In A Whale's Belly

The happiest years of Jonah’s life were the ones he spent in the belly of a whale. He didn’t have to strive towards anything, simply because there was nothing to strive towards. He didn’t even have to feed himself, since the whale’s stomach supplied Jonah’s organism with a perfect combination of proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Of course, it was stuffy in there, and it smelt fishy, but in general Jonah found his situation quite bearable. In those times he loved to talk about symbiosis and about the lengthy and mutually profitable coexistence of a man and the outer world. Even so, he was aware of the fact that neither time nor the outer world exists in the belly of a big fish.
      One day Jonah got an idea in his head; that, namely, of freedom. He prayed unto the Lord his God for deliverance, and so the whale was instructed to spit him up on dry land, which proved to be much drier than he would expect.
      Before long Jonah regretted altogether getting out of the whale, and felt sorry for himself, and spoke to the other swallowed-and-disgorged, always moaning about not living a proper life. He even started searching for another whale interested in swallowing him up. However, the whales were not in any particular hurry to let him into their interiors, and they simply drenched him with some of the water that had been processed inside them, and waved him off with their massive fins.



British Lions

When lions started speaking English, animal keepers were the only ones who could understand them. Others didn’t take the whole thing seriously – Wittgenstein famously said that if lions could talk, they would stop being lions. He didn’t clarify, however, if animal keepers would remain human, should they understand lions’ roaring.
      On Sundays animal keepers and lions sit up straight at the round table in the local inn and, scarcely exchanging remarks, divide between them a huge Union Jack cake.



The Worm of Doubt

In the spacious classroom of reason things learn to reveal their self-concepts and make themselves useful. The worm of doubt is also there; it thins the convolutions of some brains and subsists on forbidden fruit from the school garden.
      In the meantime, the sky blossoms with interrogation marks and elusive smiles. The heavenly dictionary sheds words, and they fall like hail. People disassemble them and build language barriers and thorny hedges. Surrounded by one of these, the things take the exam for the right to be called things.
      Soon the breeze wafts a whisper from inside, ’Pity stands the test: pity is always pity. Love will have to take a re-examination.’
      The worm wriggles. It is convulsed with the sense of having done its duty.



The Book of Meros


Papyrus recently found in the Desert of Unthinkable stripped the profession of chronicler of all covers of sense. At the very top of the scroll a few words can be seen set down in very shaky handwriting: The Book of Meros. This is believed to be the title of the manuscript. Down the endless glossy coils riders gallop, chariots whirl, swords clink, buildings collapse. No one sits there making sense from a past.
      The roll absorbs everything that has happened since the dawn of creation up to the movable ‘now’. With each passing day the Book of Meros is getting longer, but the memory of generations is getting shorter. The march of events will soon catch up with the flow of time, and then, possibly, overtake it. Maybe this means that we shall read in the mornings of what we are destined to do throughout the day – who knows? What we shall do after we find out what we’re to do: that is the question.



A Promenade

Setting off for a walk into town, Professor Tausendteufel puts on his blind spectacles, takes his flowering walking stick and adjusts the angle of his body’s droop. The correct angle has to be forty-five degrees minus the current temperature of the air.
      The professor subsists on odours. Since professors and odours feel at home in the city, he enjoys the promenade. He smells every cow-dropping and each sunflower. Our professor spends an especially long time in front of pigsties. Not that he feasts his eyes on pigs, not at all, but he clearly enjoys their adoring looks.
      As soon as the squeaking of mill wheels reaches his ears, he directs his steps into the heart of the city. Watch him stand in the middle of the central square, and sniff at the fresh azure of cornflowers; watch the man who resolves, by the mere fact that he exists, all the contradictions of our illogical world.

(Five poems first published in ''Stride Magazine'', 2008, England)




The Two-Headed Man and the Paper Life

There was once a two-headed man. He sat at an office desk and wrote down somebody's fate. Employees went to and fro carrying folders full of everyday-ness. Peeping in, a little girl shuddered with convulsions, and shrieked, 'What's this HORRIBLE THING doing here?'
      The girl was taken away and treated for hallucinations; guards were stationed at the doors.
      This tale is told merely for the edification of those who enjoy peeping through the key-holes of their paper lives.



The Centre of the Universe

The red comb of that pheasant is the centre of the universe. The pheasant moves and sometimes even flies, and the centre of the universe shifts about with him. Why this particular pheasant, you ask, and why his comb? But the One Who Knows The Answers has already shrugged his shoulders, the movement causing his grey comb to shake at the same time.



Be Careful with Kites

When flying a kite in the long-suffering heavens, you never know what you may catch. If it's a dead bird or a piece of aircraft metal, no problem. But supposing a snag gets caught, or, God forbid, the moon? Our daring kite-flier will then find himself in direct and prolonged connection with the skies.
      And it isn't so far the case that, should he finally decide to release the kite, it won't give chase to him.



007

James Bond retired and settled in the Soviet Union – for whose break-up he was responsible. His pension was delivered to him by pigeon-­post from Yorkshire. On Tuesdays, the former 007 attended party members' meetings, and made recordings with a tape-recorder embedded in a cigarette. The meetings ended with the singing of the Internationale but James Bond, on principle, murmured through his grey moustaches, 'God Save the Queen'. 'Here's our comrade from the developing republics singing out of tune,' said the nimble old men, in their Pioneer ties, patting Bond lovingly on his cast-iron shoulders.



Aesthetics

At first, the Montagues and Capulets were friends. But then there arose a disagreement concerning the style of their hats. When aesthetics are involved, mountains of dead bodies will follow without fail.



Friendship till Death

It’s difficult to be on friendly terms with your friends. All could be well, were it not for their nice habit of working with scissors.
      ‘More tea?’ my friend asks kindly, trimming my left ear. ‘Some vodka perhaps?’ the other friend adds, simultaneously cutting off my surplus chin.
      Crawling away, completely bandaged, I take to my bed at an unknown enemy’s place, and when people approach me I make a hideous animal face, so as not to tempt them to sudden friendship.


The Alarm-Clock Bomb

The alarm-clock bomb rings up like an uninvited guest and offers you an experience of ravaged Nirvana. There's nothing you can do except sing it the pointless song, 'May there always be me.' Sometimes the alarm-clock looms up first, quietly ticking in the doorway. It's better that you hear it.



Translated from the Russian by Carol Rumens and Yuri Drobyshev


(First published in Blind Spots by Carol Rumens, Seren, 2008;
'Friendship till Death' first published in ''The Liberal'', April/May 2007, England)




Pabako

The pabaco is an exotic fruit. It doesn’t grow everywhere; it could be said that it doesn’t grow anywhere, but all the same it’s imported from somewhere, put onto tables – and people find that it’s edible, to their great delight. So the pabaco fruit would almost be the fruit of people’s imaginations, were it not for its juicy blue flesh inside a snow-white skin. And its stem is red, so therefore the pabaco tree is considered sacred in countries with red, white and blue flags. As there are very many countries like this, the pabaco fruit is considered a national dish in each of them.
      Many people, of course, have bought cartons of pabaco juice, which makes skin white, eyes blue, and brings to the cheeks what is called the bashful blush of the pabaco-eater. However, even half-litre cartons of this juice are so expensive that people only buy them on monthly national holidays. It's said that this is for the best, because if this juice (or the compote that is made from chopped up blue, white and red seeds that crunch on the teeth) is consumed more often than this, then the colours fall differently on people – skin becomes blue, or even navy, eyes go red, and hair turns white. These people, like prophets of old, cause holy terror in those they meet; they are avoided and given the most unpleasant of jobs to do: being zealous about their red white and blue country. These grey-haired subjects with blood-filled eyes and bluish skin are taken around in cars with blacked-out windows, and sent to live in houses where the windows are not transparent.
      In one country the pabaco fruit has even ended up on the state flag, together with three lions, who for many years have been bearing their teeth at it, unable to take a bite. This flag is supposed to illustrate that complete human happiness is impossible to achieve, a fact, which the inhabitants of the red white and blue country had guessed long before this flag appeared. The author of these notes must admit that he has tasted this wonderful fruit, and moreover completely legally. Just like the other so-called chosen ones, he is allowed to write about such lofty themes as the sacred pabaco tree, the monthly national holidays and being zealous about the land of one’s birth. The chosen ones write on white paper with reel ink, and sometimes even with the blue liquid that flows through their veins.


Translated from the Russian by Siobhán McNamara


(First published in ''The Prague Revue'', 2008, Prague)




Agamemnon in Cambridge

Agamemnon is giving lectures on psychology. ‘You love them when you don’t know them, and you know them when you hate them’ he says. ‘And knowledge changes your face, so that by the time you’re forty you get ambiguous congratulations from the mirror,’ adds someone’s portrait from the wall.
After the lecture Agamemnon drinks goats’ milk in the bar. The milk is brought in especially for him from an Irish farm.
‘Is a private life important for a male academic?’ one of his students asks him. Choking on his milk, Agamemnon thinks: ‘I’d love to send the young pup down to Pluto for insinuations like that’ but he answers aloud, calmly: ‘A man can live in a heavenly landscape too. Indeed, and he can guess at the love of girls and all people. The clouds will depict this love for him, and even completely figuratively – showing him three noble visions.’



A Witness of an Underwater Time

Hardly anyone has noticed that the octopus, as well as possessing eight legs, also wears a tie. The octopus is unlikely to be able to explain why he needs this finishing touch to his dress – perhaps it’s a sign of a self-esteem that has been challenged too often? All in all, the octopus is honest, scrupulous and poor. He doesn’t need much. Perceiving the endlessness of the underwater paths on which his epoch got lost, he thinks about himself: I am a creature without a name or a biography. I have a body, but it’s almost transparent. My brain is transparent through and through. My memories are gradually becoming colourless; my voice cannot be heard from under deaf waters. So what’s left? What’s left?
The sharks smile crookedly: there’s a lot left – ink.



Dr. Livingstone’s Africa

Some people carry the Northern Lights inside them, some a Brazilian beach or a Japanese rock garden. What Dr. Livingstone carries inside himself is Africa.
      In this Africa an enormous brown ape sits under a tree and small black monkeys scratch her heels. If another large ape appears nearby, she walks on straight through the first one, not causing her the least harm: the strong can exist in different worlds.
      The brown ape from Dr. Livingstone’s Africa needs a good example to imitate. When things become absolutely unbearable for her, Dr. Livingstone sends her his human form. It climbs up to a branch above her, and she spends hours looking up at it, all the time sitting in the one position.
      Meanwhile Dr. Livingstone goes around without his human form. His observations suggest to him that in the world as he knows it there are far fewer people than human forms. The people float like shadows along paths and streets, and to stop themselves from being blown away they carry something weighty: the Northern Lights, a Brazilian beach or a Japanese rock garden. As we already noted, Dr. Livingstone carries Africa inside him.



The Abyss is Calling

Night was drifting along the black river from village to village, from century to century. History was swimming behind it, spluttering and spitting out silt. At one point in space there was an unscheduled stop, and in the timeless silence was heard: ‘Farewell Ramirez, Gonzalez and Rodriguez! The abyss is calling you!’
Then there followed an abrupt command – and a splash…
A General emerged from the darkness, and announced where the next unscheduled stop would be. New gold medals with pictures of Ramirez, Gonzalez and Rodriguez jangled mysteriously on the general’s uniform.
The darkness did what it does best: it closed in.


Translated from the Russian by Siobhán McNamara


(First published in ''Shadowtrain'' No 26, 2008, England)








Hunting in Flagged Vicitities

(For Gail Hazelton)


When you kill wolves
people die

It is always the case

they bury the corpses
together with the wolves

long after
they exhume them
and re-bury them wrapped in flags

each time they take the flags
from the living

the latter squat
and cry a lot
naked
shielding with both hands
not what naked people usually shield

but some spots of wild greyish wolfskin
on their breasts and withers


(First published in ''The SHOp'', Ireland)



Europe in the Mirror of my Teapot

is hard to recognise: this silvery curve
enlarges France and Germany
but lessens other states

Ireland is barely visible
Russia tends to slide away
to the dark side of existence

all the gaps between capes and islands
are mended
as if an invisible giant put in stitches

Croatia reaches for Italy
Sweden clings to Denmark
former mortal enemies give each other

hugs of love
maybe it was like that
in prehistoric times

this teapot seems to have its own vision
of the world
and the map of Europe on the wall

practically speaking
teapots serve another purpose
sipping my Bewleys tea

I wonder if I can see the meaning
in this image of unity and distortion
and also their strange synchrony



The Golem of Arbour Hill

He appears from behind Collins Barracks,
the acromegalic giant.
His empty eye-sockets contain
medieval gloom,
his pale Celtic skin
fits tightly his stubborn Viking chin.

He strides heavily along the miry lane of desire
flushing slow birds and
tapping out pulsation in his head:
If you don''t know where you come from,
where can you go?
Those who come along are all the more unable
to locate themselves in space and time
because maps are muddy and calendars
have no dates for days like this.

Plunged into multiplying visions, he really
has nowhere to go,
except into his own dream.

In that dream,
martyrs of evolution
follow the path from Nowhere to Erehwon:
a jawless fish, dinosaur and
anthropoid ape.
They all keep saying in motion:
Nowhere to go,
nowhere to go,
but where they arrived is now known.

Probably, he is drifting in the same direction
in no hurry to reach there,
unlike hasty pedestrians,
dwellers of the swarming city that repeatedly
thrusts them back to the remote past,

into the times of jawless fishes, dinosaurs
and anthropoid apes.



The Knack of Living

When he, in his late thirties,
found a room on the lower premises,
his watch ticked out his epitaph:
''He had the knack of living''.

The restaurant car that he ran
keeps plying between the past and the present,
but his considerable savings
were not enough to buy him a ticket.

My highly successful half-brother...

Having no knack of living,
I never wanted to set my watch by his.
Why he looked down upon me?

His name is now buried
in the sandbox of time
where invisible fingers count
beads of seconds.

A shadow among the living, I hear
other shadows whisper:
''The knack of living -
how skilfully it kills!''



Pseudoaluminium and the Big Plans

The bigger the house,
the smaller the occupants of the house.

The same goes for the devil:
in huts, he used to oust the inhabitants,
while in skyscrapers he can go into a snuff-box.

The devil gradually loses prestige.
His dung, however, still lies in the fields.

They send students
to investigate this red clay.
They hope, it contains much
pseudoaluminium,
the raw material of super-high-speed bombers
and portrait frames.



Dreaming while you Shave

''A bad hairdresser
cuts everyone''s hair close to the skin'',
my grandmother used to say.

In her times
that was regarded as heresy.
They said,
bad thoughts would stick in the hair.

After school, I worked my way home
through the hair-drifts,
into which laid their eggs
the grey-winged hens of Zamoskvorechye
somehow considered to be pigeons.

My grandmother acquired the strange habit
of tearing away the last page of my school compositions.
She assured me that later on I would see:
that''s the best way to get them done.

My grandfather often said that she intended
to tear away the last page of his life,
that was why he went away and since
floundered through the side-streets of women''s hair.

Unhatched chickens laughed at him
out of their bald eggshells.



Harms and the Girl

The girl
liked the poet Harms''s verses.
The girl
became the poet Harms''s girl-friend.
The girl said:
''The poet Harms''s verses are the best.''
Later the girl said:
''The poet Harms is a good poet,
but there are other poets as well.''
Later the girl said:
''The poet Harms has a number of good verses.''
Later the poet Harms remembered:
there are other girls as well.


(First published in Litspeak Dresden)



A Practical Solution

The strangest thing
I have seen in my life
was a large poster
by a highway in Byelorussia:
''STOP! SHOOT A WOLF!''

Nearby
there isn''t a single wolf.
I never carry a gun.
I cannot even shoot well enough,
and I am not the only one like this.

But isn''t it a curious thing that one starts
thinking over
a practical solution
to the task one faces?


(First published in Litspeak Dresden)



The House in Ostozhenka Street

I once had a girlfriend
who never went to the lavatory.
She didn’t even know
the exact location of it
in our house.

It was a crazy house in
Ostozhenka Street
with an enormous hole in the stairs
leading to nowhere.
We were stuck in upstairs rooms
and used a fishing-rod
to hook out some food
through the kitchen window.

The house liked Gurdjieff
and fed us off the reel with his
music for distorted piano.

From the blear mirrors often emerged
images of the three girls
I fell in love with in succession
in the kindergarten.
They all had the same name
Marina Popova.

Years later the fourth Marina Popova emerged
in the flesh
in dangerous proximity to me –
and everything went to hell,
possibly, through the hole in the stairs.

It was the exact time when the house
schooled me to loyalty.
There was only one chair in there,
and that chair I was inseparable from
and took it with me
wherever I went.



The Remote Control

In one of the shadowy worlds
created by my post-television
clear night vision
they handed me on
the remote control
of myself.

It is of no use to me:
in the past I was controlled
by a fiendish state,
and there is no chance
to influence the future
having so little energy.

I switch channels
back and forth.
The remote control
is taken away from me
by my wife,
then by my little daughter.


(First published in Litspeak Dresden)



To Begin Anew

(For Kate Mulligan-Doherty)


''Sorry, we gave you
a wrong life,'' they said
not too apologetically.
''Will you begin anew?''

Why not?

And now I am scrutinizing
the wall-paper coloured wall-paper
in the hall with a palm-sized palm.
There go tailed people covered all over with hair
without waiting their turn,
there runs a little pack of dogs
followed by crawling Siamese twins.

The night of my life comes.
I am still waiting, I confess,
having a cold snack in the meantime
thinking over
whether I would rather finish my meal
with a hering''s tail
or with a sweet biscuit,
or maybe with both together.


(First published in Litspeak Dresden)



Open Book

If the Future sends us Cimmerian messages
this picture must be one of them

under the dark crumbling sky –
a second-hand bookshop that sells
not books but the authors –
speaking dolls

this one –
recounting twenty historical novels
by heart

and that one –
reciting three volumes of his poems

in the candlelit window
Cinderella dances with wooden
Marie Corelli
three daughters of success narrate
the story of their porcelain marriage
to Mr. Nutcracker

I can see my pen-and-ink self
quietly getting onto a shelf

I expect to be selling well –
one can clearly read on my face
the promise of long hours running
filled by incessant intellectual activity



Bunin: Portrait with the Person Missing

In the mirror behind his back
recent times are floating
red flags and standards of the Cossacks
his reflection
a hollow silhouette

into the space he left
a man is being squeezed
he can''t go in, groans
than somehow manages -

and the framework of parallels and meridians
cracks all over the globe


(First published in ''Cyphers'', Ireland)



Pierrot and the Beam of Light

''A beam of light
pursues me,''
he says and covers his
shyness
with his pale fingers.

''It finds me, always finds me,
even in my room,
even under the blanket.''

His face as white as the paper
on which he writes his elegies.

''The beam of light
and shadows around my eyes.''

''The beam of light,
blackness and silver.''

''The beam of light
pursues me,'' he starts it
all over again.
''Yes, pursues me,
and it has a face.''


(First published in the New Imagist e-zine at http://www.webspawner.com/users/newimagist2/index.html)