Unpublished in the Struve/Filippov editions
Newly reaped ears
Two poems first published by Struve/Filippov, 1964
The hunters have trapped you
The old men of Euripides, an abject throng
From Tristia (1922)
- How the splendour of these veils and of this dress
We shall die in transparent Petropolis
This night is irredeemable
Disbelieving the miracle of resurrection
Out of the bottle the stream of golden honey poured so slowly
Spring's transparent-grey asphodels
Tristia
Sisters: heaviness and tenderness bear the same insignia
Return to the incestuous lap
When Psyche - life - descends among shades
I have forgotten the word I wanted to say
For the sake of delight
Here is the pyx, like a golden sun
Because I had to let go of your arms
When the city moon looks out on the streets
When, on my lips a singing name, I stepped
I like the grey silences under the arches
From Poems (1928)
I was washing at night in the courtyard
To some, winter is arrack and a blue-eyed punch
Rosy foam of fatigue on his sensual lips
As the leaven swells
I climbed into the tousled hayloft
My time
Whoever finds a horsehoe
1 January 1924
Two Poems Published in NOVY MIR (1931 and 1932)
Armenia
Batyushkov
Poems Published Posthumously
Self-portrait
I was only in a childish way connected with the established order
Help me, O Lord, to get through this night
For the resounding glory of eras to come
I drink to the blossoming epaulette
Impressionism
Ariosto
We exist, without sensing our country beneath us
The body of King Arshak is unwashed
Your narrow shoulders are to redden under scourges
Black earth
Yes, I'm lying in the earth, moving my lips
You took away my seas and running jumps and sky
My country conversed with me
For those hundred-carat ingots, Roman nights
A wave advances - one wave breaking another's backbone
I shall perform a smoky rite
I shall not return my borrowed dust
I can't make sense of today
Like a belated present
I would sing of him who shifted the axis of the world
You still haven't died, you're still not alone
I look the frost in the face, alone
Oh, these suffocating, asthmatic spaces of the steppes
Plagued by their miraculous and all-engulfing hunger
Don't compare: anyone alive is matchless
What has contended with oxide and alloys
The mounds of human heads disappear into the distance
Listening, listening to the early ice
A little boy, his red face shining like a lamp
Where can I put myself this January?
Like Rembrandt, martyr of light and dark
Breaks of the rounded bays, shingle, blue
I sing when my throat is damp, my soul dry
Eyes once keener than a sharpened scythe
Armed with the insight of narrow wasps
I am plunged into a lion's den, a fort
If our enemies take me
Life's reticulations loosen, madness looms
This is what I want most of all
This azure island was exalted by its potters
As if words were not enough
I raise this greenness to my lips
With her delightful uneven way of walking
Notes and Acknowledgments
Further Reading