Requiem and Poem without a Hero by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 1976-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Obverse

My future is in my past

I drink the water of Lethe,

My doctor won’t allow me depression

Pushkin

The House on the Fontanka, 5 January 1941. Through the window the ghost of a snow-covered maple. The devilish harlequinade has just rushed by, disturbing the silence of the soundless age, and leaving behind the disorder common to all festive or funeral processions—torch-smoke, scattered flowers on the floor, holy relics forever lost . . . A wind howls in the chimney, and in this howl may be divined snatches of Requiem, deeply and cunningly hidden. Of what appears in the mirrors, it is better not to think.

I

My editor showed displeasure,

Pleaded sickness, pleaded a deadline,

Then, restricting his phone,

Grumbled: ‘It’s got to be simpler!

You read, and when you’ve finished

You still don’t know who’s in love

II

With whom, who met and why, who

[520] Lived and who died, who’s

Author and who’s hero. And

Ideologically it’s outmoded,

This carrying-on about a poet

And a swarm of ghosts.’

III

I answered: ‘There were three—

A milepost was the chief,

Another like the devil was dressed.

Behind them their poems labour

To help them achieve the ages.

[530] The third, at twenty, was dead,

IV

And I pity him.’ And again

Word fell out over word,

The music box droned on.

And the clever poison flamed

Over that bottle-hard

Angry and corkscrew tongue.

V

I dreamt that I was held to

Creating a libretto

For music that flowed evermore.

[540] And a dream—is something substantial,

The Blue Bird, the soft embalmer,

The ramparts of Elsinore.

VI

And I myself was not glad

To receive that harlequinade,

To hear that distant scream.

I kept hoping that like puffs of

Smoke pine-needles would be gusted

Past the white hall, through the gloom.

VII

With such an elegant Satan

[550]—So colourful—this motley ancient

Cagliostro, you can’t resist.

It goes against his belief

To mourn the dead, for grief

And conscience do not exist.

VIII

Well . . . it doesn’t smell of a Roman

Carnival. Over the closed domes a

Melody of cherubim

Trembles. No-one is hammering on my

Door, only the stillness watches

[560] Over stillness, mirror of mirror dreams.

IX

And with me is my ‘Seventh’,

Mute, half-dead, a

Puckered grimace its mouth,

That could be the mouth of a tragic

Mask, but for the black daub,

The stuffed-in dry earth.

X

. . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . .

[570] And the decades pass: tortures,

Exile, executions—you’re not

Surprised that I can’t sing.

XI

And especially when our dreams imagine

All that must still be enacted:

Death everywhere—our city burnt through . . .

And Tashkent in flower for a wedding . . .

Very soon the asiatic wind will tell me

What is eternal and true.

XII

XIII

Shall I be melted to a state hymn?

I don’t want, don’t want, a diadem

From a dead poet’s brow.

The time will come for my lyre,

But Sophocles we need, not Shakespeare.

[590] Fate is the night-visitor now.

XIV

And the theme that came

Was a crushed chrysanthemum

On the floor when the coffin has passed.

Between memory and call-to-mind is

The distance of Luga’s ice-fields

From the land of the satin half-mask.

XV

The devil made me rummage . . .

Yet how is it, I wonder,

I am so steeped in guilt?

[600] I of the quiet, simple manner,

I the ‘White Flock’ and the ‘Plantain’ .

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