Tender More Tender

Don’t listen to the sleeping ideas:

the guitar in the dusty room,

the portrait of the writer, lame

in all the colors, the filial notebook—

where letters can be learned

by tracing their black lines—

for no idea here will tell

you how to forget and how

not to know.

Leave all these artifacts in peace,

and draw the curtain open—

glance outside, wait. What

does the August view contain?

Look, look onto this tenderness,

where the posts have slightly

leaned up toward the clouds,

purring their sway

(which does not sleep).

Jungfernbrücke

the virgin bridge—Berlin

What is it good for now?

And where will it go? From hushed silence

with a deafening-bridging flash,

its water scribbled out?

It will be necessary to reflect

everything—no matter what—fully:

only darkness crosses the bridge, and now

it is a clipped wave.

But that which parses darkness

into pieces, passing in a boom above

(and also below) is the sound under the bridge

eclipses all the mud:

the water, above you again,

the cars’ whistle carried by,

observing, how the darkness dies,

and I, unclean, like you.

Chjornaja Rechka*

Beat harder, horse—

the river’s depth will bury anything,

though the poor ice is not shaken

(trembling sediments in the cold bottom).

The hoofed storm grows—

how to defend oneself, if it is so hard,

so transparent, the water can be seen below

and what if I am not wholly erased by it?

Only a ceaseless motion

to return the sky—to the sky,

the ice with the capacity to give up and glow

does not notice the blows.

The beating of the hooves dies down,

where to look upon the river?

The stars continue to reflect

in translucent battered ice.

*in English – Black River, the place in Saint-Petersburg where A. S. Pushkin was killed in a duel