^{translated from the Ukrainian by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky}

Emptiness lives inside a radio 
and newspapers are now printed without letters.

I walk up the street
but I don’t (do I?) hear my own steps.
I notice an acquaintance across the street,
and call out to him to say 
hello, but bullets of silence fly from my mouth.

I start shouting with my hands
but my fingers are bent, crooked at my fingers.

But it’s just (or is it?) a dream, just a dream
which pretends it is an emptiness, inside a radio. 

ТІЛЬКИБ СОН

Радіо всередині пусте і чорне
і газети тепер друкують без букв

Іду вулицею
але не чую власних кроків
помічаю знайомого з іншого боку вулиці
і гукаю його щоб привітатись
але з мого рота вилітають кулі мовчання
які чомусь не схожі на кулі тиші

Починаю кричати йому руками
але мої пальці вигнуті
мої пальці криві й покручені

Та це тільки сон
тільки сон

All but Death can be

Adjusted ;

Dynasties repaired,

Systems settled in their

Sockets,

Centuries removed, —

Wastes of lives resown

With colors

By superior springs,

Death — unto itself exception —

Is exempt from change.

I dwell in Possibility
A fairer house than Prose,
More numerous of windows,
Superior of doors.

Of chambers, as the cedars —
Impregnable of eye;
And for an everlasting roof
The gables of the sky.

Of visitors — the fairest —
For occupation — this —
The spreading wide my narrow hands
To gather Paradise.

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of man:

He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear Takes in all beauty with an easy span: He has his Summer, when luxuriously Spring’s honeyed cud of youthful thought he loves To ruminate, and by such dreaming high Is nearest unto Heaven: quiet coves His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings He furleth close; contented so to look On mists in idleness—to let fair things Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook:— He has his Winter too of pale misfeature, Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

I know not why, but it is true—it may,
In some way, be because he was a child
Of the fierce sun where I first wept and smiled—
I love the dark-browed Poe. His feverish day
Was spent in dreams inspired, that him beguiled,
When not along his path shone forth one ray
Of light, of hope, to guide him on the way,
That to earth's cares he might be reconciled.
Not one of all Columbia's tuneful choir
Has pitched his notes to such a matchless key
As Poe—the wizard of the Orphic lyre!
Not one has dreamed, has sung, such songs as he,
   Who, like an echo came, an echo went,
   Singing, back to his mother element.

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

Stylishly, in the white season,
we come here wearing awkward logs
on our feet, to skate on icebergs,
to ride pulleys into the sky
and ride the sky down.

We ride the sky down,
our voices falling back behind us,
unraveling like smooth threads.
Say, I am the air I break; or say,
I am a spool unwinding.

I am the spool that unwound
while riding the sky down, that waits
now to ride the pulley back into the sky,
that comes here, stylishly,
each weekend, for the same trick
in the white season.

 “Seldom we find,” says Solomon Don Dunce,
         “Half an idea in the profoundest sonnet.
     Through all the flimsy things we see at once
         As easily as through a Naples bonnet—
         Trash of all trash!—how can a lady don it?
     Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuff-
     Owl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff
         Twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it.”
      And, veritably, Sol is right enough.
     The general tuckermanities are arrant
     Bubbles—ephemeral and so transparent—
         But this is, now,—you may depend upon it—
     Stable, opaque, immortal—all by dint
     Of the dear names that lie concealed within ‘t.

1847. TO MY MOTHER

     Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,
         The angels, whispering to one another,
     Can find, among their burning terms of love,
         None so devotional as that of “Mother,”
      Therefore by that dear name I long have called you—
         You who are more than mother unto me,
     And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you
         In setting my Virginia’s spirit free.
     My mother—my own mother, who died early,
         Was but the mother of myself; but you
     Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,
         And thus are dearer than the mother I knew
     By that infinity with which my wife
         Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.

1849.

At midnight, in the month of June, 

I stand beneath the mystic moon. 

An opiate vapour, dewy, dim, 

Exhales from out her golden rim,

And, softly dripping, drop by drop, 

Upon the quiet mountain top, 

Steals drowsily and musically

Into the universal valley. 

The rosemary nods upon the grave;

The lily lolls upon the wave;

Wrapping the fog about its breast,

The ruin moulders into rest; 

Looking like Lethe, see! the lake

A conscious slumber seems to take, 

And would not, for the world, awake. 

All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies

(Her casment open to the skies)

Irene, with her Destinles! 



Oh, lady bright! can it be right—

This window open to the night?

The wanton airs, from the tree-top,

Laughingly through the lattice drop—

The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,

Flit through thy chamber in and out,

And wave the curtain canopy

So fitfully—so fearfully—

Above the closed and fringéd lid

’Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,

That, o’er the floor and down the wall,

Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!

Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?

Why and what art thou dreaming here?

Sure thou art come o’er far-off seas,

A wonder to these garden trees!

Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!

Strange, above all, thy length of tress,

And this all solemn silentness!

The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,

Which is enduring, so be deep!

Heaven have her in its sacred keep!

This chamber changed for one more holy,

This bed for one more melancholy,

I pray to God that she may lie

Forever with unopened eye,

While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!

My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,

As it is lasting, so be deep!

Soft may the worms about her creep!

Far in the forest, dim and old,

For her may some tall vault unfold—

Some vault that oft hath flung its black

And wingéd pannels fluttering back,

Triumphant, o’er the crested palls

Of her grand family funerals—

Some sepulchre, remote, alone,

Against whose portals she hath thrown,

In childhood, many an idle stone—

Some tomb from out whose sounding door

She ne’er shall force an echo more,

Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!

It was the dead who groaned within.

It will be Summer eventually —
Ladies with parasols,
Sauntering gentlemen with canes,
And little girls with dolls

Will tint the pallid landscape
As’t were a bright bouquet,
Though drifted deep in Parian
The village lies to-day.

The lilacs, bending many a year,
Will sway with purple load ;
The bees will not despise the tune
Their forefathers have hummed ;

The wild rose redden in the bog,
The aster on the hill
Her everlasting fashion set,
And covenant gentians frill,

Till Summer folds her miracle
As women do their gown,
Or priests adjust the symbols
When Sacrament is done.

I’m sorry for the Dead to-day,
It’s such congenial times
Old neighbors have at fences
At time o’ year for hay —

When broad sun-burned acquaintances
Discourse between the toil
And laugh, a homely species,
That makes the meadows smile.

It seems so straight to lie away
From all the noise of fields,
The busy carts, the fragrant cocks,
The mower’s meter steals

A trouble, lest they’re homesick, —
Those farmers and their wives,
Set separate from the farming
And all the neighbors’ lives.

I wonder if the sepulchre
Is not a lonesome way,
When and boys, and larks and June
Go down the fields to hay !

To disappear enhances ;
The man who runs away
Is tinctured for an instant
With Immortality.

But yesterday a vagrant,
Today in memory lain
With superstitious merit
We tamper with again.

But never far as Honour
Removes the paltry One,
And impotent to cherish
We hasten to adorn.

Of Death the sharpest function,
That, just as a we discern,
The Excellence defies us ;
Securest gathered then

The fruit perverse to plucking,
But leaning to the sight
With the ecstatic limit
Of unobtained Delight.