Transitions №2

Author: Vera Kotelevskaya

 
Первая публикация:
По русскому словоглобусу. Across the Russian Wor(l)d: Сб. стихотворений / составители-переводчики: А. Саул, Е. Свиридова, И. Чудаков. – СПб.: Свое издательство, 2015. – С. 38–41.

 
***

again i won’t finish beckett
i won’t share crooked little roads
with a couple of subtle alcoholics
who carry themselves like a vase
so frail that they can’t take it,
infant-life linen and fishing rods,
carrying the sausage in the see-through hands
to treat themselves and tolik
blessed are fishermen and breams
the fisherman went blind the fish extinct
though the sausage will go on
blessed are those toilers
who in spite of broccoli and brie
make food antique
like the belavezha forest song
in that angelical vainglory
either ginger bread or brew
the irishman’s choice is vexing
darkness is thickening under the eyelids’ rim
like some fancy forest-like script engraved
the public is accidental and evanescent
the storyteller dreams of truce
between flour-water and the baker in
chapter seven… or eight…

 
Muscular memory

1
I am a village doctor: such a morning
is night.
A dog falls somewhere behind
the turn.
I am rushing along a frosty chain
to the patient, who is sure to be all right.

Okay, I am a village teacher,
a crammer, a stepdaughter of two fathers,
and still I clutch this snowball of night
like a discus thrower.

However you look at it, the blue around me is
as abundant as sugar, and the stars (stars, stars!),
and this descent down the hill, this lump
flying from behind the first UAZ.

2
A rug depicting deer, drinking from a plush bowl
of a pond. Against the pile
was the night path oh the hand, yes or no,
how many deer keep a low profile
towards the emerald within the woods,
already half-bald, how many loads
of doors are screwed
cruelly, what kind of waltz
does a butterfly dance in the autumnal window-frame,
the camels are advancing in a denser line
with every call of Janus, as if the fane
had grown like a weed, on the future time.