Take Two—Poems from Russia & Mexico

Texts from different places also should meet. The first poet included here, Maria Maksimova, is a prominent new poet from Moscow. The poems included here will be appearing in Crossing Centuries: The New Russian Poetry, an anthology slated to appear in April from Talisman House. See translator Laura Weeks' essay in that book, "Speaking Through The Veil: The Dilemma of Women's Voices in Russian Poetry," for more on Maksimova...

The second text, "River," is by Manuel Ulacia, a poet from Mexico City, where he is a professor. His most recent book is El Plato azul (Ditoria Editions, Mexico City). Translator Suzanne Jill Levine (her biography of Manuel Puig, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions [July 2000 Farrar Straus & Giroux] is soon forthcoming) describes him as one of the most interesting post-Paz poets in Mexico today. Her translations of Jorge Luis Borges' Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger and co-translated with Esther Allen, won The National Book Critics Circle Award this year.

            —Leonard Schwartz




      ***



Poems by Maria Maksimova



from the cycle Marginalia


1.

Marginalia . . . Here's how the day begins:
with a whispered exchange of barbs,
with bells sounding in darkened railway cars,
with needles of frost scribbling on your cheek, with knocking knees,
spilled over in patchy sleep from paper platforms.
Jingling from splashes of muted piano keys,
from greedy fires of the station's black maple,
there a rusty stream of leaves is scattered on the wind,
sweeping the parched lawns like rain.
There emerging dawn swims like a pinch of salt;
like a flabby body the warming city shakes.
Like a broken fingernail grating along the skin of space,
a nameless pilgrim stands, pregnant with a stone of light.


2.

Between two interludes, between two autumns—
the yellow and the black,
there are two states of movement:
one born on the wind, the other—
at the bottom of the reservoir.
Between them lies a pause where one cannot hang on
you fall head down into the leaves without waking.
The wind rises—songs of angels
scattered over the stony earth
make funnels and vortices of fiery leaves, of charred sparrows.
The voice insufficient, the moist meat of premonitions,
of greedy events—along the edge of reason, along the selvage edge,
scattered seeds of September's bitter poppy
swarm, humming in the lashed and ragged sky.
Father and Mother, sister, all the same you will leave them;
we're closer to where the rooks and ravens nest.
Boy of piano-wire, running along the edge of lightning,
be it a dream, or a net, or a dusty, pale drawing,
traveling for the first time is a ripe ear ripped out with the roots.


5.

A rusty wheel creaks,
snowdrifts smell of straw . . .
What would it take for a man to stretch out
sprawling over the sled like a wolf's dead pelt?
gunfire's reflection, salty drops of buckshot,
a fishing-line of rainbow from the fire to the icy ravine
An empty casing, nothing more, that once was pain—
do you remember, my soul, clothed in rushes and nets,
how we ran in the brittle tracks,
how they showered us with light and food,
do you remember words, remote as footnotes,
clumps of hoarfrost before the tightly locked door?
Now a wild animal steps cautiously into a thawed patch;
the air boils, everything melts away in rings and rivulets.
A cast stone leaves circles in the sky.


8.

It must be April
scraping its claws along the marble,
leaving no trace.
Stifling city dust
clings to the sound of birdsong.
You, who were leafing through the prayer-book,
couldn't thread your way through the rosary of gardens—
skin flickers in the hunger's twilight
Whom will you speak to? What will you find to rhyme
with your tidy harmonies?
You're burning with note-fever;
you're breaking out in typhus spots.
Fax still burning, and there's no one
to smother the smoke
to touch the strings with a yew bow,
waking a tremor in the resonant pause.


(tr. Laura D. Weeks)



      ***



A Poem by Manuel Ulacia



River
            to Emir Rodriguez Monegal


        there is a river in the mind
where we f   like the cells
of a big animal

                        a river
where images are made
        instant crystallizations
creating the present


                       a tribe
awakens in the jungle
         amid the writing of the trees


a sun on the tip of a branch
        opens its petal as the day
breaks on the eyelid of the horizon


    there's a village at the source
where a king sits in the square
            and a solitary street
we cross only in death
            in San Juan Chamula
(this fourteenth of February)
                the people offer flowers
                    fruits
coca-colas
        and transistor radios
to the sacred gods
    and in the atrium of the church
there are those who walk on fire
    without burning
         the soles of their feet

                there's a flower
that bears fruit
        in the center of the day

an orange
            amid the multitudes
of the Kasbah
        that satisfies the thirst
 of some listener

because in Marrakesh
                        jugglers
cross the desert in caravans
nomad calligraphy
            in the sand on the page

telling stories
                and flautists
invent the music
        flowing along the riverbed

        there is a river where man
translates the body
    of the animal he forms part of

a river
            where forms are traced
inventing geometries

                a circle is drawn
in the echoes of a cloister

it is the sun lighting the chants
Christ born each morning
                            to die
on the cross of night

                on Mount Athos
the monks
        bathe space with echoes

their voices
                distant emanations

there is a fountain of clear water
        where all forms gush forth
swept downstream

    a fountain that waters the tree
where days ripen
            a memory deposited
like mud in the riverbed

            written with stones

an architecture of fossils

                    cracked vessels
nourishing the roots
                    from the depths

in Teotihuacan
        the naked pyramid of the sun
stripped
                    of its red paint

pointing to the cusp of the day

                    in other times
the priests offered
            a body to the gods
from the sacrificial stone

        today the blood still runs
tracing the axis of the universe

            there is a large animal
covering the earth like moss

    an animal that envisions itself
from the division of its cells

        a body that feels alone
and seeks
    another body to become itself

two bodies join
like the water of two streams
or the light of two candles
            spilling emptiness
between the legs
                of day and night

in Paris a juggler
            holds two spheres
in the air

                in a hotel room
two kiss

    the moon streams in the window

                            outside
the cars
speed along snowy pavements
                tracing an ellipse
from the obelisk
            to the Arc de Triomphe

there's a river
        that invents us together

 a river you write
                out of the matter
you become when you read it

            a river translating
on paper
        what my senses perceive
a river
        where our eyes commune
with the bread of each letter

as night falls
        the seeds of the orange
you drank in the Kasbah

                    shine in the sky

constellations
                celebrating the orbit

letters
                burning in each word

there's a river of ink
            that you and I conceived

a river
flowing through
                 the veins of the poem
    bathing the corridors
                     of our dreams

when your body
                    falls still
in the gravity of its weight

when it forgets
        itself twined in the sheets
and the sheets with the bed
        and the bed with the floor

    (as if the world were woven—
a single thick skin)

                    you emerge
in another reality
                made of images
gentle images
like the reflections of a stream
                        weaving
the archetypes of sleep

                there's a large animal
an animal that feeds
                    by devouring itself
as enzymes in the body
                devour carbohydrates

as time devours man
chewing up his body to the last bone

        there's a large animal breathing

whose inhalations and exhalations
                last for centuries


in New York a breeze invents
    the cosmography of heaven's vault

checkered map
        producing luminous networks

where all revolves
             in the flow of the stream


the smallest web
                    pushes the largest


            the subway cars glide by

like rainbow-hued serpents

            connecting centers

mouths spewing forth men like words

                prayers spilling everywhere


there's a river

                    a river passing through my head

I hear it coursing through its bed

                    I invent myself


sitting in a park


        a seagull sleeps in the delta of the night


in the arms of the Hudson


                        Manhattan



I write as I read


                an atom of hydrogen feeds my thoughts


there are galaxies

       in



(tr. Suzanne Jill Levine
from Manuel Ulacia's El Río y la piedra (1989)