Selected Poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Author:Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2008-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

Summer’s hot breathing in the town café.

At the back they were noisily slaughtering pigs.

Flash of a tray. Faces. Flypapers

hang in the windows stuck all over with flies.

The teacher blinks, fumbles with the menu,

the farm girl grumbles into the thin soup,

the woodcutter with his huge, dark arm

taps a fork on a magisterial glass.

Rather a lot of noise in the town café,

and a surging sound of flying waitresses.

Glasses of tea. In a chance conversation

we suddenly lay bare ourselves talking,

I and a man with a fat face and glasses,

quite intelligent he seemed to be.

He classed himself a Moscow journalist

writing a feature piece in Zima Junction.

I talked quite openly with him about

those first one-sided certainties,

and not unravelled knots and the profound

and intricate honesty of the hesitations.

He buying me a cranberry vodka

and gesturing away tobacco-smoke

answered, ‘My dear young innocent,

I used to be just the same myself:

and always wondered what came from where,

and thinking I could manage everything,

always analysing and fighting

and trying to build a new age out of one’s head.

I was brash, of course, and aggressive,

and didn’t have much time for lamentations

until I needed. Later of course

I wrote my novel, it wasn’t published,

and had my family. Well you have to live.

Now I’m a hack. There are a lot worse.

Took to the bottle. Disappointed they say.

Not writing now. What is he now, a writer?

He’s not an influence, he’s a custodian

as if his thoughts were public monuments.

Oh there are changes: but behind the speeches,

Elsewhere from what was publicly spoken

this nebulous exercise takes place:

this rumination of yesterday’s silence,

and silence smothering yesterday’s events

And in his measuring glance and his repetitions,

I could see nothing but a rage of unbelief,

Unbelief. Believing is loving.

With a pessimistic, red, fat face

he ate, lamented, smacked his lips,

well-fortified against belief or loving

by a complacent personal discontent.

‘Oh hell, I was forgetting the feature piece;

I must get along to the saw-mill, time I was goinge

How vile this cooking is. Well anyhow

what else could one expect. What a hole this is/

He wiped his mouth on a paper serviette

and noticing me scowling. Oh yes/

he said,c of course this is where you come from;

I quite forget, so sorry, do excuse me/

He muddled stupidly around

and shambled across to the door with no good-bye,

concerned neither with me nor with the others.

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