Ephemera Again

Georgian version here

Ephemera Again

What causes the Cypresses’ bodies to sway:
where is their whispery rustling’s source?
There’s no wind today… no wind today.
Except on the mountain. There, the currents course.
The silence down here is becoming a prison:
Unsleeping, watching, forever unseen.
Up on the peaks a grand poplar has risen,
and soon it goes tumbling into the stream.
A poet’s in danger the same as that poplar:
Seclusion and stature create all his woe.
His enemies libel: they slake him and slur,
they slander and smear him with poison’s aloe.
But he remains noble: he won’t stoop or sway.
The church bells are tolling for him from their spire.
There’s no wind today… no wind today.
Except on the mountain. The winds there race higher.
The great arc of Paris perceived in reflection
comes to the poet in Spring, as he sleeps.
But then suddenly the winds change direction
and soon into his life a young woman sweeps.
Demonic confusion! Confliction! Turmoil!
on every side fires whicker and flick.
The wind blew a woman through his mind and soul
and she’s starting to howl like a lunatic.
Yes! then the ground begins to descend
like a horse at full gallop down from a peak
a coffin is borne by invisible hands—
no one walks in procession or weeps in its wake.
Oh love! You’re as stable as foam on the ocean!
Give the scrivener a sword, or a lightning shaft
To carve into history: “”The Wind Blew a Woman
Through His Mind and Soul,” as an epitaph.
And Paganini… nets of an orgy…
The maestro will drink his wine from a bowl,
A stage illumined with hope will foresee
Feral french horns, and a savage piano.
Once more he takes up his trusted violin
and builds his monuments out of sound and air
that infect the whole world: Rome, London, Berlin,
and soon the old legends echo everywhere.
No! This is wrong! Hope is not some thin string
for finely-wrought fingers, shadowed by ladies.
He leaves, like his strings, the young women weeping
tender chrysolites from wide-open eyes.
For dreamers who have but a single red rose,
He gives permission for their souls to storm.
Cracked mirror, cracked walls: he doesn’t look close
to see the despair that infects every washroom.
And the factories spew and spew their phlegm
as the Dante of our epoch, Verhaeren —
A giant who has magnatized the flames—
will turn iron gears with iron hands.
And soon the gears spin— quicker and quicker:
everything around them, swallowed in steam.
The clanging noise roughens, lights flare, then flicker,
Will we never quit this foul work, Verhaeren?
The time’s near when iron will speak on its own
And, like a dark crime, demand our attentions,
Relentlessly fast, a hyena, it runs
cruel and hot: child of our inventions.
It suffocates everything with burning fingers
Even he who gave it breath, life and light:
It killed Verhaeren! But his memory lingers
and concering his glory, Fate yet still will write.
Or then, Dostoyevsky, as if ninety times
on a foggy night… a foggy night
was sentenced to die: to be shot for his crimes,
and moment to moment awaited his fate…
As the hangman slowly enters his cell
Something else deeper, something more profound
remains there, forever behind a dark veil.
This is the image Dostoyevsky sets down.
He doesn’t seek rescue, or look to the helm,
But stands with a shadow spread over his face
Sentenced to die, to be shot for his crime:
And who’s there to mourns him? What death is this?
From the top of his scaffold, he gazes away
Watching the satyr with a half-starved stare
This is the gaze that his portraits all bear…
Thre’s no wind today… no wind today…