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| From the book Gates. Windows. Arches | | (1979–1983) |  |
| In the Liquor Store | | to V. Kotov | A father weathered by hangovers,
jangled coins and empty bottles.
The other drunkards were noisy
and reeked with tobacco’s smell of death.
The cellar was like a gorge
from which the sky looked like glass.
In a purple stroller a child
in a red rash,
sat there like a straw-man of suffering,
flowing through other
meaningless waters…
Things floated without reaching the bottom
of molten and weakened eyes.
And there, on the bottom, a tuba blared,
the wind howled. He was
the ailing King,
the owner of the building,
where once every millennium or less often,
to the otherworldly music’s jangling,
following the blasphemous Spear,
the Cup of pain is carried in.
Where flesh, like reason, suffers.
Why, why? – the tuba calls
from his half-closed eyes –
why, as long as death continues to lap
living blood? why does injustice
coil around my heart like a python?
I’m not Hercules, I’m like a dream myself.
I soar up, from under the heel,
over the sores of the Holy Land,
I coil as though I were mad thorns,
when, with silent steps,
to the circling music,
following the blasphemous Spear,
the Cup of pain is carried in –
and perishing, we drink our heart,
as if it were vinegar!
Why, why! – the tube calls –
is my life, like his liver, being ripped apart?
for how long am I to burn inside the mountain?
for how long will death howl,
and the earth wheeze in sparks,
flying up golden, from the blood?
and all that was will be again…
| | Slava I. Yastremski and Michel Naydan | |
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| | | |  | | In the Liquor Store |
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