To the Bronze Mirror

Your brazen mist with slender throbbing veins
of century that has to pass but stains -
with dust and rust - both things and their traces,
and plods along the day that hardly deigns
to answer back, and therefore erases
his lambent self and splits his own bases.

The more you strive to stay, the more this flow
of dying things and sounds makes you go
unto the edge where all is done and said,
where slowly, in the autumn afterglow,
Time wanders with the rains, for ever strayed,
and stretches forth the future’s blood-stained blade.

To what degree the names we give to things
to their darkling selves make subtle links,
and if a name now gains, perhaps, it loses
when essence gets defined, and breaks, and blinks,
and rushes through the nets, so glad to do this
that joy alone her pain and terror soothes.

You, little greenish spot with warped faces
that are reflected blooming on the axes
that keep all dreams for living beauty firm,
your native past that things through shadows traces
here stepped aside and didn’t touch your home
with moving outlines and air warm.

When ancient names, forgotten now, are
repeated by some chance, this plastic bar
so echoes and trembles on the verges
of undecided fate that from afar
it’s like a blare of fire, green and gorgeous
when blazes and in brassy sphere merges.

Accomplishment achieving its perfection,
lost labyrinths with their almost ashen
and fretful gleam, where on a broken wing
the wind is keeping balance, not to smash in
the rows of melting souls still wandering
with hands that slide along the rusted string.

You keep your population locked inside
of a recessive planet that would glide
eternally, without ever knowing
how fatal are its power and pride,
restrained from either borrowing or loaning,
resolved like night and violent like morning.

The fields are ripe, the list has been completed,
the crowd of stars with their torches splintered
is moving slowly through this grainy screen
and lighting up whatever has been hinted
or left unanswered in this gap of green
to be completely lost, untouched, unseen.

From outside – your marshes and your moss
left by the wind which tried to make it gloss
but stained with bloody fingerprints all over
and vanished: only fragrant haze of loss
hangs in the sultry air, getting lower
where brazen birds of splinters hiss and hover.

Their sounds spring but would not interfere
with this progressive silence that’s a mere
resemblance of a more profound nought:
thus, however desperate the fear
of alien things can be, we give a thought
to things we used to find but never sought.

You’ve stopped reflecting not because it is
impossible to shine again and breathe –
these cells are filled with time, the thinnest juncture,
connecting tiny mountains and seas,
is broken, and the arrow hits the archer
while milky sails regain the azure pasture.

The wheel is turning on: thus, however
suppressed it can be at the very level
of falling waters mixed with night and soil,
your secret sky still brims and starts to ravel
but slightly and discreetly, not to spoil
the lines of landscapes by its eager toil.

Strained elements depart without a sign,
but later, when they’ve drawn their own line
in burning crimson, ‘mid the soaring spheres,
they will return exactly to the spine
of their broken planet which adheres
to her strange wish to be revived and see us.

You, blob of honey hardened in the marble
of scattered hopes that once had been too humble
to make themselves impossible to fail.
The streams of life still bounce, murmur, warble,
but you remain within this aimless trail
with broken masts and shreds of a green sail.

And all those faces that have ever been
reflected on your surface, now lean
towards a spot of daylight seen from their
deserted place - to breathe, or just to mean
whatever, in this glimmering and square
forgotten frame, whatever they can dare.

Between the two of us - these ravished ages
decay and rear within the wood that hedges
your calling fragile fingers from the rest
of this harsh world, and by its stillness pledges
to challenge changing things by all the best
it has inside of its abandoned nest.

And, maybe, one could never recognise
his own shade with a diminished size
and image turned upside down, in the alley
of bent and crooked ash-trees, with sunrise
transforming into midnight, growing daily
and shaking like a heap of greenish jelly.

This brassy plate of sky is losing inches
together with the seconds when it switches
from singing height to sudden swing and swerve,
and clouds float through the open breaches
in its half-melted side which has the nerve
to let them browse and its own edges curve.

Vibrating on the silver arch you draw
among the trees with bitter smell of thaw
and porous lilac leaves, among the ruins
of blown hopes still trying rise and claw
the flapping wings of badly wounded blue winds,
you hold and fight as if it matters who wins.

This strange escaping beauty, a compound
of total silence, with the only sound
of empty contours seeking to be solved
and shaky singing structures: see them bound
to our age, to this enormous mould
to scrape off their value’s crumbling gold.

Thus feelings try to set themselves anew
when lose their basic temper, taste and hue
deceiving almost everything that enters
or interferes, taking their cue
exactly from the present being spent as
amorphous mass devoid of hidden centres.

The more direct and desperate your glance is,
the more abruptly your split handle dances
beneath the palms of ages roaming by,
the more your rocking pendulum enhances
the swings as if it wants to crack and die,
or just to break the passing year’s thigh.

It’s like a tower dropping down the bell,
soft, slow fall: and yet one wouldn’t tell
the core of sunrise losing fiery slices
from low leaden water in the well,
despair from the highest points of crises
gained by the life that suffers and suffices.

Вланес, 2005

Сертификат Поэзия.ру: серия 790 № 30932 от 15.01.2005

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