POEMS
ALEKSANDR KUSHNER
Cypress
For this, as well, I love black cypress; and I love
it also for this, as well: that is, for blackness,
for being darkest of all things here. One drooping tuft
hangs, peering from its great height, abandoned, feckless.
I love black cypress for this, as well: that it combs back
its stiff and wiry locks, the needles of the cypress;
for this: that on recalling a cypress chest, I catch
the scent of sleepless poems broken in to triptychs.
Those sheets of paper in the stuffy, resinous air.
All through life to fight insomnia and suffocation.
What does the cypress see? A ship on water where
the great wave spires in foamy curls, where wave crests glisten.
We're destined for eternity in this life on earth,
as though in one life ten could be accommodated.
But the endless ends; no matter how familiar
it is, sometimes it lets the night outweigh it.
I love black cypress for this , as well: that, having carved
out creaking stretchers from the wood, people bring them
to bear the sleeping ones back to the ship through the dark,
and black earth burns the occiput as if dreams linger.
Farewell! may you wake in another land, mysterious,
where drought and dust never assault the cypress needles.
For this, as well, I love black cypress: that the best
of obelisks to raise over the dead is a cypress seedling.
Editor's Note: "Cypress" is a selection from
Apollo in the Snow
by A1eksandr Kushner, to
be published by Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. Translation
©
1991 by Paul Graves and Carol
Ueland. All rights reserved.
