Green Linden Press

Sing about prison and parting

To Aleksey Magarik

Sing about prison and parting
With tears and a mouth full of foam. 
Something of Moscow’s Golden Ring, 
But when drunk, something from gulag. 
This song’s about a son come home
On medical leave, his hair gone gray.
He drank at Ninka’s, at Klavka’s he sobbed
“My God, O God, Jesus be praised!” 

Our train station’s visible for miles—
A gutter lisping on its own. 
Someone singing of platform goodbyes,
Of hooligans sent into exile.
Of people, bread, strategic cargo
Traveling the homeland all day.
A song about wasted life—
I’m not particular, just play.

In the fall, go out to the open field,
Cool your head in homeland wind.
A gulp of alcohol is like a hot rose
Unfolding in your chest.
The night of the ravens hovers above.
Distances whistle through fingers.
The homeland has no strangers,
No, everything’s here, and you breathe as if

You woke to an overcast dawn…
The door clangs, the gruel’s left,
You brush off your foolish hope
And are taken in your underwear. Far off,
A pond is covered in gooseflesh,
A semaphore forces itself to shine,
Rain scatters down, and an unshaven man
Talks to himself as he passes by.

On the Death of I.B.

Some time ago, in your senior year, you lived here,
And now, by your own hand, you left this earth.
What terrible ticking did silence make you hear
When a head-turning lovely wants to live no longer?
A native of these domiciles, in the middle of my life,
I visit your old stairwell, for the sake of chills up my spine.
Should I empty my wallet on roses, pass the cemetery wall
And, by custom, let a single drunken tear fall?
Didn’t I climb to your window from jealousy, from spite,
Along a rattling gutter drainpipe, groping for sky?
It’s good to be young, lithe and young and drunk to death—
Twenty-five years, twenty-five years of wasted breath.
Not once but always, somehow I confuse a face in a crowd
For someone else, from a voice or the shape of the eyes. Now,
I’m not mistaken. I heard right. Dead. My head’s a hive.
No, you never ever loved me, but at least you were alive.
Who’d rise to their feet today, plant their head into clay,
And push so hard that death would suddenly go away?
To rise again, a resurrection! Father and mother rise.
My friend Soprovsky, alive again, talks me into booze.
We buy a cheap bottle of vodka, but it goes down like flames—
With a scar in the throat, like Slutsky’s diction and childlike rhyme.
Like those drunk from happiness, those burned with doom,
Who mosey home from the war in a black-and-white film.
The wheels clatter on rails, and the heart does vaults.
At the station, marches play, your eyes stung by their salt.
And there you are—one of them. You glance at both of us
And silently give the finger to us, your adorers.
I look at you through the crush of people and see you as you were,
Owned by no one, receding wordless to your youthful years.
Well go ahead. Go. Leave all the bad 
Behind. From now on, think how everything’s better ahead.
Like the old days, stand at the school windowpane.
Silence will utter your first and maiden names.

Sergey Gandlevsky is one of the most celebrated contemporary Russian poets. Born in 1952, Gandlevsky opted out of the Soviet system, working odd jobs and sharing poetry with a small coterie of friends in the 1970s and 1980s. His work did not appear in Russian literary journals until the late 1980s, during glasnost. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, his poetry and prose have received nearly every major Russian literary prize: the Little Booker Prize (1996), the Anti-Booker Prize (1996), the Moscow Score prize (2009), and the Poet Prize (2010). A Russian critics’ poll in the 2000s named him the country’s most important living poet. His writing—poetry, fiction, and essays—has been translated into numerous languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Georgian, Hungarian, Finnish, Polish, Lithuanian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Chinese, and Japanese. In English, Gandlevsky’s poetry also appears in A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Zephyr Press, 2003). Gandlevsky’s two novels also appear in English translation by Suzanne Fusso: Trepanation of the Skull (Northern Illinois University Press, 2014) and Illegible (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019). Since 1993, Gandlevsky has worked at the journal Foreign Literature. A lifelong Muscovite, Gandlevsky has relocated to the Republic of Georgia since the war in Ukraine began.

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan Press, 2018), Sand Opera (Alice James Books, 2015), and four volumes of poetry in translation; the most recent, I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2015), won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant and was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Award, the Read Russia Prize, and was longlisted for the National Translation Award. His work has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Watson Foundation. Recipient of the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the Hunt Prize, Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, and magnetically original.” He is Professor of English and Director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Also by Philip Metres: "Interior with Silk," "Attendant Whiplash," "Undressed and Bedless," "[Shrapnel Map]," "In the Very Wrath of Love"
In the store: "In the Very Wrath of Love" (broadside)
Interview: a conversation with Philip Metres on his book Shrapnel Maps

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2023