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Here in immortal calm and peace the great and noble sleep
Beneath the soft and dewy turf in many a mouldering heap.
Here Baratashvili came with wild desires to madness wrought,
Oppressed by raging fires of passion, and perplexing thought.
The Fields
Swaying, a slender figure appears
walking alone, sickle in hand,
singing a song, her voice is the pasture
at village’s edge, where an old outpost stands.
The song is a soulful hymn of farewell
sung to a row of cranes facing the sea,
while the sun, like a spider is closing itself
in the delicate criss-crossing thicket of trees.
But what does the soul know of slavery? Nothing!
The rustle and braying of sheep fill the streets:
a young village virgin and flock are returning.
And the Virgin will soon return to the huts.
To Gautier
You named your native haven Pimodan,
A place forever Delaroche’s hues.
The light awaited us, and it was laden
Laden with laurel and with petit choux
This blessed time is even now more perfect!
In each: the lightning of Brumel and Lauzon.
And please, please where are all the altruistic
Poets, painters, passing ladies, mimosian?
Surrounding us are white streams of rememberance.
Surrounding us are streams, light and clandestine:
The place glowed — a snug, erudite Parnassus,
It was a legendary lifestyle of the mind.
But we were seeking something profound, something Georgian…
Rhyme — and subtle nuance, rhythmic shadows.
Where were all the people from the pattern:
The Maenads — swan and wing — Infantas?
For now the road is thornier than thorn,
And no one else is trampled as this soul.
Now I’m an empty mountain church, forlorn,
And the dying sunlight dooms me with a smile.
Laughter, fire,
bitter tears,
extraordinary
shining eyes—
glorious and dismal,
A tempest of ideas
departed
to never return.
Those brilliant
extraordinary eyes
that so vividly pierced
the darkness
like a far-off
flash of lightning,
departed
to never return.
And with those eyes
I think, a song
miserable, vile, died
with an avalanche.
And my own life
took this path:
departing
to never return.
***
You’re going away… and reaping your torment,
like hay from a seaside recently shorn.
Whoever said you’ve lived your last moments?
No: today is the day you were born.
My Life
My life is the purest color of wine,
It shall shine until it dries.
With it I’ve earned a poet’s glory,
worth everything — even mere immortality.
Once more, the ashen days follow en masse,
I will never tire of raising my glass
to you, whose passion… is nothing but ardor.
Myself, I fear neither the past nor the future.
Indigenous Ephemera
I can’t even tell the indigenous trees.
Winter has covered the footpath’s last mile…
“It’s been a while?” I call to the breeze,
and the forest responds: it’s been a while…
Snow
I am vicious with love for the indigo snow
Untouched, as it blankets the river.
My mad love will undergo every woe,
Every wet frigid grief will endure.
My darling, my soul is a bottle of snow:
I grow old, and the days faster flee.
I have traveled my homeland only to know
It when it was a velvet blue sea.
But I am not troubled. I am winter’s kin
And this is the life that I know,
Yet I will remember forever the skin
Of your pale hands embedded in snow.
My darling, I still can envision your fingers,
In a garland of snow, humbly bent:
A glimse of your scarf in the blue desert lingers
Disappears, and then glimmers again.
And thus my mad love for the indigo snow
Untouched, as it blankets the river,
It drifts as the grieving winds pivot and flow,
It coats every broken blue flower.
The snow comes! A bright day arrives with its tiding.
I’m covered with tired blue dreams.
Somehow either winter or I must keep striving.
Somehow I or the wind must remain.
Here is a gentle game. Here is a road…
All alone, all alone you traverse it.
But I love the snow, just as I once loved
The sorrow your voice kept so secret.
It called to me then, it was so potent then:
The placid days, crystal and fair.
Your hair rushing ‘round in the scattering wind
And leaves from the field in your hair.
I pine for you now. How I wish you were mine!
I’m a vagrant who longs for his home.
Now my only companion’s a copse of white pine.
I must face myself once more, alone.
The snow comes! A bright day arrives with its tiding,
I’m covered with tired blue thoughts.
Somehow either winter or I must keep striving!
Somehow I or the wind must pick up!
You’re Thirteen
You’re thirteen and you’ve ensnared
a graying lover’s evil dreams.
Line up thirteen bullets here:
I’ll kill myself thirteen times.
Ephemera Again
What causes the Cypresses’ bodies to sway:
where is their whispery rustling’s source?
There’s no wind today… no wind today.
Except on the mountain. There, the currents course.
The silence down here is becoming a prison:
Unsleeping, watching, forever unseen.
Up on the peaks a grand poplar has risen,
and soon it goes tumbling into the stream.
A poet’s in danger the same as that poplar:
Seclusion and stature create all his woe.
His enemies libel: they slake him and slur,
they slander and smear him with poison’s aloe.
But he remains noble: he won’t stoop or sway.
The church bells are tolling for him from their spire.
There’s no wind today… no wind today.
Except on the mountain. The winds there race higher.
The great arc of Paris perceived in reflection
comes to the poet in Spring, as he sleeps.
But then suddenly the winds change direction
and soon into his life a young woman sweeps.
Demonic confusion! Confliction! Turmoil!
on every side fires whicker and flick.
The wind blew a woman through his mind and soul
and she’s starting to howl like a lunatic.
Yes! then the ground begins to descend
like a horse at full gallop down from a peak
a coffin is borne by invisible hands—
no one walks in procession or weeps in its wake.
Oh love! You’re as stable as foam on the ocean!
Give the scrivener a sword, or a lightning shaft
To carve into history: “”The Wind Blew a Woman
Through His Mind and Soul,” as an epitaph.
And Paganini… nets of an orgy…
The maestro will drink his wine from a bowl,
A stage illumined with hope will foresee
Feral french horns, and a savage piano.
Once more he takes up his trusted violin
and builds his monuments out of sound and air
that infect the whole world: Rome, London, Berlin,
and soon the old legends echo everywhere.
No! This is wrong! Hope is not some thin string
for finely-wrought fingers, shadowed by ladies.
He leaves, like his strings, the young women weeping
tender chrysolites from wide-open eyes.
For dreamers who have but a single red rose,
He gives permission for their souls to storm.
Cracked mirror, cracked walls: he doesn’t look close
to see the despair that infects every washroom.
And the factories spew and spew their phlegm
as the Dante of our epoch, Verhaeren —
A giant who has magnatized the flames—
will turn iron gears with iron hands.
And soon the gears spin— quicker and quicker:
everything around them, swallowed in steam.
The clanging noise roughens, lights flare, then flicker,
Will we never quit this foul work, Verhaeren?
The time’s near when iron will speak on its own
And, like a dark crime, demand our attentions,
Relentlessly fast, a hyena, it runs
cruel and hot: child of our inventions.
It suffocates everything with burning fingers
Even he who gave it breath, life and light:
It killed Verhaeren! But his memory lingers
and concering his glory, Fate yet still will write.
Or then, Dostoyevsky, as if ninety times
on a foggy night… a foggy night
was sentenced to die: to be shot for his crimes,
and moment to moment awaited his fate…
As the hangman slowly enters his cell
Something else deeper, something more profound
remains there, forever behind a dark veil.
This is the image Dostoyevsky sets down.
He doesn’t seek rescue, or look to the helm,
But stands with a shadow spread over his face
Sentenced to die, to be shot for his crime:
And who’s there to mourns him? What death is this?
From the top of his scaffold, he gazes away
Watching the satyr with a half-starved stare
This is the gaze that his portraits all bear…
Thre’s no wind today… no wind today…
Last Train
Like the chariot of time, this car
cannot be stopped, it will soon leave.
And hope, like Fortune's fickle star
is fading far and fast from me.