Manuscript Found by Natasha Rostova During the Fire
I will try to live on earth without you.
I will try to live on earth without you.
I will become any object, I don’t care what-- I will be this speeding train. This smoke or a beautiful gay man laughing in the front seat.
A human body is defenseless on earth.
It’s a piece of fire-wood. Ocean water hits it. Lenin puts it on his official shoulder.
And therefore, in order not to suffer, a human spirit lives inside the wind and inside the wood and inside the shoulder of a great dictator.
But I will not be water. I will not be a fire.
I will be an eyelash. A sponge washing your neck-hairs. Or a verb, an adjective, I will become. Such a word
slightly lights your cheek. What happened? Nothing. Something visited? Nothing.
What was there you cannot whisper. No smoke without fire, they whisper. I will be a handful of smoke over this lost city of Moscow.
I will console any man, I will sleep with any man, under the army’s traveling horse carriages.
Translated from the Russian by Ilya Kaminsky
30 The Paris-American
Polina Barskova is an assistant professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College. She received her B.A. from St. Petersburg State University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Her scholarly publications include articles on Nabokov, the Bakhtin brothers, early Soviet film, and the aestheticization of historical trauma. She has also authored six books of poetry in Russian.
Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo) and co-editor of Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins).
