Valzhyna Mort Poems

Over the growing shadows fell the dead weight of  light.

With a long bark mules metered the distance and turned back.
...

it begins with your face of a stone
where lips repose like two seals
in a coastal mist of cigarette smoke
you move through the streets—
listing them
is as useless as naming waves.

(that city is so handsome for a reason—
it was made out of your rib)

it continues with my
skidmarked by a dress
body. i stand on the border
on heels like my sixth toes
and show you
where to park.

that very night
lying together
in the dogs yard
—flowers are biting my back!—
you whisper:
the longer i look on the coins of your nipples
the clearer i see the Queen's profile.

for you, body and money are the same
as the chicken and the egg.
the metaphor of "a woman's purse"
escapes you.
stealing, you like to mumble:
a purse is a purse is a purse is a purse.
also:
a real purse in your hand is worth
two metaphorical purses over your mouth.

they tell me
you are a body
anchored to the shore by its rusting blood.
your wound darkens on your chest like a crow.
i tell them—as agreed—that you are my youth.
an apple that bit into me to forget its own knowledge.

death hands you every new day like a golden coin.
as the bribe grows
it gets harder to turn it down.
your heart of gold gets heavier to carry.

your hands know that a car has a waist
and a gun—a lobe.
you take me where the river once lifted its skirts
and God, abashed with that view,
ordered to cover that shame with a city.

its dance square
shrank by the darkness to the size
of a sleeping infant's slightly open mouth.
i cannot tell between beggars' stretched hands
and dogs' dripping tongues.
you cannot tell between legs—
mine—tables'—chairs'—others'.

that dance square is a cage
where accordions grin at dismembered violin torsos.
beggars lick thin air off their lips.
women whirling in salsa slash you
across the chest with the blades
of their skirts soiled with peonies.
...

new york, madame,
is a monument to a city

it is
TA-DA
a gigantic pike
whose scales
bristled up stunned

and what used to be just smoke
found a fire that gave it birth

champagne foam
melted into metal
glass rivers
flowing upwards
and things you won't tell to a priest
you reveal to a cabdriver

even time is sold out
when to the public's 'wow' and 'shhh'
out of a black top hat
a tailed magician
is pulling new york out
by the ears of skyscrapers
...

The wind that makes your hair grow faster
opens a child's mouth full of strawberry and sand.
Slow and sure
on the scales of the ocean
the child's head outweighs the sun.

Inside of the wind—
a blister of a church,
its walls thicker than the space from wall to wall
where the wind shifts shade and light
like two rival chess pieces
or two unmatched pieces of furniture.
Inside of the church—such a stillness
that when a feather floats down in a fist of dust
it becomes a rock by the time it hits the ground.

Organ pipes glint like a cold radiator,
contained in a case of a carved tree, its branches
tied up with a snake.
Organ pedals, golden and plump, are the tree's only fruit.

It is all about the release of weight:
the player crushes the pedals like grapes underneath his feet.
My body, like an inaccurate cashier, adds your weight to itself.
Your name, called into the wind,
slows the wind down.

When a body is ripe, it falls and rots from the softest spot.

Only when a child slips and drops off a tree,
the tree suddenly learns that it is barren.
...

It's four in the morning.
I'm ten years old.
I'm beating my mother between the mirror and the shoe rack.
The front door is ajar. A bridge
presses its finger to the frozen strip of water.
Snow falls over it gritting like sand on glass.
Both of us in our long nightgowns.

I stare into her earring hole and aim
at her large breasts not to hurt my knuckles.
I slap her face like I flip through channels.

My father lies at the door. From his shirt
lipstick smiles at me with the warmth of urine.
It's as if somebody threw at him slices
of skinned grapefruit.
Every time she hits him—I hit her.
Look at this. Look whom you've bred.

How can he see from under his pink vomit.
But his body smiles—
cannot stop smiling.
...

even our mothers have no idea how we were born
how we parted their legs and crawled out into the world
the way you crawl from the ruins after a bombing
we couldn't tell which of us was a girl or a boy
we gorged on dirt thinking it was bread
and our future
a gymnast on a thin thread of the horizon
was performing there
at the highest pitch
bitch

we grew up in a country where
first your door is stroked with chalk
then at dark a chariot arrives
and no one sees you anymore
but riding in those cars were neither
armed men nor
a wanderer with a scythe
this is how love loved to visit us
and snatch us veiled

completely free only in public toilets
where for a little change nobody cared what we were doing
we fought the summer heat the winter snow
when we discovered we ourselves were the language
and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes
when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands
when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes
when we were shot in the legs we nodded our heads for yes
and shook our heads for no and when they ate our heads alive
we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers
as if into bomb shelters
to be born again

and there on the horizon the gymnast of our future
was leaping through the fiery hoop
of the sun
...

my grandmother
doesn't know pain
she believes that
famine is nutrition
poverty is wealth
thirst is water
her body like a grapevine winding around a walking stick
her hair bees' wings
she swallows the sun-speckles of pills
and calls the internet the telephone to america
her heart has turned into a rose the only thing you can do
is smell it
pressing yourself to her chest
there's nothing else you can do with it
only a rose
her arms like stork's legs
red sticks
and i am on my knees
howling like a wolf
at the white moon of your skull
grandmother
i'm telling you it's not pain
just the embrace of a very strong god
one with an unshaven cheek that prickles when he kisses you.
...

And once again according to the annual report
the highest productivity results were achieved
by the Factory of Tears.

While the Department of Transportation was breaking heels
while the Department of Heart Affairs
was beating hysterically
the Factory of Tears was working night shifts
setting new records even on holidays.

While the Food Refinery Station
was trying to digest another catastrophe
the Factory of Tears adopted a new economically advantageous
technology of recycling the wastes of past -
memories mostly.

The pictures of the employees of the year
were placed on the Wall of Tears.

I'm a recipient of workers' comp from the heroic Factory of Tears.
I have calluses on my eyes.
I have compound fractures on my cheeks.
I receive my wages with the product I manufacture.
And I'm happy with what I have.
...

white apples, first apples of summer,
with skin as delicate as a baby's,
crispy like white winter snow.
your smell won't let me sleep,
this is how dead men
haunt their murderers' dreams.
white apples,
this is how every july the earth
gets heavier under your weight.

and here only garbage smells like garbage . . .
and here only tears taste like salt . . .

we were picking them
like shells in green ocean gardens,
having just turned away from mothers' breasts
we were learning
to get to the core of everything with our teeth.

so why are our teeth like cotton wool now . . .

white apples,
in black waters, the fishermen,
nursed by you, are drowning.
...

it's so hard to believe
that once we were even younger
than now
that our skin was so thin
that veins blued through it
like lines in school notebooks
that the world was a homeless dog
that played with us after classes
and we were thinking of taking it home
but somebody else took it first
gave it a name
and trained it "stranger"
against us

and this is why we wake up late at night
and light up the candles of our tv sets
and in their warm flame we recognize
faces and cities
and courageous in the morning
we dethrone omelets from frying pans . . .

but our dog grew up on another's leash
our mothers suddenly stopped sleeping with men
and looking at them today
it's so easy to believe in the immaculate conception

and now imagine:
somewhere there are towns
with white stone houses
scattered along the ocean shore
like the eggs of gigantic water birds
and every house carries a legend of a captain
and every legend starts with
"young and handsome . . ."
...