Like a belated present,
Winter is now palpable:
I like its initial,
Diffident sweep.
Its terror is beautiful,
Like the beginning of dreadful deeds:
Even ravens are alarmed
By the leafless circle.
But precariously more powerful than anything
Is its bulging blueness:
The half-formed ice on the river’s brow,
Lullabying unsleepingly…
I would sing of him who shifted the axis of the world…
See, Aeschylus, how I weep as I draw the portrait of the Leader…
In the friendship of his wise eyes
One suddenly sees – a father!…
(His powerful eyes – sternly kind…)
And I want to thank the hills
That nourished this gristle, this wrist.
He was born in the mountains and knew the bitterness of prison…
I want to call him – not Stalin – but Dzhugashvili!
I seem to see him dressed in his greatcoat and his cap,
On the wonderful square, with his happy eyes…
The furrows of his giant plough reach the sun.
He smiles with the smile of the harvester…
You still haven’t died, you’re still not alone
While – with a beggar-woman for companion –
You delight in the immense plains
And the haze and cold and snow-storms.
In miraculous poverty, opulent privation,
You live alone – consoled, at peace;
These days and nights are hallowed,
Honey-tongued is this innocent labour.
Unhappy any man whom, like his shadow,
A dog’s bark scares and the wind scythes down.
And poor indeed one who, half-alive,
Begs mercy of a shadow.
I look the frost in the face, alone –
It’s going nowhere, I come from nowhere –
And always the breathing wonder of the plain
Ironed, folded without a crease.
The sun is squinting in laundered destitution,
Its frown peaceful and consoled,
The multitude of forests much the same…
Snow crunches in my eyes, innocent as bread.
Oh, these suffocating, asthmatic spaces of the steppes –
I’m sick of them! And the horizon,
Catching its breath, is flung wide-open.
I need a blindfold for both eyes!
I could better have endured the sand
In layers along the banks of the toothy Kama.
I would have clung to its shy sleeves,
Its ripples, brinks and hollows.
We would have worked in harmony – for a century or second.
Envious of the rapids’ precipitation,
I would have listened under the flowing timber’s bark
To the movement of the fibrous rings.
Plagued by their miraculous and all-engulfing hunger,
What can we do with the murderous plains?
Surely what we deem to be their openness
We ourselves – falling asleep – behold;
And everywhere the questions swell – where do they go,
And where do they come from?
And is not he who makes us shriek in our sleep
Slowly crawling across them –
The space for Judases not yet born.
Don’t compare: anyone alive is matchless.
I yielded, with a kind of tender terror,
To the flatness of the plains,
And the circle of the sky made me ill.
I appealed to the air, my servant,
Waiting for service or news;
I prepared for a journey, swam along the arc
Of voyages that would never start.
I’m ready to wander where I shall have more sky.
But that bright longing cannot release me now
From the still-young hills of Voronezh
To the bright, all-human ones of Tuscany.
What has contended with oxide and alloys
Burns like feminine silver,
And quiet work silvers the iron
Of the plough, the voice of the poet.
The mounds of human heads disappear into the distance,
I dwindle there, no longer noticed,
But in caressing books, in children’s games,
I shall rise from the dead to say: the sun!
Listening, listening to the early ice
Rustling below the bridges,
I remember being luminously tipsy –
Head swimming, going under.
From callous stairways, areas of awkward palaces
On the edges of his Florence,
Alighieri sang more forcefully
From tired lips.
So too my shadow picks
At the grain of the granite,
Eyeing in the dark a row of hulks
That seemed houses in the light,
Or twiddles its thumbs
And yawns with us,
Or kicks up a row,
Warmed by other people’s wine and sky,
And feeds stale loaves
To the importunate swans…
A little boy, his red face shining like a lamp,
Lord and master of his sledge,
Careers across the steaming ice
And I – at odds with the obedient world – rejoice
In this contagion of toboggans,
Amazed by children swooping down:
Steep slopes, silver runners, frosty exhalations.
Oh that our era might slide for ever,
Soundless as squirrels, towards a soft river.
Where can I put myself this January?
Exposed, the town is extravagantly stubborn…
Have I got drunk on doors that lock me out? –
All the catches and fastenings make me want to bellow.