Valery Kourinsky

03.23.1999

INTO BOUGHS OF TREE OF LIFE

Now dim now sunny and clear in March,
now dim now clever-clever of mind.
Who can explain me what is me?
Who can me catch this tiny cloud of sense and nonsense?
Who is my hermeneutically thinking
and a bit clairvoyant friend?
Where does an interpreter find a dictionary
to translate me into common street language?

Today I do not like
that shadows are not distinct enough,
that music which I suspect in the dark windows
of moment, flowing in me, is only written
but still not played.
I feel sighing presentiments
that are so good for me today,
so aristotelianly deep on the flatness of a usual wet screen
of a fragment of common existence.

Today's danger crossroadly tunes my fancy.
But what way may I chose in outwardness,
while there is no trumpeter appealing to move onward,
towards future summer passion to skim over puddles
and to read well rhymed pathways after short sun-rain.

How it will be tomorrow
when almost machine-wisely
something gray will become more and more green,
aiming likeness to sprout-onion?..

I walk slowly through the agitated waiting
for would-be-positive-answer of destiny
and grapple, grapple with my half destroyed
winter desire to be beside those
who can't return here.
The multitude disappeared forever.
Voices, jumping in dance to each other.
I sense warmness of "Closerie des lilas"
of those times
where Hemingway and Cendrars sounded there,
sounded there in unison with eve of World War II.
And slackened hour falls in the haystack of August-future...
And minutes scatter themselves upon centuries,
fell off into boughs of tree of life.