Selected poems from the collection BREAD AND CIGARETTES! / English Translations

 

NORA

translated from "НОРА"

I am Nora
and I live in a doll's house
at the end
of a narrow, unpaved street,
so narrow
it sets the neighbors fighting
every time
they try to pass each other.

I am an enemy of the people
and I have a terrace
from which no stones
fly down onto the road,
where lost travelers
with clumsy steps
squelch through mud
up to their knees.

From there,
the view reaches
all the way
to the end of the street,
a street
you cannot walk through
and still come out clean,
clean as the lace,
starched curtains
in the windows,
stirred
by household ghosts.

I am Nora
and I have no lace curtains.
I look straight
into eyes,
into the sky,
into the dark
that eats the words
out of the wombs
of women who keep silent,
boundary lines
for predators
in the name
of the common good.

Everything is the street's fault,
so they say,
and there is no room left
for widening.
Tomato patches
have taken it all,
and makeshift scarecrows
made of rags.

SHAKTI

translated from "ШАКТИ"

All I ever wanted
was to be Shakti,
wounded and weak,
a tender goddess
coiled three times
around the lingam
like a boa
around its prey.

Giving my life,
I would conceive
a new one,
and give birth to you
as such,
then fold you
into the cosmic
mother's lap
that hides
the universe
inside itself.

With my hair
I would have washed
your feet,
had those feet
not kicked me.
And from the dead body
strength was born
that turned
into contempt
and rage.

Between love
and hatred,
victims fall.
Between creation
and destruction,
memory kneels.
Between death
and birth again,
fear lies,
knowing
that someone's end
is your new beginning.

STRIPPED BARE

translated from "ОГОЉЕНОСТ"

I walked stark naked
through blind alleys
where even the wisest
wouldn't think to go.
I searched through piss-stained entryways
for secondhand shops
where all sorts of people worked,
offering me their coats, hats, shoes,
skirts,
giving me everything
for this nothing of mine.

And stark naked
I put on
all those rags of theirs
that reeked of mildew.
I kept looking
for what I did not have,
and I had nothing
but my own bareness,
whitening
behind the locked grates
of shop windows,
lighting up
their misshapen faces.

They told me it was cold
and that they cared for me,
wrapping me
in their mildewed coats.
But those coats
had short sleeves,
and frost crept in
and cracked my bones.
And those hat brims
hemmed in my vision,
taming
my thick, unruly mane.

And they told me
it would rain,
and the pavement would be slick,
lacing me
into their worn-out,
hole-ridden shoes,
through which feces
from their lairs
swam freely,
slowing my step
over broken pavement.
And those skirts
were too tight
for my stride,
or too short
to hide these balls of mine,
balls this big.

Stark naked,
I pulled over myself
the low reek of damp
that tore at my skin.
I searched
through bolted windows
for a sliver of light
whiter
than my own bareness,
and I was deathly afraid
of bitterness,
while they,
blinded by it,
were teaching me
how to love myself.