Sukhanovo

Flipped the pages and picked randomly, an amazing poem from the dense collection, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness.

Sukhanovo by Natalya Gorbanevskaya

Leafless buoyancy
of bare groves in April,
green moss, transparent
stream, cold horse-tail.

Oblivious buoyancy
like a dream of eroded words,
transparent day, green aspen grove
of a hundred trunks.

Cold bend of the river
and in the far distance
the transparent wind is whistling
in the rosy osier bed.

Here, as in a painting, noon burns yellow,
and the very air, like grief, is disembodied,
and in the utter silence, like a winged army,
the crows in Crow Park hang overhead.

But the mouldering leaves of years past
cling to my elbows, to my hands reeking
of cigarette smoke, and the bare shrubbery thrusts
its arms among my tangled curls.

I have left home so far behind me,
like a plane that in a dense fog wanders
from the aerodrome into the darkness...
Am I living or dead, am I leaves or grass?

Wipe the bliss of half-sleep from your cheeks
and open your eyes wide until the lids ache,
the filth and whiteness of the ward
is like the voluntary flag of your bondage.

The emptiness and narrowness of the ward---
close your eyes tightly until your cheeks ache.
Wipe the smile off your chapped lips,
but swallow the ineffectual scream.

The half-dark, half-light of the ward---
and your neighbor, with closed eyes,
insensibly cursing the white light,
soundlessly dissolves in tears.

In my own twentieth century
where there are more dead than graves
to put them in, my miserable,
forever unshared love

among these Goya images
is nervous, faint, absurd,
as, after the screaming of jets,
the trump of Jericho.

In the bird scream and whistle,
I open the window, open myself.
Before the grand presence passing by
I hide, like a farmyard fowl.

The white flame of light
fades.  The transcendental howl
subsides.  In the empty sky
a magpie wags its tail.

But day clings to the tree shadow
and does not depart;
it moves like a rusted engine,
and the faint echo of its last
sobbing rays hangs over the wood
like a sun in the sky.

Goodbye!---and I am myself amazed
how bright and cold it grows,
how the rain stops drizzling.
Goodbye!---like a little ladleful I spill
into the broad clear river,
into the deep gentle Lethe.

You howl, you weep copiously
on the green grass
and again return to your slavery,
your mind numbed.

You howl, you weep, you swallow
bitter tears,
down steep hill slopes you roll
into the nettles.

And again you return.  How long will you
continue thus?
Your palms tingle all over with the burs.
Sharpen a pencil,

seated at your desk, scrawl a line, scribble it
on your wrist;
spot a blade of grass with
a drop of blood.

Make appointments in December,
when even the lips freeze in the cold,
but how may one descend from poetry to prose
and overcome the craving of the body?

I circle the cold columns,
catarrhal parking lots,
offend the passing traffic of men and cars
and find no place in the world.

It's quicker by the underpass, but
you can't get far from yourself;
sleep, swallow, morsel of transmigration,
like a piece of ice on the rock of asphalt.

Now I am sick, and feverish, and in a sweat.
I ramble on of you in my delirium,
of the long wished for, of the unloved,
of that which is dear to me and which is not.
I fall through into a nether world of oblivion,
where only the body wags its heavy tongue,
while the soul, poor creature,
lies in a dungeon under lock and key.

And there, in the depths, the dark, the gorge,
you loom, like a desert mirage
and my low voice calls out, cries.
...The pillow is hot against my cheek,
the cannon booms toward dense noon,
and deafness fills the throat, a bitter taste the eyes.

translated by Daniel Weissbort