Free Ode
To the Philosopher’s Stone of Petersburg (with two offshoots)
to A Kuznetsova
Why, creator laborious,
Did you build this prodigal city,
Phlegmatic, miraculous, inane and judgemental,
Like an alchemical vessel?
You mixed rum, and blood, and stone,
Raised them to your lips, but suddenly left them
And threw yourself to this crucible.
Then it became nothing new,
And each man threw, like a drop of blood,
His own life to the constricted expanse,
And each was required, at the entrance,
Under the pupil of the malicious frost,
To lick the axe.
And hundreds of tongues fell
To your train-stations and gardens,
And writhed, and chattered
In the ears of the Future.
I busied myself with a simple game,
And perhaps it was a bit childish,
I will tell you in plain language –
Where lies the stone – the treasure.
Like coal it is languishing in latent mist,
Swampy, crimson, metallic,
While it remains dead.
There where the murdered tsar Rasputin,
In a caftan of bright-emerald,
Gnaws his own skull, his eye-sockets
Locked shut with bolts,
Behind them it lies – that miraculous stone,
Faded, wrinkled, broken.
Along the kind buildings I pass,
Along the enduring stony growths,
I pull apart their buds –
And there such shadows roam,
And bombs are produced like pelmeni,*
And the explosion’s noise reverberates.
* a kind of dumpling
There lies a priest strangled by a calloused hand,
And January’s blood under the Winter
Flows and turns like an ark.
There Ksenia, arriving home,
Shakes snow from the bare steps.
What then, like a worm, for a long time I lay,
And the knight of the tsars trampled me.
But suddenly the voice of the Stone called out,
And here I stood up before you
And I did not run away.
Go then, tsar, to the “palace of crystal”,
To drink with a shorn schoolgirl,
You cannot defeat me.
I will raise up my heart to the heights
And arduously wring out your violet,
That the stone might drink in the deep darkness,
And mumble about itself.
For this not much is needed –
The tiniest trifle or glance,
An owl, perhaps, on the corner,
Or simply – that the forces of hell
Draw a cross on top of the snow.
1
Dawn grows, grows.
Finishing the opus,
I notice that I
Have been flying a long time in the abyss.
Whether I myself stumbled
And slipped from the edge,
Or somebody sneaked up
And pushed me – I don’t know.
On my head is a weight,
On my torso – steel,
Revolving, I fly
To the place of the Grail.
A whirling of downcast rocks,
A gorge of solitude,
But this is not a fall,
Rather a long pilgrimage.
At home people rise from the darkness,
Ponderous, like towers,
To the Holy Land we are flying,
And we are not afraid.
Knight of the fall,
Of icebergs of stone,
The glove of creation
A paladin wears.
2 Where the Stone may be
In the eye of the gryphon,
In the clenched paw of the giant lion,
In the love of the Sphinx.
Here comes a man,
His brain more dappled than a peacock.
He is not at all afraid.
He remembers himself and everyone,
He will up and leap from the tower,
Fulfilling
The walnut’s fate.
Translated by James McGavran
Page(s) 214-216
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