Polina Barskova
MUTABOR
translated from Russian by Valzhyna Mort
to O.K.
1. Madre Infeliz
My life has given way to the gaping cracks
which, for the sake of speech, I’d call “Saturdays” and
“Sundays.”
I tried to fill them with your
tongue
your eye your laughter your penis
this infilling led inevitably to death.
But death was followed by Sunday’s rising—poor me
I tried to fill it with your voice that
either cancels or channels or samples me
like booze, bitter burning green
when I shrank
it felt good
I tried to fill them with Conversation
I tried to fill them with Observation
with a fat groundhog a pale narcissus a merciless hag
But, through the gaping cracks came over me
a shining, a glittering, a twinkling
the very act of naming—
“she sends her daughter to spend the weekends with the father”
blocked, sedated
a poisonous, shining cloud
inside me
only partially
I clawed the floor
I sat&stared into the dark
I bit nails
I sat&counted hours
I felt rather inadequate
I called a girlfriend
the girlfriend was pouring milk from her breast
as if from a watering can into her girl’s mouth
lulling me ok
ay
keep busy
I kept busy
Kora, my simple-hearted Demeter,
you filled my mouth with pomegranate kasha
seeds on fire
your fingers buried into my mouth like harrows
when she comes back up
it will be Monday
2. A Friendly Divorce
At a certain stage of my spousal relations
I took up spending nights at a local
author’s, Emily Dickinson’s,
either under a tree by her house
or at the cemetery.
Why were these particular
places chosen?
Firstly, I was ashamed of going to popular spots
frequented by my mother or the homeless or whoever else.
Secondly, I liked hard earth and hard roots
A kind of sex
Thirdly, I love poets
Living and particularly
Dead
Dead poets love me back
Emily in an unwashed nightgown reeking of fish
In the beginning I was afraid to lie down there
January (but rather warm)
Then it turned out to be just fine
Extatica
Catharsis
Orgasm into the ground to keep it warm
After a howl turns your insides out
tossing your guts like
clams inside a boat
how good to lie on the ground
Consequently, I met a man
with a weak spot for cemeteries
“Take me there there there”
he said
“It could happen that I’d never come back here again
I don’t want to leave without seeing”
3. Mutabor
What words they haven’t tongued, haven’t
stalked from book to branch, haven’t sucked
like a raven a worm, these storks
thrashing their beaks, probing the strength
of sounds, of living words, dead words,
words of their parents, ugly disfigured words of their
elder sisters, they stuffed themselves with the dictionaries
of synonyms, rhyme dictionaries,
technical and medical lexicon,
dirty words and proper nouns,
words flew by us with their exhausting swish,
leaving us empty, sub-satisfied.
We walked at night.
My heart shivered like a newborn rat,
a wished-for, woeful, winter infant
that has dropped into thick redberry leaves
screeching like the mandrake.
We are waiting for change to come, you said coldly.
A dead poet, M. Semenko, in the edge of the earth in Vladivostok
writes darknesses of screaming poems.
A living poet, Alexander S., walks all over Amherst,
waves his long arms: a Caliph Stork.
No: we are waiting for a transformation.
They have tried all the words they could
come up with:
murtobor, murbutur, murburbur, murtubur.
Nothing worked.
The magic word of the spell has vanished from their memory
and they remained, as they were, storks.
POLINA BARSKOVA was born in Leningrad and is the author of over ten books of poetry in Russian. Her books in English translation are This Lamentable City (Tupelo), The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems (Melville House), and Relocations (Zephyr). As a professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College, Barskova began a collective archival project that resulted in the anthology Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad (Ugly Duckling Presse). In 2015, Barskova received the Andrei Bely Prize for her book of prose Living Pictures. Her newly translated Air Raid: Selected Poems comes out this year from Ugly Duckling Presse.
VALZHYNA MORT was born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon), Collected Body (Copper Canyon), and, most recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG), winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of an NEA translation grant, as well as fellowships from the American Academy in Rome and the Lannan Foundation. Her work has been honored with the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. She teaches at Cornell University, and writes in English and Belarusian.
