Selected Poems

To Sergei Yesenin

To Sergei Yesenin As they say, to the other world you’ve crossed over. You’re hurtling through the void, ramming into stars. No more royalties for you, no more bars. Finally sober. No, Yesenin, I’m not joking. The lump in my throat is grief, not laughter. I see you there, with your wrists slit open, swinging your very own bag of bones. Come off it! Give it up! Have you lost your mind? Letting your cheeks go pale with the chalk of death?! You who could let loose such streams of words, the soviet years ✦ 121 122 ✦ vladimir mayakovsky like no one else could on earth. We’re crushed, we’re at a loss. Why’d you do it? What for? The critics mutter: “The blame here falls on this and that . . . Above all, on a lack of rapport, which resulted in too much wine and beer.” If you’d swapped your bohemians for the working class, they say, under their influence, you’d have quit your brawling ways. But what does the working class drink? Lemonade? The working class too is full of drunks. If only you’d been assigned to some union guy, they say, you would have been so much better in terms of content. You’d have written a hundred lines a day, like Doronin— endless and tiresome nonsense. The way I see it, if they’d had their crazy way, you probably would have checked out even earlier. Better to die from vodka than from boredom! Neither the noose nor the little penknife will reveal to us the reasons for this waste. Perhaps if there had been ink in the Angleterre that night, you’d have had no reason to open your veins. Your imitators were thrilled: how about an encore! A veritable platoon of them have now done themselves in. Why increase the number of suicides? the soviet years ✦ 123 124 ✦ vladimir mayakovsky Better to increase the production of ink! Your tongue is now locked behind your teeth for good. Now is no time to be cultivating mysteries. The people, language’s creator, have lost their clear-voiced debauchee-apprentice. And they come bearing scraps of requiem verse, barely amended, from some prior funeral. Driving stupid rhymes uphill with a stick— is that really how a poet should be remembered? Your monument hasn’t even been cast yet— where is it, the buzz of bronze or granite’s granulations?— but they’ve already delivered to memory’s latticework the trash of reminiscences and dedications. Your name is sniveled into hankies, your words are slobbered by Sobinov, who croons beneath a scrawny birch: “Not a word, oh my friend, not a s-i-i-i-gh.” Eh, I’d sure like a word alone with that what’s-his-name, with that Lohengrin! Oh, to stand up and make a loud scene: “I won’t let you mumble and crumple his verse!” To deafen them all with a three-fingered whistle, to send their grannies and goddamn mothers a curse! To scatter all these talentless hacks to hell, fanning the dark sails of their dinner jackets; to make Kogan run for his life pell-mell, the soviet years ✦ 125 126 ✦ vladimir mayakovsky maiming passersby with the blades of his mustache. The garbage shows no sign of letting up, so far. There’s so much to do— we’ve got to keep up the pace. We have to remake life, for a start; then once we’ve remade it we can sing hymns of praise. Our time is a tough one to write about, but tell me, please, all you cripples: what great man, anywhere, ever has picked out a path because it was well-traveled and simple? The word is commander of the human army. Forward march! Let time burst behind us like bombs in the air. Let the wind blowing back to the old days carry nothing but a clump of our hair. For festivities our planet is poorly designed. We have to rip our joy out of the days to come. In this life to die is not so hard. To make a life is significantly harder. 1926 the soviet years ✦ 127 ...