If
I should feel sorry
for the vase of your torment,
knocked down by the heels of the cloud dance–
who then would fondle the golden hands,
imploringly twisted on the signboard by the shop-windows of
Avanzo?"*
A Few Words About Myself
I
love to watch children dying.
Do you note, behind protruding nostalgia,
the shadowy billow of laughter's surf?
But
l-
in the reading room of the streets-
have leafed so often through the volume of the coffin.
Midnight
with sodden hands has fingered
me
and the battering paling,
and the crazy cathedral galloped
in drops of downpour upon the cupola's bald pate.
I have seen Christ escape from an icon,
and the slush tearfully kiss
the windswept fringe of his tunic.
At bricks I bawl,
thrusting the dagger of desperate words
into the swollen pulp of the sky:
"Sun!
Father mine!
If
at least
thou
wouldst have mercy and stop tormenting me!
For my blood thou spilt gushes down this nether road.
That is my soul yonder
in tatters of tom cloud
*
A Moscow art dealer who exhibited pictures prominently in his
shop window.
