Посвящаю с любовью моей семье: Аде и Зиновию (Жене) Кане, Брюсу Эсригу и Ариели
и с благодарностью – моим учителям: Вячеславу Лейкину, Стелле Вербицкой, Профессору Эллен Чансес, Крейгу Келлер, Мастеру Ченг Хсианг Ю, Сенсею Грегу О’Коннор, Роберту Фридману
и членам важных для меня сообществ: Миллбурнского клуба, Beth Hatikvah synagogue, the Aikido Centers of New Jersey, Madison Studio Yoga, the Arts by the People program.
Я признательна Брюсу Эсригу, который помог мне отредактировать англоязычные тексты, проявив при этом свойственные ему вдумчивость, остроумие, любовь к слову (а также пристрастие к точке с запятой).
Искренне благодарю Рашель Миневич, Эда Побужанского и Александра (Сашу) Казакова за полезные советы и ценные замечания.
Я рада, что Анастасия Шеперд стала моим партнёром в литературной игре, которую мы назвали «Странники в странном мире». Часть этой игры вошла в цикл The Age of discovery.
With love to my family: Ada and Zinovy Kane, Bruce Esrig and Ariel
With gratitude to my teachers:
Vyacheslav Leikin,
Stella Verbitskaya,
Professor Ellen Chances,
Craig Keller,
Master Cheng Hsiang Yu,
Sensei Greg O’Connor,
Robert Friedman,
to the communities of the Millburn Club, Beth Hatikvah synagogue, the Aikido Centers of New Jersey, Madison Studio Yoga, and the Arts by the People program.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Bruce Esrig for editing the English language texts. He brought to this task his penchant for deep thought, his playful sense of humor and his love of words and of semicolons.
I want to thank Rashel Minevich, Ed Pobuzhansky and Aleksandr (Sasha) Kazakov for insightful comments and valuable suggestions.
I am glad that Anastasya Shepherd is my co-creator of the literary game we called “Travelers in a strange world”. This game is great fun to play, and it inspired “The Age of discovery”.
Metamorphosis
English language poems
Metamorphosis
What I used to think of
As myself
Turned out to be
A chrysalis.
Now it has split open.
An old woman is slowly emerging.
She will wait patiently
For her crumpled rags to unfurl,
For the sun to harden them
Into wings.
Ripening
My little daughter wakes in tears:
She fancies that her bed is drawn
into a dimness which appears
to be the deep of all her fears
but which, in point of fact, is dawn.
Vladimir Nabokov
Not life or death,
Creation or its fall,
Not good or evil,
But the whole, the all —
This fruit of knowledge
Is still dim, still green.
The ripening of dawn
Remains unseen.
The soul does not yet trust
The sense of sight,
Still hides in terror
From the kindling light.
It’s here, though each glimpse of it is brief,
It’s here, the lambent glow of joy and grief.
The Age of discovery
1. Indra’s net
Am I reflections of the world or the mirrors reflecting it?
Anastasya Shepherd
One story of this world
Begins with “Let there be light”.
I do not think that punctuation
Had been invented
When these words were first recorded.
But judging from what follows,
An exclamation mark
Should cap that sentence.
But what about Indra’s net?
What are the words
That first emitted and still carry
The light that knits it into one great whole?
What punctuation should we use?
A question mark seems most fitting.
You and I, like everybody else,
Are both:
Jewels linked into a net
And reflections bouncing within a hall of mirrors.
But let us not get trapped.
We have the power to play it
Like a game, a dance,
A laugh-inducing tickle.
2. Voyagers
Я список кораблей прочёл до середины
Осип Мадельштам
…The list Of soaring ships I’ve read up to the middle.
Osip Mandelstam (translated by Alex Sitnitsky)
Wake up! Wake up!
There is a porthole, a port, a portal,
A momentary gap
Right here,
Where the past
Meets with the future.
A dawn breeze is rising.
You can glimpse the swaying masts,
The white sails being hoisted.
You can hear the seagulls laughing,
The lines groaning, singing,
Taut with force
Ready to propel the ship.
Let us arise and cross the threshold,
Let us run
To where the land and the water
Meet.
It is for us to name the vessel,
To unfurl the flag,
To set course
Across an uncharted sea.
3. Exploration
It's a strange world,
made of echoing emptiness
pulling itself together…
Anastasya Shepherd
To blossom into being
A new world needs travelers.
Now we are here,
Calling out to each other:
“Look!”, “Did you hear that?”,
“This feels just like…”
“Watch out!”, “Where does this…”,
“Well done!” “What if?”
Now we are here,
Exploring with all our senses:
Humor, awe, dread, irony, appreciation, wonder.
When we gaze up
Celestial bodies
Flare into existence,
Dance with each other.
Flocks wing across the sky,
Swarms billow over bogs,
The air comes alive
With singing, buzzing, courting, hunting, pollinating.
Each step we take tells us
What is underneath our feet:
Grass, ice, rock,
A swaying bridge above the mist
That rises from the chasm
To cling to our ankles.
I do not know how far
We are destined to travel.
But I trust this world
To keep unfolding space and time
For our journey of exploration,
For as long as we are here.
4. Siren song
…you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them.
Homer (translated by Samuel Butler)
Sirens have two kinds of songs
To lure those who come near them,
To bind the minds of travelers
With snares of longing.
Songs of adventure and of glory,
Of giving names
To new lands, to new creatures.
These songs promise freedom
From the tedium
Of familiar words,
From the confines
Of the cradle, the field, the hearth,
From the gray stones of the graveyard,
From the moss that steals over the names
Of a long line of ancestors.
Songs of warmth,
Of embracing arms and sheltering walls.
These songs promise to turn
The terrors, the regrets
Of past voyages,
The uncharted vastness of the future
Into words, into lusty tales
That can be traded
For a hearty tankard of ale
A seat close to the fireplace,
The eager gaze of a rapt listener.
5. Nightmares and their riders
I have nightmares now.
I dream that something happened to you…
Anastasya Shepherd
A nightmare is a kind of horse:
A powerful creature, wild and willful.
Approach her with respect, with skill,
For she may bite, kick or rear;
She may leave the one who dares to touch her
Broken, paralyzed, dead.
Yet she is capable of learning to accept a rider.
Balancing on the back of a nightmare,
Riding a dark dream,
We can leap much farther than is humanly possible.
A nightmare can carry us across an abyss.
6. Trains and their dreamers
The train stitches together images,
like a demented alliterating seamstress…
Anastasya Shepherd
The distant clatter
Of the predawn train
Quilts the quiet air,
Pulls the thread of the whistle
Long, long, l-o-ong
Through the mist.
Between sleeping and waking
I dream.
I piece together
Stations, timetables, tickets
To choose my own destination,
To fashion a different self.
7. Synaesthesia
There are times in life when synaesthesia becomes inescapable,
when water smells like lead and feels blue…
Anastasya Shepherd
Escape is possible.
Search the floor of your perception,
Feel for the hidden trapdoor,
The moment of synaesthesia.
Pry it open,
Heave it up on its rusty hinges.
Plunge into the blue.
Roll up, solid, dull,
Like a ball of lead.
Sink through the water,
Pass through the gradations
Of the shimmering light
Deepening into darkness,
As the shadows thicken.
Let go of all
That has been visible.
Feel the weight of the ocean
Press you to the bottom.
Smell your own fear.
Taste the bile of loss.
Rise, rise like an air bubble.
Push through the cool resistance
Until you are released,
Until you burst into nothingness.
Let the freedom of empty space
Flood your senses with joy.