Vladimir Gandelsman. 5 elegy

With the preface of Alexander Genis

Some poets, and most of them, go from music, others from paintings (“Love painting, poets”). Gandelsman's muse lives in the theater, where he also has a place. Once I was convinced of this at a conference at the Dartmut College, where Lev Losev gathered philologists and translators to talk about poetry cleverly. When the time came to speak to Gandelsman, the case went to midnight, and the stagnant from the smart one, they dreamed of getting to the poems, but to the pillow. Volodya, with his verses and translations, burst into this doused audience, proving that poetry gives rise to a holiday, like a New Year's fireworks. It is not surprising that he is so loved by children whom he teaches not only to write poetry, but also to be poets.

This does not mean that Gandelsman's poetry is not serious. Rather, the opposite: in our era, accustomed to total irony, Gandelsman performs a "sad song under the flute." So the ancients determined the genre of elegy, like those that gathered on this page. Each of them is a masterpiece of scenography. The poet builds a decoration, which falls into which the excess becomes necessary. And let the gun does not shoot - it hangs not in vain. Each thing that got into the verse was awarded its replica, helping the author to sing the quiet aria of the sage and the Stoic.

Alexander Genis , New York

PS Congratulations to the poet on the anniversary.

Elegy of arrangement

Self -Silianery Schell. Scream from orava children: "You drive!" Let's go? Why not? Look in front of you. What are you taking a gaze? Commissioning is a half -trash and the smell of old age is a holey. To the used things, ashamed, to try on, God's right. Here is a storyteller. Late hour. How can I comfort you? We need a minimum: a mattress and something like a hanger. To hang. Sing something. T-te. How not to be sad, having ruined all day? All day - not yet life. And then what ? Let's see shoes. How many saucers are there? Exactly three. Beaten. But for free. To hell. You don't want to - don't take it. What does the "saucer" mean, be it wrong? Torn the mountains of rags. And shoes? I will wear it - I will not blink - with someone else's leg of shoes or slippers. But from someone else's dishes I can’t. The otherworldly Eden will ever return. Let me settle down, I will show them all. To whom? To the one who turns up. When we will be driven in mutuals, we will not allow us to rely, we will not surrender - we will not pass things into the annals of a poor shame. Their business is an honest ash. On the landfill - in the middle of the night surge of cold stars - we will burn them to the ground. You are cursed, the eg.

Elegy. Family saga

Read a little visible, and often -
In the invisible. The crystal beast hung
Above the tablecloth - a broken vapor, radiant,
Shards sparkles from top to bottom.

On the tablecloth snacks in narrow boats.
Decanter. Breaks speech of a stream
family. Seminative, in gilding
night lights, rain outside the window. Hearth.

The gray -haired owner at the piano. Happiness
romance. Chrysanthemums. Baritone.
Read a little visible, and often -
In the invisible. The mysterious Triton

longitudinal memory, longitudinal-transverse,
The stash is illuminated. Mistress. A gentle son.
His bride. Soon marriage
Dawn, and with him a sunset. The rays of the depths.

Teach love lessons, the guest is random,
You are also a boy in the wilds of those apartments
where the smell of old age and kitchen is chatter,
And you’ll make a mistake with the door - there is a satire

dancing with a nymph, and everything is more details
All stereoscopic and relatives ...
Oh, a hoarse paveph! Slam
The door and leave the goat myth behind her.

Take a look where the summer days of the joy.
Lilac blooms with a heavy tread,
And he asks for the veranda's poems,
and porcelain shepherd

The kissing stands on the storyteller.
A new boy will be born, meanwhile,
and the former will become a young man, and a shadow
It will fall on the past in a mournfully removed measure.

Just what is the mistress of an ambulance. Injection.
Aunts escaped, the kindest zolovki.
The owner was the first to leave.
Fools. Chrysanthemums. In gilding

night lights ... to the owner
The wife left. Thorne, of course,
to pick a tropin - not so pitch
A nightmare, because there is a spouse. Sunset. Dawn.

Sunset. In forty years "New Boy"
It will die, and the father (that "tender son"),
Fan, there will be one day
Watch impassive how they drive the ball.

Someday they will hit the ball
the last time, and to his son, not a perep.
Seeing, he says: I was waiting for a meeting.
And the son will say: let's go, I will shut up.

Elegy with the missing

On the outskirts of the house Victorian,
Shells of sea white.
The pond is not far away, pulled off duckweed,
With a dignarian drooping. Barn.
Early frozen fields
Trust the distant heart.

My daughter is fourteen years old
The girl stands in the doorway
angular, touching, pale,
incomparable. Blowing from the gap.
And fearlessly rummies fear
the future, like an empty nut.

There is also a neighbor, the one that
No in the world. In January
A fast is a quick.
Dawn, you are abbreviated - in vain.
Let you care
snow. He is always to the lantern.

Daughter. In the hands of a glass little thing -
ball. A fugitive conversation.
Every now and then her gaze is beating.
Every now and then the neighbor's gaze inside
retreating, sharpening her ailment.
Cold of waking up in the road.

Gathering spirit, coffee maker
Codes coffee in silence.
Joyful, sad, bitter, bright,
Independent. The initial days.
Into the distance and in breadth, in the blood or outside.
Did you remember everything? God forbid.

Elegy. Father

It became a misery and tearful. The locomotive of death was approaching, and he stood on the paths like a stuck heavy -wide, in the dark. I was nearby, but far, for a silent crying in the future. It is an executioner. Between Snovsky, where dreams flows, and evening scrap on the houses of cows, and milking in the yards, and milk steam above the bucket, and a red-haired boy in the doorway, and Leningrad with his river (its most accurate line), with a bury of a beer stall, with an officer taking under a trump card, with an overcoat cut of a grater cloth, from which something will come of a darm The daughter’s wife, ”he stood on the tracks like a heavy truck, in the dark. I was near, but far away. I still did not know that not every waiting room was a holiday. That there is a collapse and the crush not for juice or pulp, but - pressing brains. There is a shell of seeds and chicken guts with a Lukomorye he heard for the first time a verse, someone's flirty “you can’t do not to face” with a Levitan from a reproduct in a Kronstadt parade ground ... Like a bee from a flower, presenting a pollen. I was nearby, but I stepped to the honeycombs of life when the rumble was approaching. I did not hear the reproach of the future, and what kind of crying and executioners there ... choosing life chooses the death of his neighbor. Power up.

Elegy of memory

(re -read L. Chukovskaya)

I lived on Tchaikovsky, then on Shpalernaya.
Whatever the address, Sofya Petrovna, is bad.
Unless we were lucky -
the same ceremonial and gateways, but evil
It seemed - it seemed that it would have melted,
It even grins: it dawned.
Is it so dawn?

The same February and the same steering ram.
but, except for the wind, no one dared to spray us
And search. The same windows in the ice ...
Unless not
more trams - their colored lights on the forehead
They flew out of memory, as in a pipe.
I recognized their numbers by color.

These "placecomers" are still or "party organizations"
rushed along the dictionary, like rats in the morgue,
but "triangle"
became geometry again, leaving the ward
insane, but issued a salary
In the embrasure of the window-in such a time
You held out your voice. Where is your slave?

The box is still mail - from a blue tin,
"Truth" sticks out ... But everything cleared up: the remains
They don’t write letters ... Cities rebuilt.
Where is that old woman praying like an icon,
On a box that appeals to the law?
About ancient Greek chaos, endowed with an epithet ...
Organized, yes.

Organization! Everything that is inhuman
It is randomed in rat, mutilated.
No and there will be no letter.
Pushkin was mistaken: both the staff is in his hands and the sum.
And while you are around the city - to be a road to him! - Wandered
Sofya Petrovna, the author spared you
The fact that I drove crazy.

Is it so dawn? Hunchbacks and plugavians
in the same chambers, and - worms their white fingers,
Their faces are meat.
So do not forget the same, passing by saving
Preobrazhensky, the godfather of her hour,
embankment - do not give a repetition the god that
Nights! - With sunrise over Okhta.