Selected Poems

The Cloud in Pants

The Cloud in Pants A Tetraptych Your thought, daydreaming in a brain gone soft, like some fattened-up lackey on a grease-stained couch, I’ll tease against the bloodied shreds of my heart; I’ll jeer all I want, insolent and caustic. There isn’t a single gray hair in my soul, nor any geriatric tenderness! Thundering the world with the might of my voice, I go forth, gorgeous, twenty-two years old. Tender people! You play your love on violins. The brute bangs his out on kettledrums. But you can’t turn yourselves inside out, like I can, to be pure lips and nothing else! Come, one and all, and be taught— you there, out of the drawing room, batiste-woman, you decorous bureaucrat of the angelic league. And another, you there, leafing calmly through lips like a chef through the pages of a cookbook. If you want, I’ll be rabid, crazy for flesh, and then—like the sky changing tint— if you like, selected long poems ✦ 159 160 ✦ vladimir mayakovsky I’ll be irreproachably tender, not a man, but a cloud in pants! I don’t believe in any flowery Nice! Through my lips a hymn will rise again to men laid up like a hospital and women worn out like a proverb. 1 You think these are the ravings of malaria? This happened; it happened in Odessa. “I’ll be there at four,” said Maria. Eight. Nine. Ten. And at this point, the evening, sullen, decembry, slipped away from the windows into wretched night. Into my decrepit back the candelabras guffawed and neighed. You wouldn’t even recognize me now: I’m a hulk of sinews, squirming and moaning. What on earth could such a glob desire? But in fact, the glob desires quite a lot! After all, it doesn’t matter to you if you’re bronzed, if your heart’s like a cold piece of iron. At night you still want to hide your clangor in something soft, something female. And so, enormous, I stoop at the window, melting the glass with my forehead. Will there be love or will there not? And what kind— big or teensy-weensy? It couldn’t be big, with a body like that: it must be a small, meek little lovelet. It shies away from automobile horns. Likes the bells on horse-drawn buggies. Again and again, staring into the rain, my face to its pockmarked face, I wait, splashed by the thunder of the city’s breakers. Midnight, running around with a knife, finally caught what it was chasing and slashed away— “be gone!” selected long poems ✦ 161 162 ✦ vladimir mayakovsky Twelve o’clock fell like a convict’s head from the scaffold. In the windowpanes, gray droplets of rain howl together as one, piling up into a grimace, as if it were chimeras howling from Notre Dame in Paris. Cursed woman! What, you haven’t had enough? Soon a cry will tear my mouth to shreds. Then I hear: quietly, like a sick man from his bed, a nerve jumps down to the floor. At first it simply goes for a stroll, barely, barely moving; then it breaks into a run, agitated, distinct. Soon the nerve and two more like it are rushing about in a desperate dance! On the bottom floor, the plaster comes crashing down. Nerves— big ones, little ones, so many!— gallop around in a fury until soon the nerves’ little legs give out! But night keeps on sliming and sliming through the room— the eye, grown heavy, can’t rise out of the slime. The doors suddenly clattered as if the hotel’s teeth were chattering. You walked in, brusque as “take that!” torturing the suede of your glove, and said: “You know what? I’m getting married.” By all means, go ahead. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be strong. See how calm I am! Like a dead man’s pulse. Remember the way you used to talk? “Jack London, money, love, passion.” But I saw only one thing: you were a Gioconda who needed to be stolen! selected long poems ✦ 163 164 ✦ vladimir mayakovsky And you were stolen. Once more I’ll play the game of love, fire illuminating the bend of my brows. What of it! Even in a burnt-out house, sometimes homeless tramps will take shelter! Are you teasing? “There are fewer emeralds of...