

within mobility

Poetry comes in the act of anticipating the fact of possibility.

What

did

you say? The spatiality of silence is created by the

temporality

of speech. I know. The realization of

meaning

reveals itself in the muteness of this "nothingness" between

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sound

and

sound, sign and sign. Between you and me?

Nonexistence s the result of coincidence. But poetry begins as

unknowing.

The sea

in Homer

was

red. Meanings

are

necessitated by rising forth ... to what?

There are two types of duration; the duration of a change in

social

consciousness

and

the

duration of the change in

meanings

in

poetry

are

incommensurate

in

their rate of

transformation.

As a

result

we

are

once again speaking of

history. Language piled up, language as treasure, language

not wasted by loss-by r evolving it dies. Here begins the circle

of Pushkin's small tragedies- The Greedy Knight, if a circle

can have a beginning. The law of the conservation of energy

permits us to imagine a certain map.

Sanctioned by the Areopagus of lawgivers, a uniquely correct

language (the importunate spectre of agglutination) leads to

homogeneity

and

fetishism, killing consciousness of an other.

There is

much that did

not occur in front of

our

eyes,

but

we

have

repeatedlrseen

how

language died and

became

a

murderer,

abandoning

itself

to soapy

fantasies

about

basic

values. Imagination differs from fantasy as the word is from

the word if. The avant-garde is one of the death-bearing

banalities.

Perception feeds the world. What existed before the digit?

Invention is

selection-from

the unidentifiable. Imagination

is

the intransitive action of anticipation. The opposite is a yearning

for nondifferentiation, for indifference: irresponsibility. An

ornament represents a system of holes, of discontinuities.

Emptiness is the core of bamboo. The source of echo, an answer.

There is no emptiness,

but

we talk about it. We talk about

people, love, the line, poetry. Do all these things exist? Poetry is

that state of language which in its workings constantly exceeds

the

actual

order

of truth.

Who defines

how

our

knowledge

should exist, or how is the one who is supposed to identify it

identified? And so forth. Here is

Heisenberg's

sentence, in

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which

I

have

substituted

one term: In

poetry are

we

describing something objectively more real, something that in

a certain sense exists

independently

of

human

thought,

or

does poetry represent only an expression of the capabilities of

human

thought? What term in this sentence is replaced with

the

word poetry? Or does this

vagueness

pertain to the

subject or only to the language in which we speak about it and

whose imperfection

we

in principle can't disregard? Here in

this sentence there is

no

substitution.

An illusory I

At the moment that language is immobilized the figure of

the enemy

of values

arises.

t

seems

that

only

negation

allows us to talk about those things which can't be touched by

language. Taste and geometry are two different things. The

pendulum of rhetoric moves the course of the agonist. What

do they ask the poet?

The encyclopedia's body can give satisfaction:

Dictionaries propose:

Psychology, sociology, political science, mythology, religions

break open:

Literature offers:

Institutions of information fulfill the enthusiasm for

solutions:

But poetry is always something else.

All this is familiar,

but

still it needs to be repeated. Without

asking the poet anything, they ask, is i t possible to ask about

that to which no answer is possible-not asking, they ask:

does such a question exist, whose absence gives birth to the

same irresistible anxiety that quite naturally excites doubt

about many things,

and

first about the fascination of the

paternalistic relations between the holder of truth and its user.

Or:

can

a person (not

reduced

to a stone's existence)

eventually find (from)

the

possibility of being the question

asked?

And

what kind of answer might it be, this pearl,

locked

around

its shell? Responsibility is a mode of hearing.

2


21/136

The shadow of a

dead

language turns into the spectre of the

universal, the one, quantitatively infinite: voracious.

But

language

cannot

be

appropriated

because it

is

perpetually incomplete. Perfect action leaves no

trace ....

Poetry

is

imperfect, unachieved, as it is. There's

no

consolation. Just as the word doesn't exist. The transformation

through

nothing into otherness: Catastrophe is

not

completion. t is

the

culmination of

the

confrontation

and

struggle between points of

view

(of equally

correct

consciousnesses

with

their respective worlds).

Catastrophe

does not reduce situations,

but

the opposite, it unfolds their

irresolvability

in

earthly conditions,

casts

them

aside

unsolved (Bakhtin). Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri is an idiom,

the imprint of a cyclone, accumulated oneness, returning the

idea

of

sacrifice, division, distinction, finding meaning

in

its

very slipping away. Does speech exist? (Chuang Tzu). The

transformation of a

question into questioning, about

the

boundary, border, outline of meaning, about the liberation of

the senseless by the senseless exists

only in the

promise, in

language, in poetry. History is not a wafer of space melting on

the tongue. Courage consists in an unending affirmation of

thought which overcomes the order of actual truth itself.

Poetry is

an expenditure of language without goal, in fact

a redundancy; a constant sacrifice to a sacrifice.

t

is possible

that one should speak here about love, in other

words

about

reality, or the probability of answering the sourceless echo-

about responsibility.

Arkadii ragomoschenko

2


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23/136

StJMMAEtEGIA

.

:


24/136


25/136

A SENTIMENTAL ELEGY

(for Anna Hejinian)

Let the mouse run

over

the stone

-Aleksandr Vvedensky

Tell me, what binds us to some meaning,

what drives us out of our minds?

Dark

of a racing cloud, trace of

The rim of a clock face.

glass, white.

The vastness of death and its insignificance, debris

flying in a scorched haze of dragonflies

earen't going anywhere.

There are wells where even at noon the stars are sharp

But branching

out

like a book into

strangeness-a

possibility

always remains,

sand

and standing still.

Some word, like a law's mold, reveals the world reversed

mirrored down the axis of matter.

And so

this peeling apart

in

tireless trials of freedoms.

Perhaps- but it's

meaningless -in

the prisms' twilight

where winters' straight lines erupt suddenly in the ice

and like indivisible fire

the wind rocks it and scatters it

by

the handful.

And so

in the trials of flight between zenith, nadir, window

and

unshaven cheek,

5


26/136

ochre

and

heather,

in the debris of streaming heights ...The visible image

of a home for these things eludes us. What's behind them?

The same is behind us and before us.

Capricious stroll, hair like far-off laughter,

Not to remember to weave a cobweb into the structure

Into the correspondence of minutest registers

Their myriads flicker

Myriads

matching the spirals of the pulse that braids the wrist's

of hearing,

dry

riverbeds.

The sequel is absurd.

A conquest (of what?)

is

like a photograph, its filigree

lost in a grid,

For everything must begin, however

you

look at snow and fire,

As if, reflected in melting ice

on

the window,

you

were

scraping your cheeks with a razor

And again the nature of sunset

is

unknown

And of the spatial partitions that create it time?

body?

memory? line? and of the intervals glimpsed by chance

when branching

out

like a book into strangeness.

What is said is a lamp,

but

it announces: spring thunder.

Light speaks its name brokenly and immediately you can hear

how the dry celery beside the indistinct map

flickers

glistening

hoarsely

like the wrist's river weeds.

6


27/136

The tap is running.

But take some bitter coffee beans, let them be

spun

into fragrant dust

let them simmer

odds

and

evens ground down, stopping the

run

of whirled resins

And

tum

to the invulnerable, braided water

For there the fluid time of its fall is shattered,

n the memory a splinter of light catches the thousand ''l's

it stubbornly

retums-

as children against their will catch the claw of a bird

in the creaking kitchen, perhaps ....

I

don t

remember.

I was shifted a pace aside

from myself, from everyone, and that includes God

approaching the native land of clouds

and cutting

my

gaze off from flashes of sand

and

trees.

Summer passes

hiding nothing

in

the deep blue

a branch of elation sinking

into crystal salts of reason

Tell

me,

what

is it that melts in

us or

binds

us

together?

Within the sequence of days and of days now

and

then

alternating with night ..

drawn

out

beyond the limits of the mind to the stillness

in each chance sound

split by the desire for such binding.

27


28/136

Note

on

the epigraph to A Sentimental Elegy

In actual fact objects are a faint mirror image of time. Objects

don t

exist .... Let the mouse run across the stone.

Now

count

every one of its footsteps.

Now

forget the word every, forget

. the word footstep. Then every footstep will appear as a new

movement. After that, since, for good reason, you have

experienced the disappearance of your perception of a series of

movements which

you

were erroneously calling footsteps (you

were confusing movement with space), movement will begin to

fragment,

it

will be reduced to nil. A flickering begins. The

mouse begins to flicker. Look around: the world is flickering.

from Oberiuty,

by

Leonid Aleksandrov, in

Chekhoslovenska

rusistika

XIII 68 no. 5

28


29/136

THE NUMERICALLY SECOND ELEGY

What

is being written is unwritten, approaching completion.

What is

written-it s

incomplete, perpetually

approaching completion.

A choice of meanings.

The seductiveness of a particular meaning. Then the plural.

A cherry

and the temples

are poised for

now

in an equation, like the wall s

blooming clusters, studying the rain.

Not meant for the

hands-neglect

..

Can you hear, has enough been said?

Are

there enough meanings of myself for me to stop,

What is being written reduced to what s been written,

desiring no other:

what is not and never could have been said here

and now again: guess who sent this postcard.

A guess is

an

obstacle, a ferment of distinctions

But not the tangle of their transformations into metaphor ..

The magnificent rainbow of breath falls back toward the mouth,

Now

and

then in the cold one sees its formation

and, finally, here is its

description-whether or

not

its

beginning

is

within

me

is

uncertain: desire. The sting of desire

and

so forth.

o repeat, desire expiring. Strong smell of frozen beet.

The sunflower is black,

The omnipotence of the cold

is

flowering like the wall

of a passerby.

The end is always sudden.

You

distance yourself from the one

who

chooses for himself

the first person,

Several persons.

One of them is first. The

end

is unexpected, like completion,

9


30/136

and

intimacy collapses now everything s close to the body-

Not to name it home

under

any circumstances

Not to name it ...

Better to

be

silent as

in

the cold.

Have you finished?

Better the evening with a glass of wine

and

you

as your own guest

when one writes about wine as about the eyes of a frozen fish

in which one thing will never become another

by studying the walls blossoming with the unspoken

in spring.

3


31/136

ELEGY TO A DREAM

ON

THE STH OF FEBRUARY

A

dream-that s

four.

Those who proclaim: Four features will grow black hereafter

on

the worm-riddled page

without unrolling

the scroll of numbers.

The full moon fits into four

Translucence like a cellophane shell bulging around a locked

room. The globe.

By

itself the dream isn't significant. A thief.

Voices muttering: The reading lessons won t last long ...

hearing

muffled-a

moat melting the endings off vowels

doesn't prevent our unrolling the alphabet scroll. The mouth.

Only for

an

instant the comers

relax-narrow

in the captivating obscurity of hearing,

in two lines, repeated in two windows, stark white.

The comers are thin, like a closing wound.

The comers are sharp-the dog-star Sirius drawn from a well.

Moisture is simple

at

the points of intersection

in live cavities of rhyme

But voices speak in

unison-that s

four,

This is the fissure's refraction, behind it the

mouth

of the intersection spurting dark

But in order to lose oneself there, to assume

the form of a docile dream

One must broach the thought that its shores can't be reached.

The moon

stood.

The labor of the sensing hand, mute. Then a second hand

Again the one that preceded this in the intersection's austerity

Where-for me and the voices uttering.

3


32/136

Cinnabar familiar with the sky

From here the winds form a close ring.

The sky abandons speech.

Seated around the table's husk were all whom the brain

letting them draw themselves up

in different configurations. There

was absorbing,

was not a single thing that couldn't be named: light

r four, it doesn't matter,

When you bend your body of glass with your trace

With this I was

a second, third, fourth, not regaining

speech.

32

around the dream.


33/136

KITCHEN ELEGY

(for Michael Molnar)

Guess who

sent

you this

card

for

your

birthday

(birthday card text)

An agony of radiating bone in the hissing snow,

The wormwood bush bent by the wind.

It's red and sharp-don t listen to its sound,

Stamp it into

the

path.

The hand, meeting a thorn

on

the cornel bush,

weakens, respecting no perfection of form

with its lingering drop of blood.

Frost.

Air. In its brightness and rifts. A vacant lot.

And

it seems it is just as

hard

for the sky

to remove a star from the equations of light

as it is for me to remember how many winters

remain before summer

or to let memory coalesce

restored meanwhile to that perfection of form-

not a mercury drop

but

the unsleeping needle

that doesn t need thread, allowed to glide without shadow,

no longer the drop s sticky mirror,

like branches, showing the hand flame

fused where the point bursts.

Gray, meager shoots of dawn.

Tea

like a phoenix fledgling dwelled

in

the

cup s

patterned cage.

The vacant lot swirled in the window-in its frame,

gnawing with quick teeth into the cold,


34/136

dogs were swimming

in snowdrifts.

The crows floating resembled imprints in coal.

The cigarette ash was slow to fall ...

And a draft w s stirring

my

hair, interfering

with the eye s morning studies

narrowed against the sharp rays

o teach the

mouth

again to be patient with the object,

o tie knots, not to decipher them.

34


35/136

UTNOT

AN

ELEGY

Parallel snow,

Animal smoke

huddles in the neolithic burrows of the night.

Comprehension is confined between the brackets

of the eyes, nibbling

white,

and

the

mind

is like a mouse in a labyrinth.

You

see what

you

see.

The world lies low. You are only a hunted beast

creeping cautiously

across a crackling

nap

of sound

You will be trapped.

The trash pits have lost the secret power to stop entropy

as a poultice of chewed nettles stops the flow

of

blood

or

singing stops the raving of the mad.

Two or three degrees ago

on the centigrade scale

the

sections were already coming

apart

cutting ties) longing for wholeness,

For disintegration as

i f

it were a meeting ..

Where does the column of heat come from?

The

sun

falls directly on the slope of the roof.

t

is resurrection and resurrection again.

Now

even a corpse

must

be

as

hard

as a star

And

as invulnerable, too,

in

subterranean

lakes not

horrifying

As

a

gun

is

not

horrifying nor the glowing column

of tranquil fire

Where charred crow vessels

Dwindle

behind

the thumbnail of the visible

Living half as the eye of the Arctic and half as myself

stamping a red clump of wormwood into the snow.

o

we discover the structure of the

sky measuring

ourselves

35


36/136

against the moon;

Inheriting a kingdom by right of primogeniture

ou

shake the

dead mouse out

of the labyrinth

ut

of the parallels

The animal smoke out of what you see

of what is seen.

36


37/136

MARCH ELEGY

ros

snows

(from the poetic)

The ridiculous shack of frost is slush, faded,

The solar hood of the rose is white as

damp

plaster.

Brother wolf with his ravenous belly is foraging through thickets

along the ravines

and

in sparse brush

Relentlessly baring his teeth at himself

in

the fog,

Ears laid back against his scalp, rushing about

in his mangy skin,

He grieves,

Forages,

Squinting

an

eye

at

the moon in the black gullies,

Staring straight at a plaster doll in the gold, ..

Nobody.

f

only a stinking Tatar

Oh, how thin

and

mournful the whining of the stubble

on the hillside-

f only a venerable old man would cross his path,

He wouldn' t insult him with aid,

he d

just rip open his throat.

He sheds clumps of

fur,

chokes

on

crusts of foam,

Wretched with his yellow fangs

Nothing.

in

the tints of wonderful smoke

It's not the moon that splashes icy water into

is

jaws,

It's not a pestilential star that scratches

his heart like a

sister-

Ripping his paws to the bone on the crust of diamondlike snow,

Night and day,

7


38/136

d y nd

night bending into one bow,

The younger brother, recalling little Prince Ivan, gallops

Straight into the white

su

Look,

wh t he

got into his head, the cur

38


39/136

ELEGY ON RISING DUST

...

t

rises

slowly

monotonously

flows.

Meanwhile, wrapped in the depths of lethargy,

An innocent root drinks the winter s coals

Just as seraphim

devour

the tom-out tongue

clapping their glassy wings

And

how compelling is the blooming-not of clouds

Of

murky

systems for calculating time

Spring s scales are shadowless like the brain s axe-head

And

blood is revealed

in

concealed transformations

As if it were a substance rising to the zenith

Then falling back to the nadir of pure speech

That leads off endlessly

to

dreams of birth

And contemplates itself in the husk around essential matter.

Like so: in the gliding of the swift

In the instant the lizard darts from the shade-

A rift, like the breath drawn in, immaculate,

Division s thread leads straight to unity;

A rift, like the breath released, or distinction,

Whose packs

of

signifiers, quivering,

in

intangible

and predatory ardor

Coldly weave a pattern of exceptions.

Meanwhile the equilibrium is unaffected by the thunder,

y worms of lightning tearing the fabric

Into piscine strands of craving, sap and cinders

at

the

delta

of

the northern sheer transparent rivers

The sunken

bowls of the lakes grown wild

39


40/136

With ancient configurations of capillary moisture

Intertwine, snatching away any sign of light and depth,

Plunging the pine into the sand's precision

And binding the unplumbed dome of wind in a web of resemblances

With the eyelash fighting

In the rocky labor of life-giving night

Sea grasses which from earliest times penetrate

The strata of gods told in a merging of elements

And also the turquoise barrier between the fire and the house

Which we again disturb with the illusion of delight.

The spring of history ... The history of spring

So senseless and meager a gift

And nonetheless at times it is equal in grandeur

To the powerful form of raging dust

To

glittering, poisonous scales

in the mirrored splashing of resurrection

-here a confession follows: the law ... of the elegy ...

Or to sense, rejecting thought

In

an

avalanche of rustling

and

voracious magnitudes

Spreading a net of crystal frost, unnumbered

t is the end of matter, the window's riddle

In which clouds drunk from heat

hang in anticipation of

dark

downpours.

In the floating rustle, in the flight of swifts ...

I don t ask for mercy.

t is barely warm

along the fringe of delight with the line

Tying what's not

this

to what's not that.

Let there be a God of the trace, transparent as mica,

4


41/136

Lowered into the night. Let there be a God of the bay

Like canvas embroidered with

equilibrium

with silk saliva

from cocoons of the dead.

But the identities of spring

Enormous

dreams of language.

And dust, drifting through them beyond words,

is rising slowly, a simple incarnation,

Elusive

and

unsleeping as "the other"

In whose verbal body "I" is set like a trap.

4


42/136

OBSERVATION OF A FALLEN LEAF

AS

THE ULTIMATE

BASIS

OF LANDSCAPE

(a reading)

1.

It settles.

.. although what prompts this

is unknown

ChuangTzu,

On the equality of matter''

The sediment is

mobile-a

landscape.

We

shift it in

an

experiment

with

time-the

flicker

of increments in the dwindling exclusion of signs.

Attributes: round? bitter? sharp? number?

the crawling path of simulacra (consequences)

connecting blooms with a fog of blood

in the wordroots' symmetry?

Just like

a vine

Utopia?

that growing

climbs-a

lens change--

groping toward a goal: distance. The reflections

of drops in each other (a mountain, near the eye

the thumb of the right hand on which there's a scratch,

a mulberry tree, further away, you see, they too

viewed from different sides

points

of place

posited by space.

found their place -a landscape

Until the drops dry, they hold out

42


43/136

the possibility of non-coincidence. But each wipes out

the reason for the others, substituting itself.

As

in a closely-focused optics, the car flips moments

across

the face

looking to the side. t the intersection.

nd to make it easier later one writes: rain, weather,

a lock of sunlight

on

the cheek,

description of a stone.

To

be concrete

the event is inserted in the narration in a single gulp:

reality.

Pedestrians changing.

The footstep's naive bone separates the tissue joining

one thing to another.

A photograph in which there is always only the inception

of death, i.e. comparison. Whose second

part

is

you

turning toward the first part with desire

spread out over the eyes; to smoke, to see,

describing

the surroundings of a letter's co-position

with the one after and the one before, realized in one

that hasn' t yet appeared.

Literally a tree on a knoll. A woman with a red umbrella,

snow, in a man's raincoat, wind, to the ground, and a dog:

Either a mound of sagging clay ...

But like the broken bush in the distance-

They stand out like an echo.

I'll stay

as long as description transforming the tree into experience here

in the evening

in

the center

And turning away: unexpectedly the landscape stands still.

Waits. Streetlights.

4


44/136

Stricken by the virus of time. And to it again; becoming

its axis, whose ends are joined, like sleeves of a tautology

or also

possible its

pain, unifying contemplation.

Such is the source of a favorable environment, the layering

of the bush,

the dog, of the shovelled earth ...

clay

Like the lizard's lettering

when awakened by the flashing future.

Pleasant is the ford when you cross the great river ...

Forty years,

however they say a

leaf falls

from this tree ...

From this one?

A poplar? A letter? Catachresis? Perpendicular? The blue

in sepia slits?

Synesthesia?

Madness?

A sign enters like a forged nail we hammer

into the shell of oblivion.

The collar of the dictionary.

The seed's schema is pulled straight I teach

I)

in a leaf

swirled into the surroundings

Gradually opening a mode of existence to simple

landscape language.


45/136

2

The landscape

is

a

moment

of

time

that has

gotten in

position

L . Hejinian,

he

Guard

But how could we sleep, rapturous with bliss

from countless recognitions in a field of damp

where yellow ripens intermittent as seeing?

Through the drizzle.

And down to the depths of January?

But how could we breathe? We? things are always the same.

Snow ess.

A shriek,

disembodied apund.

And

melting the horizon flows

from

moons spread

out,

stored displaying

the concave

outspread

sum

of the senseless weight of sagging space.

But the sound is high. Immobile, like a sphere

no bigger than a bee's universe which fell on it

in the physical victory

of vanity

released by gaiety.

To

exist everywhere motionless. Like rust corroding hierarchies,

To

stretch ''being into seeing without lingering, as

i

without touching the throat ...

Having rejected the avarice of form

In order to move from some to love on the thread of substitution.

The snow doesn't melt

Where there is none. The grass is melodious

and

dry.

And the live corpse of a leaf leaves behind a conceivable decay

broken by a line in imaginary time ..

45


46/136

sediment moving down a well-worn course.

Annealed by weight.

And in this prospect, where the force of friction

the damp)

on the eye is pure

a saturated yellow, filling

We

unite the sands gray scraping with reason: into

one-many,

Leaving the snow behind,

Outliving the leaf s ghostly

flight-a

net of emptinesses,

trap of rumors.

Having left its

own

outline untouched, the leaf

like a thing in time

is arrogant with promise (even above the branch

weighted toward the

ground

And then just for a moment the all-encompassing predicate

of layers makes this clear.

And once again transparency marks matter ...

No more than a letter

on

the surface, a face,

All traces trace, the cell of all nets. Only a choice of letter,

Nothing,

After turning itself inside

out on

waking

in the bed of the sentence.

t is only

an

observation of a leaf .

Weaving the ground into landscape. But let s count:

just such a year

burns

down

the frame of

days-borne

off outside

And

if

you re not here

Then here are all your days. Anyone is continued

by the significance of another.

46


47/136

Strange work: to search for regularity.

And having stepped back

as

i

slightly startled

Taking cold with the tongue from the teeth

Pulling the soaked scarf away from the throat

Then only to notice this lofty

disorder each

thing

s

clear

viewed through the palm of the hand.

47


48/136

INSTRUCTING CLARITY IN A CONFUSION

1

As black

in

the hollows of white

rushes to wake

with fatal blooming, smoke is spread out

by procrastination's underground shoals over the mutiny of snows

(what force within failure drives one on?

and leans over the narrow-lipped gloom like

an

inscription

saturated with centuries

it seethes again in unbearable commentary

And letters appear, furthermore, without shadows

in the grindstones of

order-they're

not cities

in feverish drops of wind

nor fables about nature;

and there is

no

trace

of matter that 's as precious as an echo,

lovers of some past time and thing,

when

poets were everything although ..

death (laughter?) occurs more often, so as not to divide the mind

into a labyrinthian root system,

a splash

of readings-thousands -

in a singular link with beautiful motes of temporary

material appropriate

to lovers-

unions,

bodies, swimming in darkness in rivers, going

down

to the rotting shafts of the mind ...

48


49/136

2.

Life flakes off

with

speech. The husk goes off, playing the fool

along a flowing path of sap,

winters pass over the hills

and a tree ages hour by hour

with rings of compassion in an endless din) like the

black

with white dew

night transforms hundreds of stars

into plasma

and wasps

are winnowed with the gods' fires.

The line of plains and mountains

whirls like a fog

whose stones envelop the moon in veins and the Siren is gold

on the bough.

But the evolution of changes is less visible than smoke

hovering like a rainbow of achievement over a steel-gray crown

not hoarfrost

but

ice

resembling death, flowing back to the beginning

but out also to the

end

through thought ... o billows of procrastination )

but

thought lies in the neighborhood of doubt, where

it waits eternally

to be recognized

erasing itself renewed like a written record

as

in spring the sown seeds level the furrow, turning the density

of fibers into the heart of matter-mute

a boundless knife point

o

procrastinating blades .. )

9


50/136

The fir is heavy with ice.

Needles

and

trunks

etched black.

A sparkling funereal shadow lies straight as a pathway

under

the turquoise birches

and fire wrapped in womanly yellow tenderly bares

the jutting twigs.

o

stand here alone as water. Without shores.

ithin

a rind

of grasses

the impatience of the brew is bitter, delirious,

as

i

someone s ant-like mouth

were distorted

on

the glass, in medicinal drunkenness

when the floor changes places with the ceiling

and the crooked cold

toying with the

mouth that

disembodied

brother of the forehead,

of

dry

contemplation

in seeds of inaudible ignorance like a net

set to destroy the mind caught in stagnant meaning

in the dull, dying hour of dawn. But here even memory is no more

than a flaw

sucked in by the center of the circle. Don t leave.

Bend down.

Listen to the hum tall weeds. Bare. Unseen.

Sound this

is waiting, when there s nothing to hear in response,

The string envies such a fate ...

A spark s colorful moment separates us

with a moth s ash spread

in

the soot

by the free rainbow of eyelashes

Having separated

us

it crowns the eyelids

flash cinders

of the ten seconds when the eyes meet,

cut off like a shoot in a crystal lens, such is the bamboo stem

so


51/136

of the uninhabited

nd the stale asbestos color of the roofs

covered with sodden pigeon carrion.

3.

But the graceful raising of a hand

encroaching

on

the framework of geometry

before eternity (not sunset's tree

which is burnt through with holes of oily lace

but

a few extended lines ready to be joined

by n imaginary thing

out of all imaginary numbers into one)

the

lifting of the h nd will

carry

out

the encroachment already there

where in nd out''

pulsate peacefully

in the font of accumulated nothing.

A thaw.

A face.

It's getting light.

Streetlight like a sea creature dries, scraping its beam

on the slushy stones.

The tide of d wn

equals all rifts.

The snow doesn't change the direction of the wind

The first streetcar clanks.

5


52/136


53/136

TH

ISL NDS

OF

SIRENS


54/136


55/136

THE ISLANDS OF SIRENS

1

I

am

guided

by Thoth

that

guides

me.

(''The Corresponding Sky )

Swimming already

in childhood

I suspected

that it

was pure

time.

The idea

of

universal glue seeps

weeping down over wonder

The question's crystal

trellis

The answer's transparent frame

shimmers in

an

intangible instant of displacement

and in its outgrowth the splash of a

diaphragm-

petals

of

metal

and

the slitting splash

backwards

a rustle creeping through the chamber of years.

That is not everything, but that

is

always behind

one's back,

or

behind,

behind the preposition marking space

behind a glance

resembling

an

answer's shell; half-open

it waits for the hour

to flash in the downstroke

falling back like the night sky in wide open eyes

from

eyelash to eyelash

from oily dreams to

an

adjective

jumping on no


56/136

And

the eyes, like nets, taking bodiless form

flow around the swimmer

He

comes into consciousness from the other side of things

like a dangling coin.

And as for the innocence of the meeting a little later:

the ocean,

gardens of the Hesperides,

archipelago.

Garden

of fourteen stones,

Cosmos knowing neither place nor reckoning.

ou

scoop water

now

from the Scamander,

now

from the tiny Tanais, from the Bug, the Neva,

again

and

again the bucket swings

overboard with a hollow sound.

When the

wind

stops,

and

the sleeves of tautology

get wet, knotted in the hollows

behind the back, a force liberated from motion

crumbles the solidity of one s belongings

with

its weight,

the coupling of spit, of body, veins of decay, of chlorophyll,

of the glue

in the soaring intersection of beam and shadow.

From where the (soul?) soul

(we read) goes off

in different directions simultaneously

not with jealousy s lies

but

twisting its tremor

as if it were a spool of threads

flying

outward

to the floor it jerks coil after coil

(an acrobat

on a trapeze)

winding inspiration

on

itself. What

was left

a dry tree, licked clean by a chisel.

56


57/136

It's rare that one goes straight home

More often one's like a page

thrown on the table

wet

with

rain-everything

wide open everything

summer

spots spreading simultaneously from different sides

And what 's between them, that last instant of meaning,

that-home,

disappears into it.

A living funnel

under the oar, unaware of itself, existing only a moment ago,

exposes emptiness like a seed.

The wandering seed of the universe

burning version after version.

Verse-turning. Not that

but not yet the other.

An azure falcon envelops

the land

with its wings

leaning

on feathery pillars

of flame.

The mercy of pseudonarration.

I've

made

up

my

mind. I must, finally, tell a story "about

something," must

beat

a

path

for t assiduously in a fake

memory.

An hysterical

swarm of

moths

coils around

the

streetlight and, I should add-the eyelids ...Why? Well,

because

the theme

of turning began long before yesterday.

Because, having fixed habits, sometimes one can successfully

recall the

state

that memory immediately

frames

as

the

ornament of necessary details. Omitting a list of them, we'll go

on to the next entry. I remember the stupor that overcame me

57


58/136

(was i t childhood? youth?), as

i

I were lost in a

long

contemplation of some brilliant object. Activity

in

limited

space. A familiar ploy. Concentrated

in

dispersal. Thanks to

certain habits, it's possible to repeat these moments even now,

when speed overlapped itself; it exposed what I studying

vision, could neither describe nor understand

nor

,take from

language, even more

vague

in

its totality than those few

images which it offered to my consciousness, dazzled by its

accessibility. But it's no secret now, that

what s

arrested in

hypermotion was no more than a world, like

an

anticipation of

my

future

memory of

that moment. Is there time? What is

space? Content, you will ask? Is it merely pure brilliance? And

you

don t

want to say more? And you

don t want

more? And

you-are

nothing more?

And you-are

no more

than what

you can say? Sun eclipsed by

Song*-sign

turning, it began its

descent to another realm. Propp's trope.

But it's been so long since we told each other stories. A

photograph's aporia. Truly the steel music of the elevators is

wonderful, the great night music; descending or

ascending-in fact, what's the difference? I love lying with her

no less than being in her. On my back, that is,

beyond-the

pendulum of walls. Examining the amusing movements of the

lips, moving

with

breath-wave

and sand-which

tell the

night's story. So the ridiculous movements of

our

two naked

*In The Song [or Lay] o Igor s Campaign, the first

example

of

Russian poetry,

an

eclipse

ot

the sun divides the poem into two parts.

The second part is the story of Prince Igor s journey into the next

world. In his studies of the folk tale, the Formalist theorist Vladimir

Propp

used

the

poem

as a basis for

is

analysis of certain prototypical

and recurrent formal elements in the plots and subsequent meaning of

folk tales; the discovery of new knowledge in the next world

and

the

subsequent return of the hero, transformed by his newly acquired

knowledge, to the world

of

the living

are

among the

significant

elements of these tales.

58


59/136

bodies demand speech: case endings, pauses, certain words to

which others would respond, drawing us along. How late we

are As always we're simply not there, debtors' speeches, so as

not to be left behind with one or two convulsions, although,

by the way,

they re

quite pleasant. The theme of turning. I

entered the slatey-obsidian aperture of light, leaving behind

the milky

depths

of the kitchen, the

paper

geometry of the

room,

where patches of books,

capable

of cheering anybody,

showed through one another, not denigrating, not glorifying,

and black birds quickly descended to

my

shoulder, supplying

me with

the necessary information

in harsh, unpleasant

voices, which merged into each other. They imitated books:

I-a language fact."

Segments of duration stick together like eyelids

withdrawing into a circle's ranks. Memory encounters

the anticipation of itself-the disappearance

of rhythm

in sections of equal length.

The planet's echo is set askew, its weaving

in thickening sandy flocks bending

toward sweet collapse is tender.

In the nettle rains, blood-making is transparent.

Algae

wind around the screw Rhodimenia stenogona

hondrus primulatus

Euthora

cristata

Porphyra variegata

Dumontia incrassata

59


60/136

Pylaiella litoralis ...

Chryzomenia

wrightii.

Proper

name-metonymy.

Descending the grainy slope to the water

you give her handfuls of water. You spill it, watch,

how all that was drowsy

when

dividing flows together.

Aline.

Like the hand s shores, and between them all that laughs

at the possibility of a name.

I see the strait, indented by clouds.

Yo thout in mynde remembraunce how

weol

brent

revolven in ye

welkin

on

hyllecreste

whilom.

Ye

cavernys thir

innardys ofbasalte

y-wrought

ye bulluc ye

tre

ye

chaunticlere

y-plumpt

as

werdys

ond

semeth hydde

in

purpel dawenynge

of pryme y-shapen sterrys of

grene.

Ond quhair

wynde

layke ye fauchoun

pleynes.

All the difference

we ll

get n the stone.

A second, that

part

of some mineral, colored by vicinity,

unfolded

its

torn

edges.

But

how

can

I

comprehend the

infinite, i only

one thought

fills the

imagination

with

thunderous laughter: the end. Of what? The eyes tum to the

stone, illuminated by a part of speech signifying some quality,

starting

another

luminescence

in

the self-negation of the

transition from one to another-a test of

the

pen

in

description.

Granite

is 40% water.

Stone

pores ... You

and

I-pure time. Next to each other or far away or yesterday in

the morning when, before, after, tomorrow,

in

three

thousand

seven

hundred

forty-four ... What? Should we

do

the dishes?

Should we sweep the floor? Should we publish a book of

6


61/136

poems with

lyrical tendencies? The arrested wandering becomes a

country-grammar. A bus stop, street crossing, one second in the day's

tectonic layers: sounding (yellow car,

tragic?)-it'

s analyzed like a gulp

of air.

She takes the hand from her breast, regards the lines on the ceiling,

comparing them with the lines on the wallpaper. The two are silent.

Your story is incomprehensible, she says, incomprehensible, although

it's difficult not to suppose that she is like the pages thrown on a table

wet with rain. The glue is called the Moment. The shoes know it.

2

At times, it seemed, the paddles plunged

into the serenity of grasses which metals waste away

in clusters of oxygen

in thunder and heat

avoiding the melancholies of the sand

whose arms are restless like the moon directing

the ebb and flow

resembling crowded figures of kind clay

formed

from varied

cells, as

i

to come into being,

to live backwards in the crosshairs of sight

where identities beyond hearing and shame

were defeated in the field

of reflections

having lairs in a foam of silver.

Consider

this- later

long ago already was then.

End of quote.

The paddles plunge

into the flqwering morph of a forest

hung in space like a thing.

61


62/136

At a touch the darkening stagnates

And connections appear with whatever in the wordform is

takes on its own viscous meaning

thanks to simple repetition

like smalt

thrown by luck into glue cryingout at the wonder

of un coup

de

des.

In contact with any surface

we experience the obvious which forces objects

to come slightly after

language--

in the floating rustle, in the flight of

swifts

laughable and ancient child,

with such tenderness you teach a poet

to confound death with laughter

and resurrect

and patiently confuse

mind with

wind

and sparks with sweat-

their beating immobile

and bottomless, like a migration of birds along the edge

of a blade

matching its length.

As for the paddles in their great number:

3

They shatter the surface

of dancing strands and subside

as the turbulence recedes into the depths

But

afterwards-more

dazzling, smoother,

higher

6


63/136

i the three are in a row

on papyrus or incised in

limestone

it's a sign of spring

A syllable of favor

on the forehead of Nut

(having tired of terrestrial discord,

we

lifted

the azure belly of the cow

One of her eyes

a magma chink

over its congested ground )

(mother's letter: the core

of my mind, she writes, is encrusted with lime. Imagine,

how hard it is for me to

part

with you-there you are,

somewhere,

under

her, you grow weak, you are becoming

a stalactite.

And

I beg you,

don t

smoke, and

buy

oranges

i you can)

and in the magma

in the lava's infra-singing, looking closely

we see

how

they are carried by the wind

dancing like spirals

not separated from those whom all

our

lives

in repetitions

throughout the whole of death we seek.

The second eye only Pars.chikov could have created:

it is a well of pattern meandering without bottom or shame

without

a

staff-like

a

shepherd-beyond

any basis

for thirst

6


64/136

beyond the walls, the enmity of their disgrace, whose backs

they bear around the circle like ore,

a load of

roots-oxen

of the rocky, geological rumble

and accumulation

0 heavenly vein

mind s morning wine, like the sea,

the stem of plagues, the Third Eye's course

amazing

in

itself-can

we

comprehend

the flow

of your

burning blizzard?

in which the sister

collecting pollen dips her

hands

to mix liquid

with

liquid

to soak it into the power of all-sharing kinship.

An eye-socket in the stupefaction of the bloom ..

night's formula spread

out in time in which

the husband-but face to face-

emerges

from the brother s

body

from the netherworld.

What distinguishes the language of photographs from letters?

When the

wind

stops

to extend the branching of branches with gifts

conveying signs of their affinity

(this

and that

achieved their true

purpose

victorious in the magnificence

of

emptiness-they

swayed ... that's all )

64


65/136

when

passing through the brain s two hemispheres

it subsides in ghosts as they die out, born from them

You

approach the window and you see

a boy looking back at you from a neighboring house.

His forehead at night is beautiful-silent blooming

like a glass hieroglyph, the unheard flight of hours

in which mothy snow swirls,

an inchworm in a chamber of light, a murmur, rustle

in the shrinking whisper.

He looks at me and sees how I thaw toward him.

The immeasurability of speech

flowing through the body always amazed me ...

resembling a city, a swarm of flies grazing, exhausted

by mercury,

resembling a spoke.

And you won t say anything.

An evaporating cloud - one-ended rainbow.

But what stones,

on

which of the road s easy curves?

and how much can they add to the footstep

sinking in anxiety

in the rumble of bees and clover?

In its constancy a thought unfolds itself

I see a stone.

We ve

heard

that a crystal is formed when nature,

undergoing changes, moves a step toward impoverishment,

and in that very

moment

the theme of beauty begins to

shimmer, inquiry and obstacle. But the stone ... What am I to

it?

6


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The complexity of surface leaves me at a dead end, the

sensation of complexity dulled. The simplicity of the surface in

the stone's totality frustrates me .... I see a stone. I

write-is

the

stone some immutable condition, compelling one to write? An

impulse. And I answer-no. But it is also not a whim. In that

case do I see some thing, an object, in order to begin to write,

to conceive of an object in all its relationships with me,

continuing? One can ask also-do I only write when I hold

pen in hand,

and

pen on paper-leading-extracting from

cells of Breughel's space a letter's pages. But already for a long

time the

fingers

sit

on

the typewriter

keys. The

drive that

moves the carriage is a little weak, the letters print one into the

other.

Of

course

one

can ask: why do you ask? Who will

answer you and don t you already have enough story worlds?

Color and time-one and the same. From these I've already

learned something. The manuscript now is nothing but a

calendar,

calculating the shortest routes to the stone.

We

discovered the secrets of hilarity. A lyrical approach is also

possible. We're talking about the experiences of an author who

describes a stone, and people say to him that the stone is none

other

than

his father, since the context permits such an

interpretation ... The author answers like this: the father has

turned into a different material. He is ring-like, a ring, to

which the deafness of the wintry streets attributed the shine of

copper

wire, boiled

in

alkalies of sibilants. The filaments of

power, emitted from the

point

where the

word

disappeared,

attract all occurrences, as such, as possibility. The mind does

only

one

thing: exclude.

To paraphrase:

the perfect letter

leaves no traces. The

mind

does

not

need eyes since it

doesn t

feel pain. The stone signifies something else-simply that it

isn't. I see the stone. '

All winter a false death's-head

rolled like a pebble in the mouth of renunciation.


67/136

recklessly crossed the borders of longing.

The city holds endless intersections.

Squirrels

Again

you

cut off the thought that moves toward them: father,

stone, sky

What

i

two darted into one

as the star in the northwest

unties the binding duties.

0 the speed of the

swarm

in its dizziness

Dodging each moment, the accidentally discovered "self"

description - arkadii dragomoshchenko

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