About the Author
Books

POETRY  
PROSE
ESSAYS
INTERVIEW
From the book Kliazma and Yauza
From the book The Wild Rose  
From the book Tristan and Isolde
From the book Old Songs
From the book Gates. Windows. Arches
From the book Stanzas in the Manner of Alexander Pope
From the book Stellae and Inscriptions
From the book The Iambic Verses
The Chinese Travelogue
From An Unfinished Book
From the book The Evening Song
From the book Elegies
From the book The Beginning of a Book
From the book The Wild Rose
Legends and Fantasies
(1976 - 1978)
Portrait of the Artist in his Picrure
All the beauty when the heavens laugh,
and the sigh of the earth when the snow flows down:
all of this lies down together like straw,
and the blessed stable is wide open.

Let the angels dance on the roof
and kiss precious stones
and then run off to the top corner,
and from that top corner they run sparkling,
scattering silver twigs
and changing staffs as they run.

Let all this go off into the murk,
let it turn away its embarrassed face.

Below, like juniper bushes in the wind
children will embrace each other,
and at the sides of the picture the oxen, the oxen –
the constellations of the hard-working earth.
They lie like newborn calves:
they sense their invisible mother.

The shepherds though, the parents of children,
approach slowly, like countryfolk.

Their poor clothes are darkest dark,
and this darkness almost goes away from us
and so almost brings to us,
as if it were Lot walking away from Sodom...

But alongside the shepherds, turning aside
stands the artist. Sapienti sat.
Everything disappears like a hanging garden,
and he alone stands in the empty steppe.

His arms are folded on his throat
as though they were holding a gift in store,
but his eyes doubt that.
He loves himself more than we do.
He speaks like deaf and dumb light:

“You, my thought, you, clear Kithaira,
you, the vision of the rose of the world,
you, like a refrain, not the proper size
for my huge darkness: coming up to it
you repeat these outlines:
thus my face appears in the mirror
and what is there takes it to itself,
and donning a flat form on itself
pines in it like a bird under a handkerchief,
then throwing it off needs no one.

He, to whom you want to bring armfuls
of flowers and smiling things,
and bring tormented children
so that they could laugh like water
when they rock the full saucer
and lay everything down by his feet, and smile.

He is not Laban, and nobody shares the flocks with him.
Return to him all the crazed garden:
Sodom, transfigurated before the eyes
is in the coloured water, in the consolation of tears.
And everything will be a lie and nothing like a lie.
You bring the empty mirror.

There is a man, and he is like the living world,
bigger than the world – and no one called
him here. I stand like a howl.
He is what is always in the mirror.
He is I, thought up by you.
He stands like an image of salt
and does not follow others.

Without me
my gift lies in my own grave,
like a wailer at a funeral:
she somehow tears open the earth,
flings out nicknames, omens,
steps, manners, habits,
she digs up a fresh passage in the heavy clay...
and passes on
the heavy torch of the darkness
to the place where light goes like blood.

It’s spring
and the clear Kithaira,
and the archipelago is sailing with her,
and the sphere answers the early sphere
and the darkness is upturned by the first rose.

And I go on, poorer than others,
in dark clothes, darker than all,
with a sick smile, like sick flowers,
like the earth sighs when the snow flows down”.
Richard McKane
The Wild Rose
Second Legend
Sixth Legend
Seventh Legend. Death of Alexis the Roman Saint
Selva Selvaggia
Leavetaking
Now in warm gold, in broad bindings...
Preamble to the Song
Strange Journey
The Flight of the Prodigal Sun
Night Legend. The Nun’s Funeral
Candlemas Day
Names fly out of the magical horn...
Cat, Butterfly, Candle
Singing
Water: The Peasant Woman
Eight Octets
In The Mood of Leopardi
I carry two books, as I go I am leaving...
We shall walk slowly and listen attentively...
I often dream of death offering...
Legends about ascetics are similar...
I cannot make them stop their music...
Three Mirrors
Farewell Wind
Somewhere in the corner of a neglected illness...
Illness
Journey of the magi
Mountain Lullaby
Morning in The Garden
The Cat’s Look
Azarovka. A Suite of Landscapes
 Portrait of the Artist in his Picrure
Tenth Legend. Jacob
Eleventh Legend. Supper
Twelfth Legend. Sergey Radonezhsky
Magic Stone
A Faible
Dreamer
“I raise the radiance, like a fallen hand...
The Old Poet
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