The Greyhound of Black Earth
Translated by Dmitry Blizniuk
from Russian poetry by Sergey Gerasimov
Fallen leaves of a linden tree in the park
look like a yellow skeleton of a greyhound,
where every bone is lacquered. My imagination gives it some flesh and
a net of ropy veins, pulls on short black fur, like leggings,
adds pointed ears and tendons, embeds eyes, connects optic nerves,
and the hound of black earth jumps up, but falls over right away.
It has the remains of rain and a coin in its lungs, instead of the air.
A slight cramp of the wind, and it moves,
but the muscles are not ready yet,
and the creature stares at me in black shiny despair,
unable to get up and run, unable to smell a rabbit, but it's okay,
I'll wait, I'll fill you with mind, with a lost baby sandal smeared in dirty sand.
This autumn is here for the long run. The scolopendras of birches
keep crawling across the sky, trolleybuses
with bright patches of advertisements on their sides
keep sliding past. I'll be your dad and your mom, greyhound of black earth.
This way I'll take from the warm kangaroo's pouch of nonexistence
not an idea, but something else: a big-eared, semitransparent like
the chain of a chainsaw, greyhound.
There is a stump of a sawed-off oak tree;
the rings are so light and so clearly seen,
and their pattern looks like a human embryo in a wooden womb.
The spirit moves its lips; it wants to say something. Yes, I'm a magician.
I don't have any straight and rude power over the world,
which my stomach or my wallet would prefer,
but when I am writing down the formulae of a star and sand, of grass,
I digitize the reality for God.
You can come out of hiding, shimmering purple animal of the universe,
I can feel you, I can see you in the red and yellow grin of the night McDonalds,
in the old woman walking her poodle who
looks like a piece of dry cheese in the mousetrap of the park.
We are mortal just on the outside, but extra-mortal inside –
I am the reason why all of us should be saved, not eaten,
or at least not removed from the divine computer.
Dmitry Blizniuk is an author from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Poet Lore, The Pinch, Salamander, Willow Springs, Grub Street, Spillway and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Forest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine. Member of PEN America. Poets & Writers Directory: http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk
Sergey Gerasimov is a Ukraine-based writer, poet, and translator of poetry. Among other things, he has studied psychology. He is the author of several academic articles on cognitive activity. When he is not writing, he leads a simple life of teaching, playing tennis, and kayaking down beautiful Ukrainian rivers. The largest book publishing companies in Russia, such as AST, Eksmo, and others have published his books. His stories and poems written in English have appeared in Adbusters, Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, J Journal, The Bitter Oleander, and Acumen, among many others. His last book is Oasis published by Gypsy Shadow. The poetry he translated has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes.