ALEXEI PARSHCHIKOV
(Trans. Wayne Chambliss)
The Bears
Flight-3
Crimea
And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.
Kings,
Book 2 (2:23)
There are fewer and fewer animals in the capital.
Less and less often
are the torches of bears
raised above the tall
towers of apartments.
More and more often,
they fall down
shrieking
in an eclipse.
Snorting, they lick
the ears of stone sailors on rooftops.
Semi-transparent.
More like tea leaves than bears.
In deserted circuses,
they are wrapped in tarpaulin
like giant candies.
Their symmetries were beaten out
with crowbars,
until they were bent to the good
and it was made plain:
better a cow in India than a bull in Spain.
Even so, we offended Elisha-
two score children and all half-witted-
and down the hill he went, flapping like canvas,
pigeon-toed, tender,
made soft with pride,
as we are, by rage, before we die.
We were off to the country to gather a muckle of
unbound pages.
Laughing, we plucked the books of Mao.
We were naked as syntax.
The Word moved among us. It moved us.
Exquisite and vicious, we wagged our tongues
at the prophet:
"Behold, Elisha's is the light! Even bald!"
two hairdressers cried.
Two Medeas emerged from the forest.
Two bears electrified.
Two she-bears, one great and one small,
lunged at us in a fury
to asphixiate
to maul.
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Who led me across the city that morning?
Behind the railway station, he sat me down at a low
wooden table and produced a bottle. We cracked it like a watermelon.
My Adam's apple bobbing, as though I and the rails had shared the swallow.
On the fence was a pumpkin. I used to think the
elixir of debility
was in the potato. But no! It's in the pumpkin,
an octave below. From the instability
of its inner glow, fingers of pulp emerge as if counting.
Farther down were the milk crates. Aluminum O's
lined up like ellipses. Piles of bottles
equipoised, despite themselves.
The abyss between them like frenzied sables.
An upturned crate, cast-aside, empty,
filled with its own evaporation.
Inevitability massing, everywhere, elementary,
more elementary than a bottle of milk with its lid punched in.
We sensed, or perhaps it was after-
an axis passed through us, dilating
like a scrim of plankton on an ocean pasture,
sucking sunlight, undulating
between thicknesses. Through us passed (we knew
them not),
through us passed cardiac orphans in silence.
In the thinness of our bodies, their din was stopped
silent...I offered them drink and pennies...
They were going past. Burned by the dust.
The last one turned. We stood and faced him.
The hippodrome howled, and I went as I was
after him into the light of migration.
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Perched on one foot, latching a sandal.
First I see an olive tree—and then the magnetic tree.
Orbits of objects, carefully balanced.
Flick the pupil and, as if by prayer, a lizard is vanquished.
The sea clicks, transmitting foam that plots at random
a group of flies. Turn hard
and you are met by a Khan, flanked by a pair of spindly birds,
picking through axes of rotation—like a battle made of glass,
now in shards. Poppies blister the loam.
Let the slack-jawed run through stone to Judgment.
Those struck dumb in adoration—
for the initial precision of blood, the first rotation—will be saved.
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