Grigory Kruzhkov
Translated by Boris Dralyuk
* * * Snow serves as mountains for the city dwellers - replaces kisses for abandoned lovers and churches for the faithless. In December, abandoned by the sunlight, we subsist on frozen larvae of the summer radiance. The snow is Jacob's ladder. By this way descend our angels, those we love most dearly, and, having stayed with us awhile, ascend again into the dark above the streetlamps. Go build yourself another human creature and, handing it a twig, leave it to stand beside the doorway - so that all night long it longs, and languishes, and burns for you, as for a being of a different nature.
The Rock,
or
A Third Anecdote about Wallace Stevens
I Stevens's tussle with Hemingway, as we know, ended badly. Stevens was twenty years older, fat, like Hamlet - and also hadn't eaten, a piece of steak would have done him good! He returned to Hartford with his hand in a cast and reported that he'd fallen from a ladder. Too bad he didn't specify from which. For instance, it could have been the ladder to the altar in Moneta's temple - the sole priestess (as the poet correctly noted) "of this desolation." He could have said he'd fallen from a mountain - or from the moon, or even a pagoda. And that would have been true. But the pagoda version wouldn't have gone over: He would've had to explain to Elsie what he'd been doing in a pagoda and what innocent maiden he'd been awaiting. II A soap bubble, on a deity's adjusted scales, outweighs a rock (as we know). And that's a pity. Out of a sense of fairness and squareness to the rock Stevens extolled it in its pure, unalloyed form, having freed if from all suppositions and makeweights - from Sisyphus, who bathed it in his stinking sweat, from wounded Cúchulain, who tied himself onto a cliff in order to die standing, from Pygmalion, with a chisel in his hand and a fixed idea in his head, and generally from any horseman or footman, who would proclaim himself King of the Hill. The rock is what's left, if we wipe off the mould - left to rush and wheel about as a stone from a sling. Immobile stones cannot exist. And that's the anecdote of the rock (so old, it's bearded) III Freshness, they say, is good for sour cream. Whereas a poem, like an icon, needs the sultriness of breath. It should hang up a while, inscribe itself into some fathomable context, and even, if you'd like, become an eyesore. Such are the metaphysics of beauty. One may like them or not, but to argue about them is foolish. A poet without bones picked clean cannot exist. The reader won't believe him, until he reaches his finger hither - into an anecdote.