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| Elena Fanailova [pic by Valerij Ledenev] |
from
Elena Fanailova’s The Russian Version, tr.
Genya Turovskaya & Stephanie Sandler, Ugly Duckling, 2009:
***
I
want to live like a snail, wrapped in gauze,
To
preserve this decrepit body,
Like
a Christmas tree ornament
Nestled
in a case of beaded glass,
Life
would lay off me,
Stop
quivering in the tiers of fiery air.
I
want to sleep in that soft velvet case,
Like
some forgotten trinket from the theater,
A
tiny bead or a lost glove.
I
will talk to you at night,
Shining
on the telephone in my dreams.
I
have grown cunning, quiet. I love to keep silent,
And
to guard the thin-walled, fragile things
I
save in cigarette papers.
Pyromania,
pyrotechnics, flash.
The
fire that turns all things to ash.
***
Better
this way: it’s you with nothing to hold on to,
Only
you
(in a taxicab, in darkness), only you.
Quick,
like poison running through water, distorting out of tenderness
The
undefined features of a face.
O,
don’t wait in the thicket above my soul or behind my back,
Order
up some oblivion, some sleepwalking paradise.
I’ll
launch a little ship and send gold fish through my veins
In
search of sweet daydreams, of wind-up heavens, of the
seven seas.
Like
it or not, my heart will stay in one piece.
Vodka
shines its dry light like a gypsy.
How
blinding it all is: the winter solstice,
These
unimaginable, inhuman words,
This
other fate, the triumph of verse.
A
Woman’s Jataka
[excerpt]
For
Aleksandr Anashevich,
author
of a text with this title
1
Yoko
Ono wrote in her diary:
His
i.d. cards are in my glove compartment
A
hand fixed on the trigger
My
finger paused in that round space
Together
we’ll still sing some karaoke
Let
it be
and similar immortal verses
A
Double will resound in his head
The
nations attack one another in war
I
will become his hangover syndrome, his drugstore,
In
a word, I must see that man
She
is a lady, a beauty and a yellow ape,
A
goddess without flaw.
A
performance artist and a young pioneer,
Like
Kulik today,
They
always close the little door behind him.
He’s
famed for that.
John
Lennon draws obscene little pictures
On
the back pages of sheet music,
Giving
no thought to battle,
To
a factory set up as a co-op,
He
doesn’t read Foreign
Lit,
Or
Woman in the
Dunes.
He
gets laid in his socks,
He’s
Mozart, he’s a child of nature
He’s
an arrogant plebe, a mangy stud,
A
young sparrow, a matchless playboy,
An
unknown hero, a real cowboy,
He
hasn’t a clue, who will serve him next
Afterwards,
quiet descends
After
the heavy spiked port-wine.
His
wife is a white fish,
A
fool with a belly that’s been cut open
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