Oksana Zabuzhko

I.

Listen to me, listen in your sleep
(These seven time zones are a chastity belt!)
In dawn's blue window the breeze puffs up the curtain,
And the blinds jangle now and then.

Here it smells of the sea, the wind, slightly of dog.
You'll turn over in your sleep - and the plane will pass the pole.
In the dark garage the sand we brought in from the beach
Last June is sprouting in your car like winter wheat.

The earth is a crumpled sheet.
The young man - a golden bee - is sleeping on it,
The lashes on his cheeks stiffen like streaks of humming sun.

He dreams of words from far away, of the touches
sealed in them like honey sealed in honeycomb cells . . .
Except for them, the words have no meaning.


II.

A morning run down a back street like a canyon bottom,
The road around the corner clamouring like moved furniture -
Oh remember while you run how the night road to Boston, panting
With each passing headlight, stopped the breath in our throats.

There will be winter, there will be - I don't know what,
Our bones will ache languorously with the sweet noise of dreams,
You'll reach the end of the days that are empty of me,
And you'll understand that time is just repeated space.

The light of a face is cast in memory as in a glass egg,
The year is burning down, lit at both ends
With the inextinguishable fire, pure as spirits, of reunion.

The young man leafs through a book filled with obscure words,
Moisture invades him, and his tender throat
Moves with the poems, in gulps and kisses.
...

I know I will die a difficult death -
Like anyone who loves the precise music of her own body,
Who knows how to force it through the gaps in fear
As through the needle's eye,
Who dances a lifetime with the body - every move
Of shoulders, back, and thighs
Shimmering with mystery, like a Sanskrit word,
Muscles playing under the skin
Like fish in a nocturnal pool.
Thank you, Lord, for giving us bodies.
When I die, tell the roofers
To take down the rafters and ceiling
(They say my great-grandfather, a sorcerer, finally got out this way).
When my body softens with moisture,
The bloated soul, dark and bulging,
Will strain
Like a blue vein in a boiled egg white,
And the body will ripple with spasms,
Like the blanket a sick man wrestles off
Because it's hot,
And the soul will rise to break through
The press of flesh, curse of gravity -
The Cosmos
Above the black well of the room
Will suck on its galactic tube,
Heaven breaking in a blistering starfall,
And draw the soul up, trembling like a sheet of paper -
My young soul -
The color of wet grass -
To freedom - then
"Stop!" it screams, escaping,
On the dazzling borderline
Between two worlds -
Stop, wait.
My God. At last.
Look, here's where poetry comes from.

Fingers twitching for the ballpoint,
Growing cold, becoming not mine.
...

Just as children scrawl self-portraits
With two figures - Mom and Dad -
Grasping them by their unsteady stick-hands,
I'm drawing on the window-pane
A Kingdom of Fallen Statues -
And the outlines, delicate and fine, are wavering.
In the Kingdom of Fallen Statues all gates stand open;
Even marauders no longer walk
On the grass that seems to have shot to full height in a flash.
Non-existent temples,
And yes, non-existent dramas -
But how real, O god, how very much alive they are . . .
Gilding and lapis
Flake like skin
From the leprous faces of princes and saints,
And, seated on tombstones
Or perhaps on column stumps,
Black-hooded gravediggers roll cigarettes in yellowed verse.
Don Quixote's shield lies somewhere,
Somewhere Casanova's cloak was tossed,
Somewhere stands the tent in which Khmelnytsky hosted Europe's ambassadors.
In the Kingdom of Fallen Statues you can hear a language
Of words still warm but no longer learned.
I'm drawing it all: everything that ever vanished, or will;
I peer into my picture as into ripples on water:
Triumphant Nike's head
Is lying somewhere in the grass.
I'll draw it - and then
I'll put the period.
...

loved you
loved you.
And this doesn't pass, just settles to the bottom . . .
I broke you in myself like a precious carafe,
And my soul like a white tablecloth was stained by the bitter wine!
You gave color to my thoughts, body to my images,
Yourself now merely noise, like the sea in a shell's ear . . .
As for how it all was, God! whose concern is that?
What matters is how it will be.
And that will be the way I'll write it.
...

"You're not really a woman."


Agamemnon's coming home.
He's climbing the stairs, the sun
Is behind him, he's clanging with brass
Like a war-bloated idol, the leather thongs
Of his armour are squeaking.
Take it off, I don't want it!
I don't want the animal smell of his mouth,
Or his hands with their black-rimmed nails - those hands
Rip off my clothes as if I were some corpse on a battlefield,
And under his nails the flakes
And fuzz from the clothes and hair of the slain are probably still rotting.
Maybe I'm really not a woman.
I don't want to scream and squirm with mortal pleasure,
Pierced by that gleaming weapon of his,
Soaked in gobs of sweat stinking
Of his regal power, trapped under his body
Trickling its sticky death-juices on me; I hate
The high-pitched bitch's whimper
That will escape my throat;
I hate the wave of languor that will embrace me
And the doughy, pitted neck above me
When I open my eyes. O son of Atreus!
That's how Troy, outstretched, writhed under you.
Your arrows target anything alive, elastic, quick -
Is it the doe? Briseis? or hot female blood
Flowing down thighs that makes you the victor,
Able to draw blood from a body like the sinless man water from a stone?
It wasn't lust or beastliness but bestiality
To have conquered Clytemnestra and the doe and Cassandra, Mycenae and Troy.
Maybe I'm really not a woman.
Agamemnon's coming home, and the shadows smelling of darkness and sweat
are growing longer.
I'm cold.
I'm shaking from the realization: killing is also a job!
Spinning, weaving,
Unweaving (like that woman from Ithaca), rubbing Aegisthus' rosy body
(what does he have to do with this?)
With soothing oil -
These are pleasures for hands, occupations for hands - but not those of a queen.
They're no more noble, for instance, than fingering pockmarks.
It would be a hundred times better to run off with some pilgrims,
Say, to Delphi, and become a priestess,
To belong at every feast to every passing cripple,
To give myself up blindly to that faceless force
Without malevolence
And omnipresent - shifting, coursing, unseen . . .
Oh, how cold I am!
You're climbing the stairs, backlit by the sun -
Oh godlike,
More godlike, more hateful, more compelling
Is your stride up the stairs (each step weighs
One year of the Trojan war) - oh, come closer, closer . . .
Stiff with excitement,
Half-blinded from the black and white - this graph of shadows, patches
of sun on the marble tiles -
I'm keeping in my sight, with the whole strength of my imagination,
Just this one small room
Where the curtain's like burst crimson: when you step behind it,
With a single lordly gesture
Of my hand, steady with the cold, obedient metal,
I'll out-do everything you have accomplished,
I'll establish a new kingdom -
A world without Agamemnon.
...

It's just that I'm myself, and no one else.
I too will die. And I won't escape punishment either.
Everything my name designates
Will be beaten like yellow dust
Out of my belongings, my papers, my addresses
(Which are scattered over half the globe).
Still, some future brother of mine, name unknown,
Might sob one night in his sleep: "Where are you now?"
And that will be enough. Look: the pollen-like smudges
On fingers touching an antique mirror
And the luminous whistle, like skates slashing ice,
Will long resound in open space.
And a child, gasping with wonder,
Will turn skyward his face chilled by sentient tears -
And that will be enough: my life will have been realized.
Then - keep on without me
...

Embraces flow down like water,
A night-light parts our shadow . . .
Not a sacrifice, not passion, not a gift -
Only the effort to stay alive.
Arched over the mortal agonies
Of strontium-plagued cities
Burns the evanescent bridge
Of our intertwined arms.
And as long as this nocturnal sun lasts,
And these brief flashes,
Love, tremble and scream
Through this final moment
On the brink!
Shattering the night mirrors
We step from the frames like portraits -
But our breath, coarse as ash,
Scatters from our lips . . .
It's as though we were gasping
With pierced lungs,
And the imprints of bodies stiffen
In the hot, crumpled air.
Oh where has it come from, and how, and why,
This pallid light on the ceiling?
"Look, my love, what's that outside the window?"
He looked and said, "the desert."
...

It could be dawn.
The light, crumpled like sheets.
The ashtray full.
A shadow multiplies on four walls.
The room is empty.
No witnesses.
But someone was here.
A moment ago twin tears shimmered
On polished wood
(Did a couple live here?)
In the armchair a suit, recently filled by a body,
Has collapsed into a bolt of fabric.
Come in, look around. No one's here,
Just the breathing air, crushed
As though by a tank.
A half-finished sweater remembers someone's fingers.
A book lies open, marked by a fingernail.
(How amazing, this silence beyond the boundary!)
On the polished wood, two stains.
On the floor by the armchair an apple,
Bitten but not brown.
...