Alexei Parshchikov
translated by Eugene Ostashevsky

Maybe you do draw
seriously,
but not now, alas!  Lines
form a grill,
and behind it—lions.

Lions. Their life is a diplomat’s,
they pose on their paws, their heads double.
With celerity of computer chess,
lions occupy cells with each cell.

They regard you on guard, but never—askance,
and stretch languorously, like crêpe.
They are tied to their feed, but also to belfries
far-off, shimmering over the Dnieper.

Lions go: “munch!”—overlooking its sunsets.
They disdain clover and dandelions.
Frothed-up bathtubs, where Marats sat—
O lions!

We’ll hide among church domes, as if among cabbages,
—in a convex mirror this city rose spherically—
and by St. Andrew’s slope
we’ll give those lions the slip.

Lions penciled in thickets and glades!
Their manes you’d curler with slate—
but me,
with you I would drink, drink, and again,
with you I would sleep, sleep, sleep.

Alexei Parshchikov
translated by Michael Palmer and Eugene Ostashevsky

I split from the dark as if oakum had croaked.
Behind me City Hysteria blackened in chalky spasms,
the sun was liquid, the sloping sea reeked,
and re-entering my body I knew God had redeemed me.

I remembered a scuffle on a square—the whistles and flaring passions.
I idled in neutral by the pinball machine
where a woman was flashing, partly real—
the edge of this reality jarred by Scheherazade.

I was out of it, yet recall the ones in slow plummet
from the fight, as if tumbling through an apple tree
and grasping at the fruit, unable to choose…
Homeric-shouldered griffons were forming a pack.

And here at this most silent of seas—as with
eye muscles slowed by the Herb—pass that joint
toward a calm horizon—relax, don’t rush…
…from mollusk to cow, idea to object…

In the mountains stirred the raisins of distant herds.
I strolled the shore as memory shoved from behind
but reflex and strain vanished into rhythm
and power arrayed itself along units of time.

All became what it should have been from the beginning:
poppies ripped through hills like T.V. static,
a donkey with fly’s eyes imagined Plato,
the sea seemed fact, not mere apparition.

Precise Sea!  Ringlets of a million mensurae.
Cliff—inseparable from.  Water—essential for.
Their necessity burned through a random dust speck
clutching them…but there was no ship!
I saw the vectored couplings, and all the essential clamps—
along the background a void sucked strength into itself—
saw even the smell of oil, the characteristic creak,
whiter than a shot of camphor yawned the Minus Ship.

It propagated—absence.  It dictated—views
to views, and with no more than a glance
you’d be caught, as by a cotton filter,
then nod into extended diapason.

Color of the void, the Minus Ship roamed,
actually bobbing in place, moored to zero.
In stretched diapason, a comma on its side…
And I crept up closer to the imperious bark.

The Minus Ship melted.  I heard a distant OM.
A hidden genius plucked a melody on the doutar.
Aimed toward the Absolute and gliding volumetrically
it swelled and then veered off at its apogee.

The Minus Ship was swallowed, like arac on a table.
the doutar wove a new center of emptiness.
Swimming toward it on an ecstatic char—time now—
I focused and crossed over…

by Helga Olshvang
translated by Dana Golin

Touch these limits and these smithereens, one

touch and the pomegranate will spill its purple seeds,

The heart has outgrown itself and protrudes outside

(there’s no one outside of this “I”, who itself is no one);

lips and lids, and partitions, and spiraling hurt

are no more than a warp,

It has all been exhausted before in a series of steps,

all a redux, an encore, a likeness, in place

of some possible other.

by Helga Olshvang
translated by Dana Golin

…Take grey, for instance, it is just that—Grey,
not Yeats’ wild swans, or boiled wool, or felt,
while blue is only Blue and not a bruise,
not shaded depths of lakes, nor flights of stairs,
incomparable Black and Yellow have
no metaphors in archives of the jars,
just as they don’t in the oblivious minds
and rambling speech of those prone to compare.
We have forsaken color.

Color has too forsaken us.  Let run
the orange yolk, let streetlights flash their red
and green; the dove’s like any other dove
the flowering bush is nothing but itself;
and in the dark the color will persist
long past the end of vision: in the gleam
of oily puddles, in the mushroom cap’s
laquer-like sheen, in iodine on a scab
over one’s mangled lip, in battered flags ( to indicate defeat of
Reds or Whites—
overexposed, they’re hard to tell apart!)
Their purpose will be spelled out in the press
And celebrated in the ruckus song.