TCHAIKOVSKY. ALBUM OP.72

POEMS

I. Impromptu

When times are meeting with each other,

There is a special measure of the air,

It is a sediment, transparent mica,

The chimera which has shown its jaw.

Duration doesn't apply to it, it's always with you,

As a vital line of a palm.

Inside it, all fine moments

Rise in layers, stand as a wall, hardened to pain. And eternal,

Every minute there are those, who are alive, and those,

Who're dead and will ever die of course, - 

At the same time existing in vanity

Of the uncountable worlds, connecting everything:

Histories, Eras, Enlightenments

In one substance, in a wide strip

Of a simple everyday concern.

Concern being, why and how

Events happen and lives

Come true as a dancing step,

Assigned on a continuous funeral feast,

Which is destiny,

Slightly slightly opening our eyelashes

And giving sight sometimes

Some moments prior to the border.

For this instant I will give voices,

Calling to go to the beginning

Of everyone and everything, having left

Gray-haired poles behind my back. And, tired,

For this instance I'll give my voice,

Which is singing gradually in nature's sounding 

And, swinging an illusive  head,

I'll disappear in a cold universe.

II. Cradle Song

Fall asleep and forget of all things on Earth

Let branches embrace you with waves

Let rivers flare with live flowers,

Merging in a haze.

III. Tender Reproaches

There is no way to love

The languorous talk over life.

Its shackles inviolable,

As a goddess’ glare, cautiously

(Instead of happiness, probably)

Will alter human’s glare.

IV. Character Dance

Hearing the surf of

Waters,

Beating in steel

Hull

You can’t go through

Wade

Not losing a

Year.

Eye can not

Discern

That which calls

In a long day’s

Hour

Just once.

V. Meditation

You’re watching people and you see

Their eyes, black and blue,

The rustling of their wrinkles, charm

Of their sleek cheek-bones, heavy air

In their hair, a care

In their movements

And, slow in them,

Death’s movement.

VI. Mazurka for Dancing

Lovely movement of thoughts

Is a keen shaft of a spear.

It will entertain an imagination

With inexcusable ease.

VII. Concert Polonaise

Oh, prophetic syllables of words!

How their viscosity is captivating!

Their fleeting melodiousness

Is merging hundreds of voices.

And perspectives of the cities

Are hurrying to open promptly,

Where ray of serene thought to glimmer

In a heap of minds.

VIII. Dialogue

Don't speak, but think of me –

Let silence gild the thought.

Faces on ancient sculptures

For centuries talk out of

Names and fluctuations of air forms –

Times’ mediators and guardsmen.

The sounding syllable is doomed to thaw

Behind backs of ingenuous brethren,

But your thought is as a sleeping grain,

Perceptible to only fixed eye,

To which, in spite of destiny and fate,

Human’s oblivion isn't given.

IX. A bit of Schumann

I don't know vanity, though infinity

Of a hundred thousand thoughts do warm my mind.

I don't know emptiness, but a stream of air

Flies through the threshold of the window.

I don't know time, but I do feel it -

Air emptiness’ brilliant grain.

X. Scherzo-Fantasy

Exhausted with the horror of the end of not eternal life

And blinded by the light of own eyes. Awoken,

Put into ignorance while expecting

Those signs that called presages, and crushed

With greatness of the nature.

Thank you goodness!

XI. Waltz-bagatelle

Through long shadow of lamps,

Under warm light of their fires,

Over silhouettes of people,

As a whisper of joyful speeches

Snow flickers.

Flickers, slowly flying,

Whistling by a silky blizzard,

Joking on a silence of hills,

Spinning eternal patterns

As the run of life.

As a run, captivatingly simple,

As a ray of a golden comet,

As a wild wind of time,

As a sign of that shrillness,

Which has been forever.

XII. Prankish Girl

I am observing an eye’s pupil,

Which starts expanding,

Rushing about in the darkness, as a butterfly,

And I am catching it with a net.

As if in that, in you

I look for a pupil of torpor

In rare minutes of languor,

Belonging to myself.

XIII. Rustic Echo

Behind the head turn - is deception. But

Even if that was strange,

In a foggy imagination

Remember - it’s a dream.

You won't notice that, exclaiming

In confusion when, flickering,

Coastal tight water

Will touch crowns’ tops.

XIV. Elegiac Song

I love you with the same fidelity,

With which I sing the note “do” anytime,

Having pulled it in mind as a string, as an arrow. As inoculation

Having it since childhood, in spite of nature

And of seductive human breed.

I love you with the same force with which comes the evening –

Moves with the sky, rustles with branches, shivers winds

And attracts with supernatural gifts

In the night playing soccer by the moon

And tempting time behind your shoulders.

I love you with the same passion, with which voice stupefies with its timbre.

… And, infinite, happens the fairy tale

Of whistling, as under runners,

Air – speckled by your pointer

And caress.

XV. A bit of Chopin

...And he lived as in game, crackling a symbolic cane

Predicting good luck to all and struggling with wasteful malice

From a rainy love to somewhere lost hope

Expelling from himself the last belief of ignoramus

He again and again flew over the mysterious cuckoo’s house

Being surprised with a crystal jingle and a call of the little coin

And, extracting years from days, gazed around, fatigue

When would find again, that got back to beginning.

XVI. Quintuple Waltz

Quintuple waltz is a mask,

But who’s its hero?

If this Tiresias is tender,

He rules sway of your destiny.

He is laughing, he tells fortunes

And with a wizard smile

He carelessly scatters

Lives of every blind man.

XVII. Distant past

As an unknown world, as mirage irretrievable and transparent

So is the distant past here, in the palm’s middle.

XVIII. Invitation for the dance. Trepak

Now – only dance, as only here

Lost measure of time remains –

As slowly burning sphere

Incinerated by the inner fire.

2010