"When I die...
bury me with a guitar..."

Garcia Lorca

Where is that gory Granada?
Where is your grave?
Whom should I ask?
The fiery horses that snort
and scrape the earth with
restless hoofs, or the bearded
eagles of rugged Nevada?...
Granada is too far away...
Are the skies there blue or gray?
Are the myrtles green?
I don't know.
But I do know that you died for Granada,
that the blood-stained shirts
of brothers of mine have rotted
in the Spanish earth, where
the seguidilla's heard ...

Granada is far away, but you are not.
I want to find your grave not to cry
and grieve, but to sing a song and
pick the waiting strings of my guitar
I want to whet on the stone of your grave
a Castilian knife of the strongest metal
for the coming battle.

1957

The little angels you stitch,
with what is left of your
blue eyes, the good little angels
such as I myself once was
at their age, the little angels,
mother, the little angels
are waiting for you to stitch
the last tiny wing.

Then they will begin to sing
and will flutter around you.
They will turn loose your hair -
thin and white. And you'll ascend
with them as the saints did.
There, in Paradise,
will commence your sufferings.
Because in Paradise there is nothing
that looks like your son.

You will fall down before the Almighty's
throne. You'll wash his feet with your tears.
And you will pray to him,
you'll pray to let you go back home,
unseen, just for a minute.
To prepare something for my breakfast.
To brush my clothes...
And to write down
on my cigarette pack: "Come back early!"

The Almighty will smile.
Although he is also embroidered
with the blue of your eyes.

And he won't grant your wish.

You will recline alone
beneath the blissful palms.
And with a hairpin you'll pierce
in the sky a starlet, a secret brilliant
star, to watch our neighborhood.

The windows of the white apartment
buildings will light up. In the shadows
couples in love will stand like statues.
Women in slippers will go for bread
and will call out to their children
in a sing-song voice.
A Caravelle will hover above the airport.
Invisible trains will whistle through the night.

Ah, the whistles of those night trains,
by which I'm always somewhere traveling.

You've heard them. Listen, listen to them.
Hear how they come, hear how they rush,
how they roar at the railroad crossing.
One of them will be my hoarse and
belated cry for you, mother.

1964

The world is made of
earth, sky, and questions.
I too, like everyone,
am trying make things clear,
to turn form into formula,
and knowledge into usefulness...
But why, when reading the latest
news in the tram, or later on,
when listening to my boss's
pompous voice, why do I keep
an eye on the sky? Why?
Daytime moon, do I feel your
presence, barely noticeable,
like the scar of a vaccination?
Why also, in the cafeteria
or when finishing an urgent article,
I keep thinking of you?
You distract me, daytime moon,
a transparent white ghost, a secret.
Why are you there on such
a sunny afternoon? Have you
stayed behind, or are you premature?
This might be all the same to you...
But not to me! I am transient.
Short-lived like my verse.
I am looking for the clarity of things...
Oh, bridal veil, torn apart
and thrown into the blue!
Are you last night's memory
or a presentiment of the future?...

1966

Now go away all of you,
you well-wishers and advisers,
concerned about what I should be.
I want to be the tin cap on a lemonade bottle.
I want my daughter, while dressing
in the morning, to hide me
in the tiny pocket of her apron
so that she has something private
at the kindergarten.
For it is not allowed
to bring in such things there.
Yet they are so necessary.

When needed, I'll suddenly
begin to glow, serrated,
silver, star-like. And
my daughter will smile...

So, let the ban be broken.

1967

Poetry readings, poetry readings...!
From the small students' clubs
to the triumphal halls, against
windmills, and against ghosts,
in dreadful working days
yet without chain armor,
the poet follows his poetry all life long,
Sancho Panza following his Don Quixote.

Well, of course, each has
received his bouquet of flowers.

But there are those distant small towns!
A railway stop. Dogs barking.
Mounds of beets and empty crates...
And look, we slowly
fall out of the evening train.

And beneath the little signal-bell
that ill-at-ease kid our eternal
and unknown brother in the art awaits,
calling us like spirits into his world.

Always "on behalf of all the
enthusiastic construction workers,"
said to be "lovers of poetry readings"...

All right! We set off as silent as a patrol.
The shortcut resembles a field.

But ahead of us like heroin
The electric flower of the
construction site shines excitedly.
And in Canteen Number 2,
amid the smell of stew,
we are addressing you,
twentieth century:

"You are blood-stained
with dreams
and delusions!
You need
crazy poets...!"

"We will sweep your heavens free of mines...!"
Ah, we are promising ravishing miracles.
But the handful of pipe fitters
who have come to hear us,
aren't enchanted. They go out for a smoke.
Sheer bewilderment shines blue in their eyes:
"What are these artists stirring us for...?"

Poets can survive anything -
being hungry, and yet sing,
being unemployed, expelled students...
But, my God, can one of them
possibly do without applause?
Grin a bit! Say it doesn't matter.
But a hole will appear in your soul -
Defeat! Defeat!

And so, how often in dining cars
we would wash away our wounds
with brandy, and someone would sigh
with tragic irony:
"And Yevgeny Yevtushenko
gives readings in football stadiums!
That's how it is with Russians, my friend -
they listen to you, even if you're not that great...
And even when they don't understand a thing,
still in some place like New York,
they will applaud you..."

"Oh, no! Stadiums are not for poems!
Poems are read in sacred hours,
like love letters, like secret leaflets
which require not demonstrations,
but dedication...!"

But the return train would stop
and the poets would disperse
to their old lodgings,
to their new battlefields...

Along the park, along the stadium,
I, too, happened to be returning late...
when all of a sudden I spotted
that the fence was ripped down.
And a smile dawned on me.
And like a thought from the past
I passed through it and past the
deserted bleachers to the immense crater.
A discarded bottle
clattered down the steps,
like an absurd bell
in an absurd amphitheatre.

And then, then I was overtaken
by that romantic adventure.
Three billion stars were sitting
in the bleachers, all staring at me.
And I began to recite
in a surprising voice.
And my sincerest passions
echoed selflessly in the dark.
I think was telling the stars
how man rises. And how difficult
it is for him to shine all life long.
Yet with his own light,
reduced himself to ashes
over new foundations
or over honest stanzas...

If there had been a watchman,
he'd have thought me crazy.
But you know I couldn't care less.

My poetry reading was so real,
I permit you to envy me!

1968

If I should have a career someday
(and they maintain it is inevitable),
if I should rise so high that they start
phoning me from everywhere, then
I will appoint death as my secretary.

And when you phone and ask for me,
she'll say that I'm not in.
"But perhaps just for a moment..."
"No!" she'll say, "He is definitely not here!"
And all the while through that infinite time
I'll be gazing out the window
at how the leaves are falling,
or turning green, at how the distant
church dome resembles a demitasse,
turned upright for telling fortunes,
at how the girls look at themselves in glass doors,
and how you are thinking that I am entirely gone.

1968

With immense delight
they come to pose.
In the dirty studio they freeze,
as if for eternity itself.

But, it is precisely this
eternity destroys them.

After fifteen minutes
they grow nervous, ask for a cigarette.
And they groan as if
they have already endured
fifteen centuries. Then
to all of them it suddenly
occurs that they have some
important appointment, or
business meeting, or concert.
And they're on their way!

My wife is an artist.
She knows that this will
happen with each of them
very soon. She rushes during
those fifteen minutes to grasp
the eternal from the person -
The proud eyes. The intelligent
forehead, the casual, radiant smile.
Or even modesty - yes, modesty itself!
Because the person grows tired
and his pose turns prosaic.

And they're all on their way!

Then I enter the studio.
Then my hour strikes!
My wife sits me down in the place
vacated by the person who has already left.
She anesthetizes me with two or three kisses,
perfumed with turpentine. And continues.

And thus I pose all day long for many a day
for someone else's leg, for someone else's arm,
for a shoulder, for a chest, or for everything else...
Sullied with someone else's splendor.
Inspired like a child playing a game:
Tsar, to you, Happy Name Day.
And I must tell you that I persevere.
I just sit there and think about
all kinds of things. I just sit there
and think to myself. Sometimes I
imagine how fame walks with my feet.
How it scratches itself with my hand.
And when I have a foretaste how I will haunt -
a faceless and nameless nonentity -
through the halls of eternity, inside me
it becomes terribly beautiful and funny.

"Hey!" My wife's getting angry behind the easel.
"Didn't I tell you that you're supposed to look dreamy!
What are you grinning at, like an idiot?"

So I nail myself back into the pose again.
"Sorry,"
       I say,
            "but I started thinking about something."

1971

To Bogomil Rainov

Grandfather's roof was made of slate
and weeds grew on its craggy shelf.
"Where is my grandfather's house?" I ask.
"It fell in ruins all by itself,"

they tell me. "Look how we've paved the yard."
And there is the old roof, stone by stone,
flagging the court. But I can't believe
that that strong old house collapsed on its own.

It was a beautifully fashioned house,
cozy, in human kindness furled,
but alas it had the same defects
as Grandfather's vision of the world.

The thick slate roof was terribly heavy
and the house itself had no foundations.
Very slowly it sank in the ground
with fate of all such houses and nations.

I'm sure that old house didn't fall to pieces
but slowly, slowly, of its own great weight
sank till the roof is level with the earth
and now I walk like a cat on its slate.

Box-trees rise from the flues like smoke
while down below the hearth burns fair,
the pot is boiling - nothing is changed
in Grandfather's lost Atlantis there.

And father, a little boy, is curled
in Grandmother's lap. His eyes are wide.
"Quick, go to sleep now, the bogey man
is on the roof." Father listens, terrified.

Yes! There is something there! He shudders
deliciously, and hearing proof
he falls asleep and dreams he dreams
my heavy footsteps on the roof.

It is cruelly hard to build a roof
that time's foundations can hold in place.
The superstructure (as Marx would say)
should never overload the base.

And those who write should think of things
as real as roof-trees, strong and straight.
Someone with lightning in his wings
has started walking on our slates.

1971

"Club de Playa Pachacamac"

An amphitheater and an arena for
two thousand folks or for a universe...
Not that it matters any more.
For they are bringing in the gamecocks,
dressed in velvet cloaks. They fasten
razor blades to their legs and
present them then to the umpire.
And the entire crowd of emperors
is choosing now its gladiators...
"Bets? Place your bets!
Place your bets, señores!"
Meanwhile, they are playing Bolero
up there.
"One hundred sols on the right one!"
"One hundred sols on the left one!"
"One million on the ultra-left one!"
"One million on the ultra-right one!"

Within seconds the cocks will be a ball
of blood and one of them will be the winner.
He'll later die, behind the scenes,
while the bank counts its proceeds.

It's just the same in life, goddammit.

The bets are somewhat higher.
But the end, the end is so alike.
Death for the clowns of politics!
Death for the word-mongers!
Death for the muggers! Though
they are often honest little people...

I too have been to funny battles.
I have killed. And I have been killed.
And I have been blinded by the bloody shine.
And my beak has been filled with sand.

While up there, in the amphitheater,
those unbelievable Peruvian women
with their eucalyptus figures
have been dissolving in the wind...
So that is why, I'm not at all indifferent
who'll entertain himself with my little songs.
And I think now I understand why,
and for whom I die.

1973

A long time ago I met
a young witch. A beauty
unsurpassed by others.
You were this beauty.
You gave me something to drink,
so I might remain forever faithful,
determined to be yours and yours only.
Remember how we played,
both of us, with kisses?
Remember how we played,
both of us, with love?
And by the time we understood
that these were true kisses,
and by the time we understood that this
was true love, the play, darling,
ended! Ended the play, darling!

And my arm returned to being
just an arm, and no longer a wing.
And the bed returned to being
only a bed. The heavens,
nothingness. But then what is it
that unites us now,
intoxicates us now,
consumes us now?
What is it called?
Answer! Perhaps afterlove?

I hear a single heart.
It beats fearfully and fiercely.
But we are both so close,
I do not know whether it is
my heart or yours, darling.

1974

To Stephan Danailov

How easy it is to be in love
at twenty. And how easy it is
to become the unbeloved...

I would embrace whirlwinds.
I would be kissing the rains.
I'd roll through meadows of
moist tenderness. And when
they'd push me down into
the fathomless "good-bye",
I'd think that I was dying.

But I'd be rescued by the
nets of youthful sun rays.
I'd jump on them the way
children jump on spring beds.
And my face would laugh
cooled by evaporating tears.
Girls like charms would coil
round me and I've felt freedom
best after the pain of parting.

But how awful it is to be in love
at forty and how awful
to become unbeloved.

Without "good-bye".
Without charms.
Without tears.
Parting doesn't
bring me freedom.

And I fancy I'm not dying.

1976

I travel slowly, and I sink
into the wilderness where even
time stops moving.

Mist. As if I have encountered
a scoundrel vested in trust.

Mist, a broken pair of wings.

Even a blind man fears mist.

The yellow tunnel of the headlights
leads aimlessly. Whoever has passed but
has returned from the limits of death
describes his narrow escape this way.

Mist. I'm moving with great difficulty.
While fragments of reality float
along the roadside. A winter field,
Brown grass, the last pasture.
And hairy horses, pretending
to be grazing, or maybe they
are praying to our old,
age-old mother.

They kiss her wrinkled hand. And
foam drips from their bitter mugs,
and I stop looking at the road.
I'm looking at the horses.

Horses, an age old friendship.

Horses, faith and freedom.

Horses, useless, they say
to the world in which we live.
The world of isotopes and
the combustion engine.
The calculated world,
where horses are economically
unwarranted, or rather,
more clearly said, condemned.
You who are condemned, you
justices and forgotten ones,
pray that god will send you
a horse in the mist, a
friend in wretchedness.

I'm looking at the horses. I plan
to stop. To get out of the car.
I won't even close the door.
I don't want either to close or open.
I'll walk alone across the winter field,
past dark puddles, leftover snow.
I'll kneel down. I'll kiss the rocky hand.
But then, I hope the horses are real.
I hope they aren't made of dream,
of memory, or mist. I hope they aren't
an hallucination. I hope they smell of
stale sweat so I can mount one of them
and take my leave.

1983

Notes on the white margins of a catalog from an art show

Turner had the knack of painting as he wished.
Yes, he's had the knack of painting like Rafaelo Santi -
far away serene horizons with promising serene skies.
Yes, he's had the knack of painting like the little Dutchmen -
land, water, and the sunny oddities.

Yes, he's had the knack of painting castles
amidst debris and delicious plants, like Watteaux.
And yet remain the very Joseph Turner...

You will say that everyone can paint
since someone has managed it before.
This is not as simple as it seems,
because Turner could paint like the
impressionists before they were even born.

Turner could paint like Matisse,
and like us. This, of course,
is not a great honor
but it's hard to explain.

As if not he but something else required
him to paint that way or otherwise.
As if we paint the light of history,
while he paints the history of light...
And that is why he doesn't care about our reasons.
I have no idea about his opinion politics.
He has painted the Battle at Waterloo
many times, but one can't say
if that is a victory or a defeat.

In the end, he painted his favorite
sea storms. He painted his favorite
mists, and suddenly - the skeleton
of death, galloping atop a pale horse!...

        * * *

The paintings that most resemble
the present day ones are the
frantic studies and sketches
for future painting.

There is something sketchy about
our time as well. We have been sketched
on the paper of transition.

Our fate looks more like the preparation
for a fate, like an attempt...
We are being erased.
They scrape us clean with the knife.
And they start us anew.
The artist fails to reach his ideal.
And it's a great deal to endure!
But we will endure because
our blood still holds the basic color
on time's palette. And our tears are
the sole link. But will perfection
triumph all the same? Will that dreamed-of
composition be completed?
And who will enjoy its harmony?
Who will be contemplating us?
When we are just a cloud of dust
behind death racing on a pale horse.

1984

or Homage to the Great French Revolution

Night's greatcoat is large for us - It will
cover us both and still trail on the ground.
It will cover our tracks and just
our words will remain to wander about
and find each other sometimes.

It so happens I've bid farewell to arms,
yet in such a way that God will remember me.
But I have never been in any military hospital.

By the quiet, poisonous Don
I have rolled, slain by
a Cossack girl's eyelashes.
But I have never been
in any military hospital.

Among stars and sand and plague
with the dreadful artist Gros
I have contemplated the visit
of the great mirages.
But I have never...
Yet, yesterday
we were in the military infirmary.
Covered by the greatcoat -
like a puddle among puddles
of clotted and blood yet to be shed.
Among piles of pus-stained bandages
and gauze and heavy metal chains
we lay embraced, no, clung to one another.
You had stopped my fatal wound with a kiss
and my soul was flowing out not into chaos
and the pitch dark but into you, my light abyss.

At the bottom. That's where I wished to hide myself.
We were trembling, both of us. While around us
the blind, the amputated, the drugged, the doomed
were screaming, were vomiting death screams:
"Allons enfants! Allons enfants!"
"Égalité!" "Fraternité!"

The sailor with the amputated legs
broke into a song with his last inspiration:
"Rot Front!" - the armless raised his arms.
"Avanti popolo!" "¡No Pasarán!"
"Za Stalina, za Rodinu!"
"Za Stalina! ..." - the punitive squad was shouting,
as well as those - the others, the half buried
in the thirty million graves ones.
"¡Patria o muerte!"
"¡Venceremos!"

And maybe I am also already blind.
And that's why I am caressing you like mad.
I read you like Braille: "Forgive me!"
And you whisper: "Not that! Say that other thing!
Say it to me again!" And I shout, "I love you!"
like someone just convicted, the way
one cries out his last words.

Don't worry, they won't hear us
in the twentieth-century military
infirmary among all these screams,
moans, curses, wheezes, and residual silence.

When the grave diggers come for me
tomorrow morning say you've already burned me.
Say that's what I wanted - to be burned separately.
Don't say that you mean your fire.
As for my name, it may stay with the others
in the common grave. But even that's too much.
Better claim until the end that I have never
been in any military hospital.

1989

To Radoy Rallin

The Field Marshal went by.
He didn't like the town.
The tanks went by.
The trucks went by.
And only a bumpy road remained.
And a hundred injured horses.

A sentimental commander
had made a strange gesture -
he had given a team of horses
freedom and peace...
and this during wartime hunger.

These were not graceful circus actors
nor slender-legged steeplechase jumpers.
These were warhorses, made deaf by guns,
blind by fire, horses with spotless honor.

Decorated with monstrous wounds,
they grazed slowly in an orchard,
and drank long from the stone trough
their last sacrament before going
to Paradise.

No one shod them anymore. Only
the nightingales sang their evening praises.
Only one very old soldier was detailed to
take care of them and like them finish his life.
His entire family had been killed long before.
All of them were buried in his absence.
And now he buried the horses like a centaur.
He would fire once in the air
and make the sign of the cross.

There he is in front of the straw hut,
well-groomed, with all his medals and insignia,
having passed through all the bloody dramas
and having hidden all his pain beneath a simple pride.

We, the children, used to bring him cigarettes
and matches, which we'd swipe from our fathers and brothers.
But he would accept no presents, so we'd leave them
there beside him, on the grass.

He recognized our passion for riding,
our passion for the frightening.
our passion for what was forbidden...
And with a simple nod of his head,
he would point at the horses allotted to us.

The wounded horses would give us a gentle lick
while we climbed up barefoot by their manes.
And they would set forth heavily -
with a warlike gait, they - for the last time -
we - for the first time - happy.

We lived long, but we did not grow old
and they did not kill us. And now when I hear
that Shiva is dancing again,
I hear my heart howl distantly and quietly.
"Captain, it's useless to undergo any treatment!
Our flesh isn't even good for horse-sausages.
And if we survive this last battle till the end,
make your strange and dangerous gesture -
let us in to die in the garden before Paradise."

1989

Death is a mystery. A fear. But hardly an end.
Earth's cradle rocks me in the void.
And I hear the spheres - the crystal-clear signals -
I who did not flee Pompeii.

Before the excavations brought me forth
curled like an embryo, silent, petrified -
I simply withstood the brunt of the elements.
And the perishable clung to me.

I watched you running down the slope
toward boats and lifesaving lies.
Having robbed the temples, you prayed
your sin was blamed on someone else.

Men. Beasts... Everything vanished.
How beautiful Pompeii the waste was!
A few blades of grass stayed with me.
And glory crept up slowly like a villain.

God was replaced. They studied the Volcano.
The corrupt city has become a museum.
And only I remained here with myself,
I who did not flee Pompeii.

1994

Death arrived at Christmas -
half past two at night.
With a howl from the beyond
my dog, already marked by fate, greeted her.
I ran in, barefoot and sleepy, and I saw -
there they stood - black - He and She,
two darknesses with shining teeth.
Thirteen years earlier -
a red ribbon round his neck,
eyes barely open - the beast Fidelity
licked me as if making a vow.
In vain we named him Gaius
(not Caesar like every second dog.)
No one has managed to rebaptize his fate
even after a Regeneration Process.

We broke him of the habit of pissing in my shoes.
Generously we accustomed him to sharing our food.
(According to the Dominicans' rule -
dog must have what a master has!)

As it turned out, we had been eating poison
for so long! My Gaius had eaten up my dinner.
In vain we prayed - Forgive him, Death!
Because he knew what he was doing.
His legs died first
and down he fell.
He looked at me with his enormous
speaking eyes:
"Don't go away! Watch me to the end!..". -
And growled terribly. And bit again into
the darkness. By now he looked like
a heart that had been taken out
and was still pounding on the floor.

I sat beside him holding
his dying snout. The foam grew
cold and he stopped shivering.
Then it was time to open the door
to the balcony as the poet wished.

At nine the fog is thinning out.
The woodpecker is knocking on the
rotting poplar as if knocking up a coffin.

Gaius is lying wrapped up
in the kitchen table oil-cloth.
As if taken down from the cross.
Pieta! I and the woman artist are awkwardly
digging a grave. In this crooked world
we've hardly found a proper spade.
The ground is cracking up with roots.
I find a rusty key in the deep earth
and fling it upwards to unlock the heavens.
While the dog and Fidelity by a last,
great effort we thrust in this mud-caked
keyhole of the nothingness.

Out from the neighbors' houses,
out through hand-knitted curtains peek
the eyes of vigilance. Information shall
be sent that suspicious persons
are hiding a corpse or a treasure.
They'll dig it up. Damn! Let them! -
Since this is the fate of all pharaohs,
Caesars, leaders and knights of faithfulness...

Sleet is falling. Frozen tears
from the angels of dogs. And that it may
pile up and cover the grave
masked with branches like a wolf-pit.
I start philosophizing:
The wolf is the dog of the gods.
The wolf is a dog, true to its dead master.
Or maybe man is a god with a dead dog.

The holiday, with its radiant Christmas trees,
is over with its presents, its crafty forgiveness.
But even on Christmas Eve there comes an hour when
loners walk dogs under the undecorated branches.
Forgotten people give memories.
Oppressed people give Man
freedom from the global state.

And I am walking through the friendship grave-yard.
Walking only a dog's soul. It runs round excitedly.
It sniffs at the bushes. But there's no way
it can leave its sign. It runs back to me but it can't
lick me. And I don't know how to caress it...

An evening demonstration's coming from the square.
It's heading to the Television building and it's chanting:
"Down with the government!"
"Down with the communists!"
"Death to the poets who write about dogs' souls!"
Death! Death! Death!
Res, non verba!

1994

The moon is an angel with a bright light sent
To surprise me once before I die
With the real aspect of things.
It holds the light steady and makes no comment.

       W. Meredith

I.
Here come the days without nights.
Here come the nights without days.
The days that are deemed...
Non-existent.
The nights about which...
You had better not talk.
Instead,
you must hide them,
watch them secretly, from within your soul.
They never appear on memorial plaques.
They are like fugitives from some
non-human region,
natural cycles unknown...
They are not listed on any calendar. With the exception,
perhaps, of one: the moonless calendar.

II.
I name it,
Though I do not christen it.
So be it then.
May it find its own god.
But, the days... Why can they
neither relent,
nor forgive?

III.
Not a single non-migrating bird remains.
Not a single evergreen plant.
In the hail of acid rain, falling leaves
expose the fact:
there is no providence.

IV.
And when all collapsed, and sane men fled,
barrenness reigned in the land,
leaving me alone with a childhood dream,
and a band of lunatics.

V.
I had not seen them before.
I knew not who they were.
Yet... they would not leave me.
They kept returning.
And, in a glorious eclipse of meaning,
we entered the deluded forest together.

VI.
They were dark, mysterious, wretched.
Yet, unwittingly, they helped me.
In costumes and manners of other times,
they paced excitedly to and fro.
Passersby - handsome foxes - kept out of our way.
It seems that, of all extinct races, only one has survived:
the race of the passers-by.

VII.
Actually, I wanted to escape.
But where to?
Then I thought of the poet from remotest Lima:
Disgusted with laws and conventions,
(and not having partaken of pisco),
he begged
of his own free will
to be locked
in an asylum for dangerous lunatics,
that he might think, speak, and write as he wanted.

VIII.
My companions listened, disapproving.
No! They did not care for that poet's way of thinking.
They'd tried living in the "free will" of a mental asylum.

A romantic beginning,
until one realized that the head of the clinic -
sovereign of the ailing world - was essentially a madman

IX.
It is discomfiting
to suddenly discover that fact
when he is grasping one's future
with one mad hand,
and, with the other, the key to secrets;
a key which locks in,
and never lets out.

X.
Why do we fight?
A famous female philosopher
tried in vain to enlighten me at "La Coupole"-
Art is schizophrenia!
Power is paranoia!
One may not even shout:
O Lord, I am not worthy.

XI.
That moonless page conceals the heart,
as once, in wartime,
women blanketed windows.
Viewed from outside, no one is there -
Yet, inside, one continues to live.
Within that dark and sheltered space
one's blind stars
may return, dazed but hand in hand.
For, if one rules - one takes the blows.

XII.
Lightning strikes. The air is heavy with ozone.
Liberty herself
chose me to serve as tool.
The theater of eternity prepares for a new -
and quite unknown season.

1996

The sapphire - of fiery, blue, or golden hue -
is the gemstone of creativity.

Sapphire House is situated
in New London, at 33 Granite Street.

For long years it was called
The Armstrong House.
Who was he?
A merchant
of boat sails, perhaps?
They no longer remember.
But the clouds are knit of his fibers.

The house is majestic, three-story.
Here wood plays the role of marble.
The ionic columns make the entrance
seem piously reverent.
But the rear walls more closely resemble
the shaggy coat of a forest magician.

People enter and exit,
play their parts and disappear.
There is only one permanent resident:
the ghost of the house,
named Ruth.

She throws cutlery.
Shifts furniture.
Gulps French wine. And makes
indecent appearances to sleeping boys.

People seem to dislike Ruth.
They fear her. They ask themselves -
How many centuries has that child lived?
What does she want...

I will stay here for a time
and then I, too, will disappear.
A pale globe shines in the sky. I can see
a halo - the radiance
that used to predict a change in the weather.
And in that lunar
globe
floats the heart of a dead god, preserved in spirits...

Ruth,
we know each other well.
You are that ironic force,
which forever rearranges
the things inside us,
and us inside the things.

Ruth,
Shift our furnishings again!
Shuffle these words for me!
Shuffle the images of the world
and deal them once again!
Perhaps this time I will be dealt
the wish-card I have so long sought,
with that sightless child in mind...
I delve into the sapphire night.
Stars rain. And I am close to God.

1996

Once I reproached my son
because he did not know
where to buy bread.
And now...
he is selling bread
in America.
In Washington.
In his daytime routine
he teaches at the university.
At night he writes poetry.
But on Saturdays and Sundays
he sells bread on the
corner of Nebraska and Connecticut.

The fields of Bulgaria are empty.
Those women of the earth who used to
reap the crops to feed the generations,
are fading away like the notes of a dying song.
Politicians set up their melodrama:
"Who filched the wheat of the motherland?!"
But what lies between bread and man remains
hidden behind the several names,
different in taste and different in price.

My son sells bread for sandwiches,
rosemary buns, olive rolls,
"Zaatar" loaves, Spanish sesame "Semolina,"
walnut bread, wheat bread, sprinkled with raisins,
Italian "Pane Bello."
"Palladin," kneaded with olive oil, with yeast and milk,
corn bread, pumpkin-seed bread,
Turkish bread, bread made of clouds...
Only Bulgarian bread is not available,
nor the leftover bread from yesterday!

"Some bread remains unsold
every day," my son says.
"We are given a loaf for dinner.
The rest is wrapped in plastic bags
and dumped..."
Weariness weighs on my son.
The bread has handed him an American dream
(And this, too, means The American Dream)!
Oh God, don't you hear? My son is praying for something!
Danger encircles him like an aura.
Give me the answer, Lord, to one single prayer -
to one last wish,
then do, please, whatever my son asks of you.
And sure, you might as well adopt him!

In Sofia
the shades of old women
scour the dark.
Ransacking the rubbish bins they collect bread.
Pointing at one of them, a teacher
of history and Bulgarian language, they say:

"Don't jump to conclusions, take it easy!
She's not taking the bread for herself. She feeds
stray dogs and birds."
And my words too are food for dogs
and birds.

Oh God!
Why am I alive?
Why do I wander alone in the Rhodopes?
Why do I gaze down abandoned wells?
Why do I dig into caves where people lie?
And pass the night in sacred places, renounced by you?

I am seeking the way
to the last magician's hideout,
he who forgot to die
but has not forgotten the secret of bread.
Not today's bread, which is for sale,
not yesterday's bread which has been dumped...
I must know the secret of tomorrow's bread.
The bread we kiss in awe.
The bread that takes our children by the hand
and leads them all back home.

1999

For Toma Markov

I know it is a dream.
I know that now
I should move
my hand. Drive it away. And take
a tranquilizer... No,

I can't.

Instead of me,
the reading lamp begins to move...
It takes a different shape,
becomes a starship,
and the little men
get off to take me
as if I were their tranquilizer.

Of course, not the entire me.
My goal,
my axis,
my restless pursuit of an end for itself -
they don't need such things.

They come to wrench from my soul
just one presumptive kernel.
A little ampoule, hidden
behind the wrapping of a glossy consciousness.
But under it...
something mysterious happens.
The little men flee terrified.
But the ship has gone.
I hear a lapping sound... Oh, God!

The cat is drinking from my glass of water.

Thanks, Savior!
Thanks!
Now
my hand will move.
The phantasms will die of fright. And I,
for the lack of a tranquilizer,
will have to gulp down a part of myself...

"You can have some water as well," the cat says.
"For I am only a memory
of your former cat Simmo."
In case you don't believe it,
in case you doubt,
remember Antoine,
remember Lavoisier.

Remember how he was examining water
and instead of a goldfish, he caught
the law, according to which
nothing is created or lost
but only changes its nature...
Then remember the guillotine, where
Lavoisier himself
lost his head.
Adieu, mon cher! Adieu!
Your mother said you shouldn't be afraid.
You won't die in a foreign land.
Beware of water and of fame.
In the present horrid times of kind-betrayers,
against the laws -
create!

2001

For Alexander Taylor

Listening to poems in a foreign language -
this indeed seems like
paranormal phenomena,
contacts with nonexistence,
painting a landscape
beyond the mist, ready to tell you:
"Oh, it's not this!
Not this, not this at all!.."

In my neighborhood there is a pipe,
which sings gutter-like
prophecies to the wind.
No clattering of tin. No whistling.
But music.
A melody.
A public prayer.
I have tried to go out in the dead of night to look for it,
to make out the magic.
But it falls silent instantly.
"Don't be afraid!"
I say to it...
I don't care
what follies you spread
but how you do it...
For instance, Lazlo Nod,
Whenever God blessed him with good humor
and illimitable alcohol,
used to translate Bulgarian folk songs.
"Dilmano-Dilbero," et cetera,
meant to him:
"A falcon perched on my shoulder."
Since he was lame,
he had to fly
rather than sow.

A horse had kicked him
in his childhood years
and the older ones were afraid to visit.
Thus he became a big child.
Then - a huge child.
Then - an old child.
I don't remember what language we spoke in
so long with Lazi. Then
the winged horse came to take him back.
Look, yesterday Manuel Muños Hidalgo came.
And the table, redeemed forever,
was filled with Castillian exclamations.
Only the glasses gazed with empty looks
when Manolo said:
"I've come to warn you
that the mold they used for us is broken.
They won't be making the likes of us
anymore."

You must talk with things
in their own fragile tongue. Don't fancy
that they understand yours.
If you find a way, show them
that you test them, the way one tastes
desire or boredom,
or the way one tests a student. Then all
the children will start prompting,
signaling, moving their lips.
And if you grasp one single sign,
you already have a significant captive -
a "Tongue," as they used to say on the front-lines -
a trace of truth resembling
a mark of wing upon the sky,
Begin right now! But don't forget:
only the lie is verisimilar.
So now, having learnt a lesson from my dog,
I bite my leash myself.
This means that I want to go out.
And to think that I am leading my own self myself.
I want to go out of these wicked words,
robbed by politicians,
slobbered over by poets,
stinking of calumny.
I want to go out of them.
And to love you speechlessly.
And to run across that field.
To leap over the magnetic lines.
To follow the scent of the poles
and to contemplate
the ants dragging semantic seeds.
People don't like the singing insects.
People like the fabulous ants.
And they give me the creeps because
the World is a semantic sign
that cannot be pronounced.

2003

I
I have found a house,
older than the universe.
And master-builders turned up right away.
Well, you've bought,
quite a white elephant there,
they said.
Actually, old age is irremediable.
Better to pull it down
and make
something entirely new
out of the material,
as the last of the leaders used to say.
But you don't seem convinced,
so make your repairs.

I said: "I'll think about it."

II
All night long my lantern burns.
I can think in the dark just as well.
But I take delight in seeing
how the sunset nestles into me,
and how in the morning
it tiptoes away.
And I pretend that I don't hear.

III
The room looks like a lantern
and I,
perhaps,
like a wick burning low.
Ashes of light.
Nocturnal creatures bat against
my glass walls.
Enormous moths with crimson eyes
on their wings keep fluttering about.
You are like us, they say to me,
only you have wings on your eyes.

IV
And in the morning, the birds wake me up.
Their little beaks are knocking,
announcing a tranquil destiny.
In fact, they breakfast on the moths
stuck on the window-panes.
Then they tell me:
Beware of the master-builders!
They are keen on making repairs
because there is a legend:
in the foundations of this house
is hidden the treasure
of the dead caravan.

V
What demon has started the rumor
that in the foundations of this world
there is a treasure
of virgin happiness?

I don't mean sphinxes
sacred chalices,
talking tablets
and alchemic witchcraft...
Yet, the caravan of time
is loaded with secrets,
isn't it?

VI
Since I am too shy to beg,
I adjure:
Be wary of
the master-builders
who offer
to repair our world.

2005

To Celia and Jack

1.
The ninth wave has cast me up
upon the isle of Ackel.
Around me the rocks are smoldering
like bits of cinder
fallen from the northern lights.
Magic streams
flow down from the nothingness
and merge together.
And the waterfalls of Dookinella
bark now and then like dogs
made up by Heinrich Böll.
Of course, I think about
the parting. And "I drink
to keep my soul and body
separate,"
as Oscar Wilde said.

Otherwise,
everything is
simple and lonely.
And the clouds keep quiet.
As if
God is writing His memoirs.
A repentant devil whets His lightning
and I slowly turn into an island.
According to the bell that is impossible
but in Connemara they sing a song,
according to which
along the road northwestwards
slow things happen.

2.
The strangely humble cottage
of the Nobel laureate,
after his death was turned into
a home for strangers,
for poor wretches writing memoirs
and drinking "Paddy."
All night long the rain returns
to knock at the windows
like a drunkard.

I conceal the fact that I feel cold.
But Jack Harte, the Ambassador of birds,
goes out and returns with a pail of peat.
The fireplace bursts into flames
with the smell of malt.

They say claustrophobia
is a disease of poets.
It catches me
when I think about the German
locked up in himself.
Then I start to feel pressed for room
within myself.
The adjacent fence is made of barbed wire
that in its turn is wrapped in thick undergrowth
with crimson blossoms
called Christ's tears...
Yet, in spite of that,
or maybe just because of that,
everything has managed to escape,
everything that
had any meaning.

Now I feel so bookish,
that I am writing on my own self -
unrepentant and
with unsharpened lightning flashes.

3.
I return to Dublin
like a bolt out of the blue.
What, damn it, have you been doing up there?!

Dublin's chimneys
are arranged
like mouth organs,
like Latin libraries
or Russian Katyushas.
Or maybe they are combs
for combing rain clouds.
But they don't suspect it
and they imagine
that they are mystic crowns.
"Lord!" they say, "What a small world,
and what a large number of rulers we got to be!"

And it seems they are right.

If a star falls down,
it serves it right.
If a ruler falls down,
what a laughter will follow.
But if a chimney falls! -
It is an omen
for the entire universe,
which is already choked with smoke.
And everyone rushes forward
to lift the chimney up again -
the fire's crown,
the raven's rostrum.
And let God lift His nose
from the blurred screen.
Let Him turn off the computer
and conclude:
There is a time for everything.
A time for memories.
And a time to wear a nightcap.
And a murmur follows:

Goodnight, light.
Bye-bye, God!

2005

Almost like Sisyphus
and quite like myself,
I heave the stone a little.
Round as a cloud.
Dark as thunder.
Yet what a silence reigns!
Beneath the stone sleeping Evil lies,
a coiled centipede -
a black galaxy with head laid
on a pillow of a martenitsa...
If someone's watching me,
he must be puzzled.
I have to figure out
something comprehensible,
so that the dwarf pats me on the shoulder,
"Good!
You are one of us again..."

I heave the stone
to hide time under it -
the time I stole.
"Why, where can one
steal time?"
Of course I answer you:
From one's self.
Only from one's self.
Most easily, from one's own sleep.
And hardest of all - from one's own work.
"And why steal?...
And from yourself at that...
And time at that!"
To give Love
something purely mine.
"And she? What did she say?"
She told me that she couldn't possibly accept
a gift so dear.
She wouldn't like to feel
obliged... To be bound...
That sort of thing.

I used to fix the price of time
according to the pain of parting.
"Time is money" -
to me that was merely
a proverb,
spread by
proverbial Franklin.
However, when I found out
that everyone thinks so,
when I saw
my present - a withered
posy, left
without water,
I made up my mind to bring
time back, where
it had been - in me. Then
the stolen time smiled at me:
"Everything comes back, my boy:
the departed swallow,
the prodigal son,
the stolen horse,
the lost hope...
Everything comes back, my boy,
only time,
only time
never returns!
And look
the cunning metal device
walks across the desert Mars.
It's seeking water.
I am hardly so thirsty.
But I too
am seeking something.
I'm looking for a proper place.
And I look with one of my eyes
at what that one, the metal one is doing.
Everything there is stone.
Why doesn't it think
of lifting up one too?
And what will happen
if a martenitsa flares up again
under it.
You wonder what?
I'll tell myself:
This is a proper place
to close my eyes.

2005

We've agreed with the sunset
that we won't look into each other's eyes
while time keeps flowing
and we are part of that same flight.

The woman artist and I have agreed
that she'll go deaf
and I'll go blind.
Thus
maybe at last,
both of us will be doing the same thing.
As in love axioms,
which are not susceptible of proof
but are taken on trust.
This is why I kiss you, approaching sky.
And you, young new horizons,
pale from perspective.

I, too, used to be annoyed
when my mother would draw me close
and kiss me in front of other people,
feeling that she was losing me.

Youth doesn't value such feelings,
unfailing health,
unconquered truth.
Youth prefers
fables and
love.

And look, in rosy haze
the port of the well-invented Ephes
is empty.
The sailors are in the brothel.
Merchants are trying to outwit
each other in the marketplace.
And politicians are squabbling
after the communal midnight feast.
But the swallows are flying lower and lower,
which portends storm,
broken boughs,
falling nests and universes.
From Ephes to the very Alexandria
a-a-a...an apple.
The apple of discord.

Old man, what are you babbling about?
How is it that you have eyes?
Why did Basil II forgive you?
Precisely you?

Look, the mountain
carries skies, it is of use.
Why does it have no eyes,
while you still have them?

I try to argue
that the mountain has lakes.

How original!
Would you like us to turn your eyes into lakes,
from which bitter brooks will flow?
And ask you then:
What do you see? Ah?
I see.

I see the desert,
the global one and promised.
But what are the little children,
the Israeli ones, God's elect, doing there?

We are building up a wall without a temple,
an endless wall is what we're building up,
a new wailing wall.

Eyes, don't say good-bye
to this visible world
and this non-Euclidean space!
For I feel like a manuscript
hidden in the cracks
between the stones of the wall.
Eyes, don't say good-bye!
For I have already been written down
but not yet read.

2005

Last night it rained gold.
It still smells of God.

Autumn's bedding,
tumbled by passions, lies deserted.

The women look at one another, glowing.
But not knowing which one is Danaë.

2009

To my son

I'm driving slowly
along the night road.
Not because I don't know it.
On the contrary,
I remember it's perilous turns.
I'm driving slowly
because my soul likes dangers,
but it doesn't like turns.

Slowly, the headlights
shove through big,
winged trees -
guardian angels,
bending over me.
And suddenly they
or someone else,
afraid that I may fall asleep,
turn on some music.
Jericho trumpets echo.
They tear down my walls.
How do they know that I like
"Hotel California?"
But can I hire a room in a song?
It is too late to ask
a bell gone silent,
a candle extinguished.
The guitars have already
confessed their sins.
The car has stopped by force of habit
at the fountain I used to call ours.
The moon horse is
drinking water
from the stone trough.

The universe smells of pine and resin -
a drug for ghosts and witches.
It is dangerous to search for the meaning
of this world: bodily passions,
a temple of a soul undone.
That yellow light in the distance
is the entrance to a merry nursing home.
There they make final love,
call one another best friends,
and drink 1935 vintage wine.

I drink strong water
from my fountain
and splash my face to be sure
it hasn't run away by chance.
No Beast, no She, no Captain
can forbid me. This maze is mine.
It has many exits, but
has no entrance anymore.

2013