Transitions №4

Author: Mikhail Eremin

Translated by Lena Zakharova

 

* * *

Stoutful seeds of sense,
The initial shape of space,
The all-Russian holiness, troubleness,
And the spiciness of crany bogs
To be found in an autumn manuscript
Where slush has left its footprints,
Where leaves as the onion frocks
Hide their tears in folds.

 

* * *

                                                                   for A. Eremin

The gifts to be returned to the Creator
In the transparency of a retina wrapping:
The woody net debris in which
Imprisoned emptiness is trembling,
An anticupola of liquid sky,
An anticup of an anthill
With surface that is fluid,
And particle, and wave.

 

* * *

A settlement (at dusk the mist resembles
Presubstantive: an observer by
“The Holy Gospel and the Cross”
Becomes the witness of inarching
Between infinitive and supin)
As a halfsunken boat and halfway what
Of the comparison between the muscles of a swift and spring
Terminal forgotten on a washing line
Begins to look.

 

* * *

A bug elevated by spirit waves,
Stomachs of plants on the rocky knees,
The tundra not touched by trods
Appear beyond the porch.
Lifeless perches and carps are swimming
In aquarium structures of icons.
A beautiful boy as a lamp on oil
Is bringing a window inside.

 

* * *

A scaldweed strangling a stem,
Weedy vitex whose body’s as long as its life
Is it vita derivative? Haplogy^[1]
From composites of vita and ex?
Maybe vexed as a weed? Aiguillete of a noble flex?
Or a venena pipe? Or a thyrsus vine? Or —
„…The laws impressed on matter by the Creator…“ —
Is it the Moirae’s breeding pride?

 

* * *

Strix
An augeress breaking a rite to tell
The fortune on giblets lets
A version of life be modeled and light
The fronds of the seeress eyes
And dim from a breath that is yet unheard
 –  and as a sender intercepted by the enemy –
The darkness alumnesse
Is gulping vermillion patches.

 

* * *

A double-barrel parted by a cloud move,
The bodies are close-grained – above – the birds are swimming,
The pitchpins are the ghosts – among – the fish is flying.
The bees are dancing on an air-arm
of swings that have been launched in three dimensions.
The phlogiston-bricked vault is hiding
The creatures thus beloved by Thee:
A swam, a swamp, a swim.

 

* * *

The roads’ (With origins forgotten –
An alley or a swath is flowing into
A pond with water flaura, fauna. On the veins
Of roots blue blood has clotted.
A white stone chilly in the thistle
Has moved its shoulder) foliage speech
Resembles so in the pronouns
Somebody and softly. 

 

* * *

Above a breathless wood (inside the storm
The trunks are dangling from the foliage
And swung by wind that’s knocking out,
Pulling from the trembling grass
Those having reached the earth and tensing
Those having roots) the rooks are out
Of cry – the frock is touching with the wing
A field and stretching like a well-fed dog.

 

* * *

One of the pines above a mirror of backwater
In which a dried up branch is piercing
A flank of pike (it’s to be broken off by wind
Next spring.) has been a mossy trunk
Above a duckweed shammy paddle.
As long as there is fish and beasts –
God/g. The numerator is the Thee, and a denominator is
To Thee, from Thee, about Thee.

 

* * *

She closed the lids. They hide the garden –
You are to dive, not just to enter it. The trees
Are yet to be an alphabet, but now they are no longer
An alley of an ancient text. The love is still
the second fence. The movement is no longer
burning, but yet to be the being.
It’s not the word to open lips
A glance of pearls is shining
Above my face.

 

 

_____________________

^[1] Haplology