Four Pieces

Gennady Aygi

Silence

1

since the time i remember anything
i know
by the pain in my eyes
where and with what blows
our silence is enlightened
and recollections suffice
here where awakenings clamor

2

and those who from that time began to see the lord's light
came for the first time to discriminate
black from white
and rapt in wonderment hastened to communicate
so this is—white
and this black

3

so burst
into visions other distinctions
and in howls as by the years
trampled in me I search out
for connections like a filament
advancing covered by mockery
as though with burdock burrs
somewhere in the ravine
alone
(oh how it was
once upon a time
lonely and clear
no one but me and the field
an entire world)

1955—1956





Returning to Baudelaire

a smouldering
(from the paper
into the world)—

the master
as though
somewhere
of apparentness:

a face
like God's—in the ashes—grasped:

of the not-"I" of the mind
crackling—with a flame! . . . —

into the countenance of this wind
the bright light of unpeopledness

1967





To Joan Miró: Vowels' Bubbles


and so here behind the drawn Yellow
I sleep and "sleep feet—I say—and sleep arms"
and vowels I once and E and O and once again I
float shining enveloped in the cores of bubbles
of golden spit—from a whispering mouth!—
and flying through Yellow they leave holes
and its cold and I awake

1969





To Max Ernst: A Twin-Rose

punched through—not as into sunlight
but into the light-of-the-Idea
punched through—and ensconced
a twin-rose: as though in the room

1969



translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale