and the dockworkers whisper, so again,
by death he’s conquered death.
He hits ’em right in the solar plexus
for each sin!
Boxing is really for the stubborn
and the young.
The young dockworker, parting from life,
manages to thank him, happy as a baby,
as if saying, Blessed is he who believes
in salvation and oblivion.
The apostles wipe his face with a towel
and tell him they always believed in him.
And the one who placed his bets on him,
continues to back him,
now
a tested fighter.
Uncle Sasha worked in a bar in Frunze1
and was wise in the ways of the world, may he rest in peace.
He liked to say, “For a real sailor the honor of the fleet
is more important than the reputation of a ship.
“So no matter what port, or where you drop anchor,
keep your heart open to all winds.
Even if you are throwing up overboard in the morning,
make sure to hold on to what you want.
“Even when you are strung up from the yardarm,
or when you are dragged on the bottom of the ocean,
always remember that somewhere there’s a door,
where someone is waiting for you with wine and hope!”
We are not given that much advice.
And what we do get is not what we need in life.
So I was always ready without a doubt
to see the truth in Uncle Sasha’s rants and confessions.
All his wild stories, tales, and drunken yarns,
all his dark curses and pitch-black tirades
had a point: you cannot abandon your friends in a fight,
nor can you forgive anyone who hits you.
I remember everyone who once sat beside us,
who were then led out by surly cops
into the melting snows of March or the freezing air of
November,
deprived of the joy and sense of justice around every table.
Some of the workers and professors with dark faces
who listened to his stories about the Black Sea Fleet,
now eat from dumpsters;
others have died of hunger or TB;
some left those dissipating places
to defend a lost Jerusalem.
But I don’t remember a single one
who was not ready to die with him.
“Hey Uncle Sasha,” one of them would shout,
“We dwell in the bounty of the Lord.
This country does not deserve to have its own fleet.
This town, with its rivers and golden sand,
will drink to us with bad brandy when we die.
Our light will be reflected in the distant stars,
black roses will turn to cinders in the hands of girls.
Every heart burns only once.
Death arrives after
life ends.”
Then they would step around the corner
and fall into the gutter.
Maybe I alone kept
what they left behind.
Silver sewn into belts.
Animals, children, women.
Trees growing in summer sands.
Springs gushing on the bottom of the river.
The team was disbanded before the season started—
the owner cashed in his shares and bought a hotel in Egypt.
Black crows strolled, guarding the lawn.
In the locker room the deflated soccer balls smelled of defeat.
Sania, our right wing, the hope of the team,
cried as he carried his things out of the clubhouse.
He held on to his shoes, as if he had nothing else,
his hands folded like a Sunni saying his prayers.
Well, I didn’t believe him, he was doing it on purpose,
behaving like he was the only one who cared.
Sania’s brother, a rightist, was sitting in jail, dreaming of
burning down this town
for electing such an idiot as mayor.
His father also had done time and was right-wing too.
I don’t know how he dealt with them.
The only good things in his life were his injuries,
old sports club patches, and his long black hair.
So I say to him, “Enough, Sania, enough whining,
enough lamenting losses.
Why are we standing here like a couple of Sunnis,
come on Sania, let’s settle our nerves.
“We’ll go to the factory and find some work,
we’ll apply to college or sign up to be security guards.
When you have a choice, always choose freedom,
When you’re one man down, you’ve got to lock down the
defense.”
And he answers, “Work, what work?
Guard? What are you talking about?
All my life all I ever saw was the opponent’s goalpost.
The only person who ever respected me was their guard.
“All I had was a number on my back,
a place in the lineup, and I gave everything for it.
What can I do now in this country?
How can I tell who’s on my team and who’s not?
“Why stay, who should I fight?
What the fuck, I’ll go to Russia.
I’ll play where they assign me, I’ll take my chances,
leave this mess, and wait for amnesia.”
All our losses are not accidental, they’re necessary.
You can’t escape from yourself, from your own grief,
from your own hate, from your own love.
You can’t change your memories or your dreams,
you can’t stop the shadows or the comets.
Things never change, they stay with us,
no matter how long we live or how we die.
Our night skies, our flocks of birds,
our rivers, our towns, our buildings:
no one will ever remember a thing about us,
no one will ever forgive us for anything we’ve done.
So I’m writing about her again,
about the balconies
and our conversations at home.
I remember what she
hid from me,
what she kept in between the pages
of that anthology with all those damned poets
who constantly spoiled
our lives.
“Last summer,” she said,
“something happened to my heart.
It started to drift, like a ship,
whose crew had died
of fever.
It moved deep within my breath,
caught by the currents,
attacked by sharks.
“I always said,
Heart, dear heart, no sails or ropes
will help you.
The stars are too far away
to guide us.
Heart, dear heart,
too many men
have signed up for your crews,
too many of them have stayed behind in British ports,
losing their souls
to the tears of the green dragon of alcohol.”
So I also
remember her legs, which I was ready
to fight for to the death,
and I repeat after her,
“Heart, dear heart,
sick with fever,
get well soon,
recover quickly,
so much burning love awaits us,
so many beautiful tragedies
hide from us on the open seas.
Heart, dear heart,
I am overjoyed to hear
you beat,
&n
bsp; like a fox—
captured
but never tamed.”
The princess wears
orange clip-on earrings
and carries a dark bag
filled with treasures.
Sometimes she likes to tell us,
“This is makeup my father
bought me. These cigarettes
I took from my older sister.
My mother left me
this silver jewelry she wore
till she died.”
“And this,” I ask, “who’s in this photo?”
“My girlfriends,” she answers,
“they really hate me for my
golden hair and black underwear,
which none of them have.
My friends are ready
to tear me to pieces
for all that summer sultriness
that heats up in my
heart.”
What is the point of poetry?
To write about what everyone already knows.
To talk about things we are deprived of,
to voice our disappointments.
To speak and provoke
anger and love, envy, hatred,
and sympathy. To talk
under the moon
hanging above us, with all its
yellow reflections looming down.
Every grown woman
has this,
this sweet melody,
which you can only hear
when her heart begins to break,
which can only stop
when you’ve broken her heart.
This fox
howls at the moon all night
and avoids my traps,
acting like nothing happened,
like nothing concerns her.
Once the jewelry she wore
around
her neck
grew in value.
The blanket in which she wrapped herself
was a field of sunflowers
in which birds
found stray seeds
of tenderness.
When she grew angry,
rage rose in her veins,
like sap moving up a rose stem.
When you’re in love it is most important
not to believe what’s said.
She yelled, “Leave me alone,”
but really meant,
“Tear out my heart.”
She refused
to talk to me,
but was actually refusing
to exhale.
As if she were trying to make things worse
for me than they actually were.
As if our biggest problem
was the air
we breathed.
I ask her,
“What are you drawing all the time?”
“These are men,” she answers, “and these are women.”
“Why are your women always crying?”
“They cry,” she replies, “for the wind,
which was hidden in their hair;
they cry for the grapes harvested,
which tasted tart in their mouths.
And no one—neither men in clothes smelling of smoke,
nor children with golden scorpions
of disobedience in matchboxes,
can make them feel better.”
The love of men and women
is the tenderness and helplessness we receive,
a long list of gifts and losses,
the wind tossing your hair in May.
Oh, how hard it is to rely on the one
you trust, and how easy it is to be disappointed
in the one who touches your lips at night.
Some things are whimsical and invisible,
no matter how you color them,
they will always stay the same:
a star hangs above you,
the air roils with warmth.
So much light is hidden
in every woman’s throat,
so much trouble.
The best things this winter
were her footsteps in the first snow.
It’s hardest for tightrope walkers:
how can they retain their balance
when their hearts pull to one side?
It would be good to have two hearts.
They could be suspended in the air,
they could hold their breath,
as they closely examine
the green jellyfish in the snow.
The best things this winter
were the trees covered with birds.
The crows looked like telephones
used by
demons of joy.
They sat in the trees, and trees in winter
are like women after breakups—
their warm roots intertwined
with cold roots,
stretching into the dark,
needing light.
It would be good
to teach these crows songs
and prayers, to give them something
to do on damp
March mornings.
The best thing that could have happened,
happened to us.
“This is happening because it’s March,” she said,
disappointed. “This is all happening
because it’s March:
at night you spend a long time searching
your pockets for bits of ads,
in the morning emerald grass
grows under your bed,
bitter and hot,
smelling like golf balls.”
In the summer
she walks through the rooms,
catching the wind in the windows,
like an amateur sailor,
who can’t set
the sails.
She stalks drafts,
setting traps for them.
But the drafts tell her,
“Your movements are too gentle,
but your blood is too hot,
you’ll never get
anything in life
with that disposition!
“You lift your palms
too high
to catch the emptiness.”
Everything that slips
out of our hands—is only emptiness.
Everything
we have no patience for—
is only the wind blowing
over the city.
The sun in the sky at dawn
is like an orange
in a kid’s schoolbag —
the only thing with real weight,
the only thing you think about
when you are
lonely.
If I were the postman
on her block,
if I knew where
she gets those certified
letters from,
maybe I’d understand
life better,
how it’s set in motion,
who fills it with song,
who fills it with tears.
People who read newspapers,
people with warm
hearts, good souls,
grow old without letting
anyone know.
If I were the postman
on this block,
even after their deaths
I’d water the plants
on their dry balconies,
and feed the feral cats
in their green kitchens.
Then, running down the stairs,
I would hear her say,
“Postman, postman,
all my happiness
fits into your bag,
don’t give it away
to the milkman or hardened widows,
“Postman, postman,
there is no death,
and there is nothing after death.”
There is hope
that everything will be
just like we want it
,
and there is confidence
that everything happened
just like we wanted it.
Oh, her voice is bitter
and imponderable.
Oh, her handwriting is difficult
and indecipherable.
That kind of handwriting
is good for signing death sentences—
sentences no one will ever carry out,
no one will ever figure it all out.
She likes to walk barefoot and sleep on her stomach,
so she can feel the oil flowing underground,
the trees being born in the empty darkness
and the water rising to seep directly under her.
She knows where all the courtyards lead in this city,
and the paths that thieves use from cellars to rooftops.
She knows how to catch kites and blimps without anchors
aided by street patrols and air shepherds.
Every teenager would like to catch her by her shoulder,
knowing that she would escape anyway,
leaving behind only her warmth,
and not believing that she was actually just there.
Every killer watches her disappear into the darkness,
hoping that she will come to him in his dreams,
convinced that she will forget his name.
He’ll never understand
what I mean
to her.
Because she loves to warm her hands in other people’s pockets,
and knows every ticket collector on the night trolley,
she greets them only to interrupt
their loneliness, which lasts till dawn.
Because each of the lost ticket collectors
is chained by their own fear like to a galley,
hopelessly handing out tickets, and looking out the window—
for her, the passenger, who doesn’t care
what stop she gets off at to descend into the darkness,
what unhappy love affair she mourns,
what losses she regrets, what losses she doesn’t,
and what words she will use to tell me about it all.
Her stepfather was odd—
worked as a gardener for a Vietnamese family,
looking after trees, which would have grown without him
in the suburbs, past the factory, in the haze.
He counted off branches, like prisoners count off years,
hunted for foxes,
fed wild dogs straight from his hands.
Everyone thought he was crazy, even she agreed,
but explained,
“I love him, I need him,
so why is he constantly hiding in the trees, in the shadows?
When he steps out into the sun, why does he move so
strangely,
as if he knew
where trouble was coming from?”
His employers couldn’t remember his name,
his friends didn’t recognize him, his family rejected him,