First, you sell your time. (This is called "earning a living.") Then you sell your ideas. (This is called "being famous.") Then you sell your house. (This is called "moving up".) Then you sell your [...]
You are a force deep inside me that doesn't know my name. (See me throw it into the fire.) That, deaf to my entreaties, wouldn't rescue me from a burning house. (See me throw it [...]
Marina Tsvetaeva English translations copyright (c) 1998 Poem of the End (Ardis, 1998), 190 pp. ISBN: 0-87501-112-8 Marina Tsvetaeva Translated from the Russian by Nina Kossman The Lord has rewarded me With a light-filled and [...]
A bomb said to a city: "I'm falling." The city asked: "Whose side are you on?" The bomb said: "I take no sides. I'm falling." The city said: "Look around you." The bomb said: "Too [...]
The stronger evidence of a cloud which carried him into the paper-strewn lot of a magnified dream no longer his own, no longer here, no longer alive, as it was when it used to entrap [...]
"Wishing to gain Cassandra's favors, Apollo promised to teach her the art of prophecy; she learned the art but refused her favours; hence Apollo deprived her prophecy of power to persuade." Apollodorus, The Library, III.xii.5 [...]
"... he was troubled in spirit, and testified, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me. Then the disciples looked one on another, doubting of whom he spake. [...]
I will grow myself quiet leaves in the diffiicult silence of chastity. I will hide in the immense namelessness though each tree murmurs to him my name. I am the bed of leaves he can [...]
See how nothing keeps out of Pluto's gorge, silently drifts towards it, waits, sinks into the thickening dark, the unreflecting water, grave made of mud and stones: this way--to hide lizard shadows, here--to rob of [...]
Stone words hard to wield, smooth as the moon washed of night, shape me into a weapon no man can see except with the eyes of his bones. Words tight as skin in a fleshless [...]
Naked leaves sifted nightly, gathered, fondled, and stored in long sheets of black fire, nailed firm to stars, free of feelings' clatter, freed most of all from the earth whose fingertips touched fire, arms steeped [...]
Look inside the face traced with the world's moist stone into the mirror of every kindness gentle bones and a hundred glories could neither imitate nor efface; see the white mingle with gold, the gold [...]
See how the black flock of quietly fallen birds stares, swallowing air, at the air staring down. Their minds become wings, their startled dreams of the sky insidiously sawed down to its very blueness-- the [...]
He dreams his way up to being, quietly, with unhurried breath, as though breath were a blossomed staircase leading to a perfect sky where kind-eyed gods themselves with slow, sinuous movements, ancient skin and immaculate [...]
To see faces of men, remote and deep, remote as in a listener singing without words, singing and seeing the processions of thousands waiting for the picture to drift and sing organize into prismatic perceptions [...]
I have too clear a mind for dreaming, she said as she ordered her thoughts away from the distances they were meant to approach and surround with incantations of thought, with benedictions that carried cloudiness [...]
The left hand of darkness is light walking backward. The absolute is the runaway smell of an ancient rain. The mouth we kiss is not the mouth we stake our fate on. Look: the throb [...]
The shape of a whisper? What else do these bones promise? Lying in wait of some body's love, stretching thin arms, twitching thin nose, witholding kisses with a halting hum, why, they are growing instant [...]