Derek Mong 

Translator

Each and every day, save weekends and holidays,
when there’s no reason or special occasion
to leave my apartment and head downtown,
the same underground train—racing at insane speeds, its
unbearable rattling and grinding, screeching

and shrieking, clanging and clawing that’s fit
to flay my eardrums to the bone—carries us past
the exact spot between two stations, Avtozavodskaya
and Paveletskaya, where a friend, not my nearest
or dearest, but a quiet man and loving father,

the kind that’s daily more endangered, always willing
to go drinking and a book-lover to boot,
the kind whose hard work never won him a penny,
BoryaGeliebter (speak his name in your prayers, ye who live!),
was blown to bits in that explosion on the sixth

of February, in the two thousand and fourth year
of our Lord, on a Friday, at thirty-two minutes
past eight, as he was commuting in the morning
rush hour, without the slightest notion that he—
the poor guy, just fifty-four days shy
 
of his forty-third birthday—was slated to land
(oh senseless fate!) in tragedy’s messy center; and then
a host of thoughts comes into my head, from furious
curses—“Let those who gave this sordid order,
and those who (aware of their actions) still acted,

find no peace in this life or the next;
whether they rest in cold graves or hot beds may they
get no response, for a special retribution awaits their souls!”—
to humble thoughts of heaven’s hidden works,
which reason can’t fathom nor human dimensions measure,

since our births as men, our lives and ends,
reside in the Creator’s hands, who always calls
his blessed back with “Blessed be those beloved to me!”—
to vague ruminations on things foreboding:
how, if the philosopher of the common task is correct

and the resurrection requires numerical data, here’s where
you’ll find it, thus proving (despite a certain thinker’s bitter claim)
that after Auschwitz and the Gulag, after bloody wars
and revolutions, after Hiroshima, Baghdad and New York, there can be poetry…
but what kind? Who’s to say, maybe this kind right here. 

At the Genoese Fortress in Sudak, if you enter
the Main Gate, at the left, and approach the wall’s elbow,
then head up from a post—it doesn’t strike
the random rubbernecker as much—protruding
like a codger’s last tooth, there is a cupola
plopped on a stub-necked octahedron

that glows, a hemisphere’s bowl;
this is the Lord’s house, where a sequence
of people, lips parted in peaceful prayer,
washes like waves through the door:
see the law-abiding Mahommedans,
flooding in from the wild steppe

to sing “La ilaha illa Allah” in a slow monotone;
see the foreigners hauling their alien art
along the rippled path from the Ligurian Gulf—
they chant their gruff 
“Pater Noster” in a language now dead;
or see a distant land’s exiles

with their “Sh’ma Israel,” who learn
by heart the scroll’s trusted marks;
see the conquerors of panoramas
and oceans, who proclaim “Otche Nash” all around,
vesting all hope in hammer and banner;
see the direct heirs of dire Martin

spreading his simple writ, “Vater Unser”;
see the fertile vale’s natives embracing
Noah’s ancient haven, Monophysites
honoring the Most High, each one
ardently affirming “Hayr Mer,” each cherishing
a grief sadder than low intellect can know…

all of them once traveled here, but now—
a free museum that’s open eight to eight,
where polyglot inscriptions intermix
with frescoes and the mihrab, where God
hears, with equal heed, entreaties
from all the fractured hosts of Man. 

Rising at morning from my graveside,
I rub these eyelids till they’re lucid,
and then, squinting windward,
I set off—unsure where I’m directed—

only to stumble through my thought’s thicket.
Daily I strive to divide my half-dreams
from this half-light, but the cupped scales
dip—first to waking, then to fictions—
 
and won’t hold still a whole second.
But through dream’s doughy incubation
a trumpet, also baked in pastry, cries—
I clearly hear it, calling me to awaken.

I imagine it’s the call to Judgment,
leaving me to choose between one of two
options: go numb or exclaim “My God!
I rouse my spirit to greet You.”

The hulking carcass of a dead orca,
flung shoreward by the surf,
lies on an empty beach.

Its glistening side, thick and oily,
roils in the July sun.
Hide and all, it’s begun to rot.

Soon this bulk will shed
its former shape, that tautness lost
as it sinks, distends.

The choking scent of rancid fat,
foul and ineffable, will all
but replace the surrounding air.

Weeks will pass, months or years
perhaps, before dwellers from distant climes
discover its bare skeleton.

They will saw it down to small
ornaments, then write on these white
shards about the frailty of living.

                 for Irina Yermakova

O famous guard before a nameless garden,
bearded, shaggy, hugely tall, with pelts that fall  
over your enormous shoulders, much broader
            than an oxen’s back, 

goat-legged, big-butted, poised on cloven hooves, 
on your head a basket rests between your horns,
your right hand on the handle, your left dangling
            a cluster of grapes.
 
Why does sadness strain your brow, O Silenus?
Why the gloomy visage and dejected mien?
Ah! Tell me! Who’s the one who bluntly stripped you
            of what’s neither shame

nor a sin but an appendage that’s precious—
your exalted prick! Who? And to right what wrong?
Could any of your escapades really be
            considered a crime?

Spurned by a herd of formerly timid nymphs
and forgotten, whether you chase or disdain
to give chase and let those rude mockers remain—
            isn’t it the same?
 
For after they’re trapped, you’ll have to do battle,
and what could you possibly bring to the fight?
You can’t fill their wet laps with your stump—not in
            the least, not since you’re

the one who’s lost most. Lewd eunuchs are useless.
There’s not a man who thinks to stand sans his blade.
And so you’re dismissed to a museum, for  
Muses to abuse.

I wish I owned my own home
on the dead sands of a living sea,
where Notus and Boreas squabble and wrestle,
bumping the air’s bells till the brassy sky
chimes high above the wave’s moan—
where I shiver or fever but never feel warm.

My palsied pupils bask in the sun’s gold
(its roses, its turquoise); the Milky Way
shields me from disease. All my mental tremors
are calmed. Meanwhile I’m not dismayed—
despite my soft eardrums—by the sea’s garrulous
music, this polyphonous, singing abyss.

I find each sound or susurrus familiar,
for I’m that rare native-speaker of two dialects;
I’ve yanked base words by their root, turned them
inside out, then spread them flat
and spoken—with small alterations—what makes
human speech balk. I know vertiginous talk.

But what’s left for me now that difficult speech
is inaudible in the vale? Now that I twist and prattle
in the wilderness? Might I sometimes live,
might I save myself, serving both sides
of that audience—the flying fish, the swimming flock—
in my own home, beyond time’s boondocks.

Long now you’ve lounged in earth—futile,
useless—but at last your hour’s struck:
you stirred from sleep, roused
your head’s dead yoke, and aligned a crooked

spine, its vertebrae cracking like lightning—
a vast array of thunder’s fearsome
peals, which lead now to the hail stones
these high heavens shed and shudder,

each transforms and tapers on the fly
into droplets thirsting to germinate, akin
to seeds, heedless of how
they’ll sprout, whether as emerald herb,

hazel woods, or some other verdant
shoot… You’ve lounged in earth so long now—
futile, useless—but here it is, the moment
you faithfully tarried till:

for it is better to oversleep
your own short age, disdaining all
earthly vanity, than to grope dimly down
its crenellated top, stumbling across

with hesitant steps and carefree
laughter, preaching “All’s well! Superb!”
That’s why those who don’t know
your true name call you a river of words.

An old photographer wanders, aluminum
tripod in tow, raking the beach vainly for one
who’d wish herself pictured against a horizon
of belted pines or crags of sand, but—as if to spite him—

no one’s to be found; nobody needs anything—
not the countless tourists, each equipped
with Polaroids and Kodaks—and it’s no staggering
aggravation, though regret, nonetheless, seeps

in. Shoeless, taciturn, he passes the trash-heaps
of people, dividing his feet between sand and surf.
He’s filled with sorrow, which is my sorrow,
leaving no tracks as he goes forth.

Of all gilded Apollo’s adopted sons
surely you’re the last and most beloved! 
Abandon that tripod and photograph heaven—
the sea, the sun, radiating from its altitude!

Cyclopean language consists of consonants:
palatals, labials, sniveling sibilants,
and glottals. It will never be confused
for the sonorous lilts of the ancients.

In those it’s meet to praise silvern streams
and lover’s hair woven with starlit evenings,
or to sing sadness and mourning,
the fierce battles of earth and heaven,

cups with bitter drafts. But this tongue,
just like a lone eye lodged in a forehead,
is fit for spitting curses at the ages,
blaring your fate to the cosmos like a trumpet.

In all the lowland dialects it is unequalled,
voiceless; in it people keep quiet.
And you, my garrulous dol’nik, shut up too!
The cyclops’s speech is stern and sacred.

                       Let’s hurry
          to grace this meager table
              with red tomatoes
and stacks of melon wedges,

                       with onions
          and dill, with parsley and peppers,
              with garlic and goose-pimpled
cucumbers. Let the oil,

                       resplendent
          as sunlit amber, glimmer.
              It’s time to slice
black bread, to strew salt

                       lavishly.
          Let’s offer bottles full
              of wine and tipple
till they’re gone. How pleasant

                       to placate
          our palates and sup with taste!
              We won’t give up,
we won’t give in to autumn,

                       not a bit.
          For God, the Creator of All,
              likes naughty lovers
far more than dreary doubters.