Translated material
Poems for L.
***
L.
on which
from love languages
should I talk to you today?
it doesn’t matter, I was already distracted and forgot
better take a look
how the night sea breathes
rises slowly
like the chest of a sleeping person
I always wake up earlier
and I sit hugging my knees
on the shore of your deep sleep
I watch how the dawn outlines your face
like eyes under heavy lids
looking at something
what's so far from me
any intimacy is like trauma
to merge with each other
we are hacking our original circuit
This is how a bone breaks from jumping off a cliff into shallow water
This is how a bone welded with titanium grows together
do you sleep after surgery
fresh plaster on the foot
smells like a museum storage room
I imagine it's like
you turn into a statue
slowly turning to stone
like an antique body
came to me from the pages
old textbooks
but when the stone
will reach your heart
I'll remember
in which language
Registered letter
TZ: “I miss Moscow. I want a poem about how the heart yearns for the bloody heart of the empire, which itself is like a separate country that the mind cannot embrace. Describe the contradictory feelings of love for a city in which you are everywhere a foreigner and everywhere you feel like you belong. This is the kind of house I wish for a fire, and I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t light it up in response.
I want this to be a letter not to the beloved, but about the beloved, but to someone else with whom you love her together: with tender memories of why and where you love her, in what ways you were similar and united, how you fought together, but at the same time, how you resisted each other.”
*
Do you remember, we were leaving the doors of the hostel - and autumn was coming. You can only be so young and defined in the fall, Moscow parted before us like a golden rustling sea, the hum of the metro got under our clothes - and the whole body was already humming. You want me to write a text about my love for Moscow, about how you were going to move to it, and I was going to leave it: that is, in Moscow we would never have met, passing on our youth like a relay race. Do you want me to write in pre-war or post-war language?
You say - describe how your heart yearns for the bloody heart of the empire. I describe: the bloody heart of the empire beats in my chest, and drives my blood through its weakened valves. If Moscow is being bombed, my heart is also being bombed, this is how my body and memory work: when I had eye surgery, the first city that I was able to see with new vision was her. The subway map is on the inside of my eyelid. The metro map is a fat booby-trapped heart entangled in multi-colored wires. I love a lot of the things I hate.
We could meet in the same paddy wagon. They could stand near the same ships. Running away from the same riot police on Tsvetnoy Boulevard. I could give news about your arrest. A city riddled with facial recognition. I would recognize your face, but not with the help of technology, but by some miracle.
The Kremlin is burning, the Oko tower of the Moscow City complex is burning, the Museum of Moscow is burning, the Nekrasov Library is burning, the Higher School of Economics is burning, the book fair on Red Square is burning, the Manege is burning, Non-fiction is burning, my pathetic heart is burning. Do I wish ashes for my house, built on someone else's blood? An empire that irreversibly flows in my blood, why is the blood of those in whose hearts you have already grown with your cold veins never enough for you, why are you not enough of those in whom you have taken root and whom you have already enslaved with your love? Why are you never enough?
You say - describe how you fought together, but at the same time how you resisted each other. I describe: we fought as if we were resisting each other. Moscow spat out my heart, sucking it like a peach pit. Now it grows in another place, in another land, not far from yours. That's how we met.
***
At first, love is an optical effect, you look at a person as if at the sun, but the sunspot on the site of someone else's face prevents you from truly seeing him.
then love itself turns into a source of light. you highlight the inside of another, carefully look into places where it would previously have been impossible to approach with ordinary human vision. everything becomes clearer - mechanisms, structures, breakdowns. It is important not to accidentally damage anything, but much more important is not to start repairing something out of inertia: light should not be an intrusion.
sometimes love can become a lens, a small glass landing on the surface of the pupil. here it all depends on the characteristics of your own internal vision: is the lens chosen suitable or not? distorts or helps? the lens comes between two people. What is this - a window or a wall? Do we see each other well?
While you are thinking about all this, another person is also looking at you at this very second. he may be completely outside your figurative coordinate system, but at the same time he is not on the other side of love. he is not an object of love - looked at and subject to your tongue, he is equal to you - and he looks at you no less than you look at him.
he sees how an optical effect flashes before your eyes, how your eyes become a source of light, how either a lens or a wall grows between you through the forces of your formulations, but maybe he doesn’t see all this. maybe for him love is the open sea, and now you are both lying on the water, on your backs, and you don’t even know about it because you don’t ask.
***
I know how they become
foreign agents
terrorists
extremists
enemies of the people
traitors
shame of the nation
but I don't know how they become
dictators
tyrants
security forces
war criminals
accomplices
murderers
I don't know
what are these people praying for?
in the temple of the Ministry of Defense
under whose arch
the bloody snow is melting
I know
that God is love
not war
that heroes
don't die
- they are killed
I don't know
how many more will you kill?
but I know that each of you
punished during life:
You,
who taught us to hate
taught us
such love
like tomorrow
some of us will be gone
now we know how
love each other
as if God is love
not war
you taught us this
but you yourself are standing
smearing dark blood
on glass icons
you taught us this
now we know how
there are many of you
but you are standing
all alone
***
Immigrant sex during someone else's revolution: we could also be on the street, but we remain in bed. Our bodies are not sufficiently involved in the document flow, our bodies are subject to deportation and expulsion.
We undress each other during someone else's revolution, as during a thunderstorm: there are screams and glare outside the windows, police cars, ambulances, lightning, smoke, thunder. This is what love looks and sounds like.
In the days of someone else's revolution, you miss home more. You mentally go through all the routes of once permitted marches. May 1 is a monster, we walk in pajamas with a poster “For independent dreams! Against Rossonnadzor! For eight hours of work sleep! We go - and the city is ours, we laugh and put all our dreams, tears and kisses on its map.
But this is not our city and the revolution in it is not ours. We never saw the revolution. Tear gas seeps into our bedroom. Under this pretext, you can cry about everything at once.
