Our Souls Quietly Sing
Dmitry Blizniuk
translated by Sergey Gerasimov
The first blizzard
tries to lift the city
like a small child who wants to lift a four hundred pound barbell.
Its fingers touch a lusterless bar of the black road.
The wind zigzags like Zorro;
snowflakes attack each other,
packs of blind, insane St. Bernard dogs.
They fence in the air
like the King’s Musketeers in the fight against November’s Guards.
The snow collects on the black bones of the trees.
The white calluses of the wind are glued to them from the downwind side.
But I feel warm and light; I’m waxed with love
like a duck’s feather. Your kisses still tickle my neck
like cellar spiders. These are my daytime dreams.
Our body-plexus is not untangled yet.
We still sunbathe on an unsteady rock of blankets and bedsheets,
while the eagles of silence shred to pieces
the flat liver of the soundless plasma display.
Two sailboats hug each other, their rigging intertwined,
and winter is somewhere else, in the world behind the window glass.
There are sluggish dregs of war there, a famine and a plague,
and it’s totally unfair, but we couldn’t care less.
A peachy taste slowly floods the brain like a sunset or a sunrise.
Even when we scatter to our workplaces,
our souls quietly sing like the Galápagos tortoises
and make love from a distance,
continuing the great magic action started by our bodies.
With a green marker pen, we drew domes
to the unfinished temple,
we decorated stones with bunches of sunrays and shadows,
of birdsongs, of common interests, and crumbles of poetry.
Beads of sweat on the neck, a smile, a short rest,
an inspiration for the warm muscles. See?—
these are our eternal days
with the eternally green tower of August.
We are going to live eternally here
and meet our immortality
like a sleepy dawn,
like friends on a railroad platform.
DMITRY BLIZNIUK is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). His poems have been awarded RHINO 2022 Translation Prize. He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine.
