Tatiana Shcherbina
Translated by J. Kates
An Offshoot of Sense
I used to believe - suddenly, I don't, My trivial faith in life has fled like a puppy banging through a door or this wind with its tail between its legs and the door itself kicked off its hinges from the reign of on to the black-out off. Lightbulbs flickered, something sparked in the wiring in my muscles - blood. Maybe as icy cold as Venus Or maybe as scorching hot as Mars, it's not the temperature shining - belief but bright-black, to tear out your eyes, the entire cosmic fabric trembles on a simple breeze, an anticyclone of earth continually brings forth things, a new edition, upgrade, a clone. The cyclone blows without a hitch through treetops, over roofs and wires, and the world, dependent on it, strong, mindless, and empty as a desert. My understanding, my creative act, is taken not as the crown of science - as history. I give out my poetry like sound, a negation of the silence, a token of solidarity with those who repeat from age to age after the schoolteacher in class. A clinging little singing firefly climbs high up into a tree, an offshoot sprouting on the naked twig. See how it scratches at my ear, a little leaf, a little ray of sun.
Pensioners
In Moscow there's a gang that will take care of lonely pensioners, they choose a woman for themselves, maybe one maybe two, and push them onto the rails. They come out onto the metro platform as if they're going somewhere, but there's nowhere for them to go: the clinic nearby and the markets, the nursing home, if they kept all their faculties, prison would be waiting for them, but from time immemorial there's a well-thought out palliative - sedative and the television - compressing the brain to a pebble but inflaming the nervous system. Russia is the kind of country where, you live long enough, it's too long. The pensioner is a grumbler, a trouble-maker, an egotist, a useless extra, an insignificant mythomaniac, stubborn, sly, whining, tiresome, senile and peppery, and the one who doesn't fit the pot is no pensioner, but an elder, they say, the longer you live, the wiser you get.