The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process

Greco-Russianizing

108 Reginald Gibbons Greco-Russianizing MIRRoR Into the dressing-table mirror a triptych cup of cocoa Disappears, the window-curtain sways and straight out The narrow path to the orchard, into toppled trees and chaos, The mirror rushes toward the swings. —Boris Pasternak A round of thanks or Drinks for My three favorite books— Let’s stand Them on their fleet or Swollen Stylistic feet for Photos, Sotto voce they Conspire, With pen-feather arms Around Each other’s inky Wings—Hey! You two outer ones, Turn in A little! They hinge Themselves Into a dressingTable Greco-Russianizing 109 Looking-glass in a Hushed house. (Where is everyone?) In their tiny choir, At worst They sing song-tricks, and The eLixir for which they Thirst is That first cup of hot Cocoa In Pasternak’s poem That in His Russian I can’t Read and In my English I Can’t forGet . His reflected China Cup and inflected Language Outlive coups, blues, reVolu Tions , the tournaments Of graveDiggers , ornaments Of verse, Anniversaries Of words With bad lives and brokEn backs. My three favorite books!— Mirrors Canted side by side To guide Whatever’s looking Into 110 The RAg-PIckeR’S guIde To PoeTRy Them—praise their age and Pages! That cup of loco zooms Through the Window out a path Among Glad shadows beneath Blue trees, While into these rooms Those same Trees keep crowding but Their bent Strong limbs touch and break Nothing. The lantern by which Something Was written at this Table, But not yet a chant Or kiss: Is it burning here, Hissing, Or softly searching Dear paths, Hovering out there? BecAuSe of APhRodITe The sweeping force with which Anything could be thrown— A javelin—or the Battering blows of hot Winds, and these gusts, too: rain, Desire, wildfire’s rushing Noise, and fast-falling stoneCold night in lands of boneHard darkness and screaming Storm blasts that freeze the blood. Greco-Russianizing 111 But in our stillness, a Gnat’s wings buzz, plucked lyre strings Beat slightly out of tune, Soft lights on low far shores Of the bay at sundown Are trembling, and then two Leaping dolphins blow in Mid-arc and again dive Into dark blue, and an Eagle wings up from the Water toward our bluff and Past us just overhead, Heavily climbing air With fierce soft pinions, we Hear three strokes and it’s gone, And your eyes are pulsing Out the light of your inTensity , flashing from Some rocky point within. A strong scent of wood smoke, Small bellows are blowing The iron-melting flames to A roar, you fan me, fan Yourself, then like glowing Javelins we’re both hurled. Amid the froth of poetic epiphenomena, I still get pleasure from refreshing the contemporary moment, our moment, with the past. The epigraph to “Mirror” is from a poem of the same title by Boris Pasternak, one of the poems he collected in his early book, My Sister—Life, which announced his great poetic gifts and dazzled Russian readers. In Russian, life is a feminine noun, so the title expresses a kinship with the female, yet because life is a sister, this kinship has nothing to do with romantic love or eros and everything to do with a close, intense bond between poet and experience, poet and world, poet and change, poet and language itself—all sisters. Pasternak’s moment was the ominous summer of 1917, when the poet composed this book at the age of twenty-seven. And yet Pasternak is said to have written the whole sequence of fifty poems when he had 112 The RAg-PIckeR’S guIde To PoeTRy fallen in love . . . (again). So the intensity of the way that language itself perceives is somehow related to the intensity of romantic love. What so drew me to the Russian poem, when I (without any Russian) was at work translating it with Ilya Kutik,was the way it moves: veering to the next image or idea because the sounds of words draw it that way.And flinging itself into metaphors and through them in different directions. (In his youth there was a Russian avant-garde group of poets—although it was not his group—called “Centrifuge.”) My pleasure is in the movement of this poem, which is“about” a kind of intoxication of impressions, of...