Minus Ship

Alexei Parshchikov
translated by Michael Palmer and Eugene Ostashevsky

I split from the dark as if oakum had croaked.
Behind me City Hysteria blackened in chalky spasms,
the sun was liquid, the sloping sea reeked,
and re-entering my body I knew God had redeemed me.

I remembered a scuffle on a square—the whistles and flaring passions.
I idled in neutral by the pinball machine
where a woman was flashing, partly real—
the edge of this reality jarred by Scheherazade.

I was out of it, yet recall the ones in slow plummet
from the fight, as if tumbling through an apple tree
and grasping at the fruit, unable to choose…
Homeric-shouldered griffons were forming a pack.

And here at this most silent of seas—as with
eye muscles slowed by the Herb—pass that joint
toward a calm horizon—relax, don’t rush…
…from mollusk to cow, idea to object…

In the mountains stirred the raisins of distant herds.
I strolled the shore as memory shoved from behind
but reflex and strain vanished into rhythm
and power arrayed itself along units of time.

All became what it should have been from the beginning:
poppies ripped through hills like T.V. static,
a donkey with fly’s eyes imagined Plato,
the sea seemed fact, not mere apparition.

Precise Sea!  Ringlets of a million mensurae.
Cliff—inseparable from.  Water—essential for.
Their necessity burned through a random dust speck
clutching them…but there was no ship!
I saw the vectored couplings, and all the essential clamps—
along the background a void sucked strength into itself—
saw even the smell of oil, the characteristic creak,
whiter than a shot of camphor yawned the Minus Ship.

It propagated—absence.  It dictated—views
to views, and with no more than a glance
you’d be caught, as by a cotton filter,
then nod into extended diapason.

Color of the void, the Minus Ship roamed,
actually bobbing in place, moored to zero.
In stretched diapason, a comma on its side…
And I crept up closer to the imperious bark.

The Minus Ship melted.  I heard a distant OM.
A hidden genius plucked a melody on the doutar.
Aimed toward the Absolute and gliding volumetrically
it swelled and then veered off at its apogee.

The Minus Ship was swallowed, like arac on a table.
the doutar wove a new center of emptiness.
Swimming toward it on an ecstatic char—time now—
I focused and crossed over…