Andrei Rodionov
Translated by Matvei Yankelevich
* * * Now, when the tenderness is palpable above the city, when kindness sings in your ear, barely audible, now, when the blast of that tenderness booms, like Hiroshima, my trusting city absorbs it all. How tender the asphalt, like a napkin, how this home, most tender, paneled, pastel and cold, touches the heart, just a little warmer than the previous house, the gray one, and this one is a little pink, tenderness behind each window. In slightly worn heels, spectacular tenderness enters, and softly, barely touching your head, caresses you and you with a dose of its snowy medicine, we'd never known Moscow to be so kind and so tender. Now the kindest of birds fly softly among us, waving to us like dead soft hands, forgiving us for every little thing, and these dim lights -the capital's upper-most tenderness-shine blandly for us. And suddenly this mumbled word - "degenerates." You hear it and tenderly think: "What was that?" Some nasties aren't happy to see us in the city, but how can they dislike us, and, really, for what? It's likely that machine that counts out your rides sees a zero on your crumpled card. Likely, that quiet man doesn't care for us - his fingers shine from the barrel, his badgered gaze glazes over with the vodka he's drunk. Oh, all this hatred from vodka, from drinking vodka! From the vodka and the drunks and the girls greedy for cash! Oh, the bubbling of tenderness in these silhouettes in the darkness, of birds or amputated hands. We are the soldiers of this nighttime Moscow tenderness, we breath the exalted smoke and mint fire. And sometimes he also calls us "degenerates" - still we remember him with tenderness - the sad passerby. * * * People of hopelessly antiquated professions joyfully raise their eyes, so recently full of tears. Down Tverskoy goes the procession to end all processions, the poets who are taken seriously. The poets walk into bars and banks, into the shoe store and bookstore, and everywhere in exchange for their sonnets, free verse and tankas they are offered drinks, grub, clothing, and footwear. All the people are happy - only the gays feel wronged: why are they allowed a parade, and we're not? They're allowed, because they are saying farewell, today they'll be going and never coming back. The people gather gaily at our Golgotha: here the most serious wordsmith will intone, and the ventri-loin-quist, one of the locals, will sing back-up for him with her loins: "We filled all the cracks, all the lacunae, we smoothed out all the corners and glitches, we destroyed everything that can be strung and everywhere you can score a goal." Every year we bid them farewell, you won't hear a word before autumn, then little by little they fill up Moscow, but this time we'll place surveillance towers along the belt road - the mayor promises every time, but it's empty talk. While spiritually rich parents still have their children, while the rich aren't forbidden to multiply, these dickheads will have their audience, and that means the dark day is nigh. Some dance, others sing, others play the fool, "That's no effin' poetry at all," still others huff, yet down Tverskoy they walk, selling their poems for various useless and useful stuff. * * * Do you hear the silence? That's the provincial fish swimming in the waters below flapping their fins Good thing you can't hear their banter and from above it's quaint - they swim and keep silent A lot like the way this immense country whispers swimming by on the TV screen you speak to me in the voice of an anchorman to the rhythm of an underwater dream Auntie Manya's homeland in a voice that's slightly sarcastic, warning me: there, deep down is our real Homeland the ear bends with the weight of the grain and they sing songs, but you can't hear it, it's too far away Soundless provincial fish open their mouths that resemble zeroes and we might be able to hear it but so far we can't for some reason and we don't have a clue what they're saying down there, only sometimes our hooks snatch up some little goby or a marginal prickly bullhead even when he's flopping around on the line and opens his mouth you still can't hear what he's singing as you take the hook out so that's the way the water world works it'll be like that till we die, maybe forever and now, when there's air between us, all the same, it's still water, water