For A.Y.

By Yehiel Fishzon

Translated from the Ukrainian and Russian by Anna Halberstadt

***

1.

Your city does not let go of me
memory does not allow
to take my hands
off your hips. Hungry desire,
where kisses do not cure,
like drafts in narrow gateways,
in passages next to the bridges
with weird names, where today
one comes across a barricade–like
wall of duffle bags.
With your city I have gone
through all things sinful,
except for bombardments:
borrowed to eat, made love on straw.}
tore poems, like one tears a shirt,}
went down into the underwater
and prickly world without you.
Into the wide band of deserts
and coming out of it, begged
that you should be the first to call.
Call and would not let me go away
like the summer storm not calming down
In the city park. That’s how
a song wants to fall back into
the notes, backwards.

2.

While my heartbeat still isn’t lost
among the jumble of similar sounds
in an ant hill, I would like to come
and visit your house on Pasteur street,
kiss your hands, every finger,
every fold of your soft palms,
and your mouth, a textbook of questions,
not answers.
So, that your place starts smelling
like mint and apricot jam at once.
Your voice at night penetrates gaps
in neighbors’ walls in the solid brick building,
in my bed, on my shoulder
with a verb addressing me — you,
telling me, facing East,
of the Southwestern school of sunrise,
where into the bottle with a home–made alcoholic juice
some add a bit of Indian summer
Khadzybey wine spilled from a bottle,
missing the palms of bazaars, trips to the beaches
and chaos of fun.
First ray of Sun secretly makes its way
to move a strand of hair on your temple
after that, the superintendent
— to water In the courtyard
tectonic plates
on which the continent Odessa stands.
I should go,
But birds–bandits sing behind the window
local yellow press representatives.
I will stay
and will be your fire in the stove burner
as you brew your tea, a candy paper wrapper,
or a long transparent piece of melon skin
on a dry piece of torn newspaper.
I am lying. I left, avoiding the rubber hose
wrapped into the Turkish Boing,
I ran away
from real secret love with no rank
and plain décor.

* * *

A little child asleep
he sees the darkness
as a blur of colors
awakening, he shrieks
not recognizing
who’s bending over him
the older you get,
the denser are your dreams
flying, spilled food
exams, the English woman’s neck
an explosion on sticky sheets.
Your soul grows
It acquires habits from
the body, so that you
could wake up
in a suburban train
after the scrape was diagnosed.
He is a husband, father, whose
sleep resembles the one–hundredth
day of the flood
where the horizon resembles
a continuous sheath
to the predator’s glance.
Disaster creeps up on its own
— adulthood naturally happens
to be penury and prison.}
An elderly man’s dream
Is filled with mental games . . .
Death. In the last layer
of oblivion,
when eyelids weigh a ton —
all characters would appear
from the dark
to embrace him one last time.

June 25, 1941 Kaunas

My falcon, flying from the Litovskaya line
will notice how deftly knives
have danced here — a purple tin of Jewish blood
pouring into the green gold of rye.
Thick bushes of violet shadow
and the blue tinge of a corpse on one previously alive
already taking the shapes of plants
so as to linger in them
until the thunderstorm trumpets.
Leafing through the crimson laughter of all the others staring at
gray orphans and
cripples,
you will ask, my falcon, whose handwriting this is: and I will
answer: the XX century, the
Silver Age
fly, looking down at the pearlescent roofs
high fashion, cast fleece of culture,
and remember — with it is with the innocent crimson blood of
Jewish babies
that space and time are dotted here