living in a jar

the cardinal hurls itself against the glass
repeatedly a pity it would be
to have such pretty life obliterated
it must suspect some unexplored estate
beyond the obstacle it cannot grasp
seems somehow eerie that it is blood-red
the color of myself seen from inside
i’ll verify the truth of this conjecture
if it persists and splits itself in two
stains on the glass so far are not its fault
i could have wiped it clean from where i sit

i tend to think of it or rather him
for it is surely male as if it mattered
i fancy him a fish of the wide air
myself a diver in the sea of birds
shielded from their fierce curiosity
by this sheer membrane living in a jar
which must be also valid in reverse
except that i for once have learned to sit
tight sick of the futility of flight
once flat against the glass i learned my lesson
and when i tend to think i think myself
to be an unreliable eyewitness
to many things a chronicler of none

and yet this blood-red bird of introspection
still darts relentless in his separate space

running out of memory

the pity though is not that he is gone
has been for the last seventeen or so
years yielding them to someone’s separate life
detached from his to an autonomous person
an unacknowledged gift not his to pass
nor ours to keep for seventeen bitter years
turned loose and now entirely self-propelled

hold on i’ll tell you what the pity is
the time unlived by him is getting far
too long for us to trust the image claiming
our total memory within whose cells
his past unshapes itself there is no past
outside ourselves and what’s inside is ours
there is less room for someone else’s past
are we some fucking gods or what get real
he should have crossed that street with more discretion

now that i think who of all people is gone
he seldom comes to mind the crowd has grown
the pity is he’s dead again for good

gods know no sorrow in their blue demesne
being too eternal even to exist
they hardly bother to tell green from orange
come to think of it he was color-blind
leave gods alone we are the only problem
abandoned on the bitter winter pavement
cradling another’s life within our own

the spirit skunk

please do not lean on doors i never lean
on doors and barely tread upon the grass
but having shed most of my substance i
live at the outskirts of a zoo as yet
without full residence rights but with high hopes

the city visited by us while still
of blubbery mortal stuff is a half-way house
a thing to lean on tread upon and touch
urged not to but presumed to be enticed
yet once a proper coat of fur is grown
whiskers and wings and opalescent scales
one who may seem the very skunk transfixed
between the headlights is in fact a witness
from an impenetrable world apart

some of those canvases by edward hicks
have images of children in them bigger
than beasts themselves perhaps too full of pride
and blood emitting stale animal spirit
unlike the true spiritual animals
not predators or raptors anymore
yet game to no one either will they ever
settle themselves in plato’s bestiary
with the polonium lion the blue tooth
blue jay and oxen chiseled out of stars
the ghostly pastoral of time to come

scylla

those neighbors they were positively evil
their general bad nature soon revealed
in petty crimes like you recall the time
they drowned the litter of a poor stray bitch
and why they named their eldest one charybdis
search me they weren’t the educated kind
the next one balked though and was born a boy
good thing such opposite poles repel each other
or do they all that high school physics sucks
still his account of wickedness is void
could be they simply liked the sound of it
once overheard and with a little effort
wrenched the consent from a dumb registrar

the harm done by such vile existences
is soon erased vast is the earth the grass
grows over scattered skeletons bees buzz
on marigolds and bright red squirrels skitter
life triumphs of its festering evil purged
good thing she was without the proper sibling
or was she have you looked into the records
they could have multiplied once out of sight
what if a cry flies from across the straits
charybdis come and lo charybdis comes

singing to no one in particular

there are birds that sing with two voices
blessed with a divided larynx
were they people they could hold
two conversations simultaneously
and both turn out right in the end

now i am expediently perched
for precisely such an attempt
except that there is no interlocutor
similarly gifted and the two songs
are not aimed at each other

such an animal is split in the middle
by an impenetrable plane
cutting off its left hand voice
from its right hand voice and the heart
from the heartless yet also singing side

but if we possessed two hearts
our blood would flow against itself
better stay as you are a useless warbler
whose two discourses addressed to the void
receive no response to either

waking up

you get up at dawn and you wash and you brush
and your dog wait a sec have you ever had one
is all over you and you pat her it all somehow fits
together coffee and bagel the wife kind of cute
with that unfamiliar face of hers calling you hon

once safely jammed by the congestion
you start seriously contemplating the words
as if tasting them turning them over in your mouth
what funny anatomy that by the way
the word dog the word wife and the funniest of them
toyota tracing it all back to the very moment
you get up at dawn but apparently fail to wake up
or was it possibly the morning before

perhaps we are all transposable the lack
of a proper person in some particular slot
wakes the entity in a spot where the shortage
is at its most acute but if so who the hell
is the entity that fell asleep in the first place

yet you dimly recall that the words
should have been different as if instructed
otherwise zhena sobaka bublik is zhena
the wife referred to as such in the fourth line
of a ditty being put together elsewhere
and the parts of the body still awkwardly

then it dawns on you and you freeze in horror
smashing the toyota into an oncoming truck

uncomplaining

an itinerant dons his woolens his furs and felt
daubs smelly seal fat all over his face
and sets off across the universe of ice
the seamless plain of snows that never melt

there are things in his knapsack that may turn out
useful and to make sure he took one of each
and cast an arbuscle twig to inquire about
direction if not the point he set out to reach

off you wander into the light that cannot fade
though faint since the sun is smeared with lard
so what if the ice underfoot is always hard
isn’t the rock and no one ever complained
follow the faithful twig never stray from the course
we all are natives and i am one of yours

fall asleep and blotches of green and blue and pink
pierce the ice like pale incunabulum ink
somewhere else not in this world of ours
bursting up like that from the dirt
you would make an effort and call them flowers
if you knew what they were and possessed the proper word
you could try and smell them sleeping late
but the blubber stinks awful
and the ice is as hard as fate

chiaroscuro

the night is the fifth postulate
solid but with the lingering the shade of doubt
police horses striding the streets
pierce the darkness with their alien eyes
the heavy hoofs clink like cracked metronomes

at the train station a woman to a random
commuter rummaging in her purse
it has changed my life
she repeats it thrice
to ward off possible doubts
it is never clear what it was
she intended to exhibit

suddenly one of the horses
peers inside from the outer murk
black muzzle against black glass
we don’t look back as if nothing happens

was it a gunshot we heard
across the warehouse block
life changes
losing its very name

half-birdlike

pushing light-bugs suspended in space
aside like some imaginary water
you come to what is water proper
a silver lake a sliver of the sky
with a gnarled tree angling for the drowned moon
this was an old man negro once but now
the denizens avoid calling it so

what denizens my ass

the thing that came here claiming to be you
is so thickly feathered it must be in fact
an alien avian creature of nocturnal
persuasion and you push the air
with wing stumps just glimpse within that silver
pity the air is too rare to take off
stitched through with the light-bugs to imitate its presenсe
water is much thicker than water
dreamt up by someone who never was a fish

it is not proper you and the fake wings
do not hold one aloft and if there is
such thing as water they will have to scoop it
out to extract the silver to forge the stars
for this landscape half-way into oblivion
ruled by the old man with no name or race
you see your own beaked image glaring at you
the tree the moon deep down and you hoot

* * *

cast bread on water so that the reflected
birds would not starve up the eyeless void
the most to ache for is the one who never
could ooze out i am nobody said one
in an old tangled tale which was a lie

i am the very nobody who never
more to the point the one whose every when
is never who is powerless to yield
to a temptation of an adjective
whom nobody would label with a he

back to those birds who are not there as well
meaning they are quite there within the bounds
of water but undone beyond the shore
they are untrue unless somebody sees them
there is nothing i could say about these birds

oh how much love remains unlived because
there is nobody to live it and if ever
you burst into the mirror circle tell
the living we are weary of this flight
beyond the water with no bread whatever

[This is translation of my Russian poem]