8. Dedicated to Marina Tsvetayeva

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892, on the
26th of September (old calendar), Day of John the
Evangelist when ”the mountain ash´s clusters began to
burn”, a day when ”a hundred churchbells were
fighting”. ”They fought for my soul and none was the
winner.” Her life, an artist´s life ruthlessly
revolting against all conformity, was to be an
exceptionally hard one: the destitution during the
revolution and the civil war (a small daughter died
from starvation in a governement children’s home), the
isolation during the exile in France, the return to
the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939 where her
husband was executed, her oldest daughter sent to a
camp. On the 31st of August, 1941, in Yelabuga, in the
Tartar Soviet Republic, Marina Tsvetaeva committed
suicide by hanging.

My name is Marina; my name is sea-foam, silver,
treason.
”The choosing of words is first and foremost the
choosing and purification of feelings.”
Letter, 1923
”In this the most Christian of worlds, poets are
Jews.”
From Poem of the End

The cemetery gates in Yelabuga in the land of the
Tartars emerge, blackened, from the realm of the dead.
Inside is the human trash pile, the bone and earth
layer with no name and no date, archaeological enigma
– where is the hand that wrote, where is the cervical
vertebra that was snapped by the rope? By the mid gate
a dog is waiting, the straydog spirit, on the
photograph his life of scabies and beatings is
revealed and immortalized, ribs through skin, a blind
white worm face. Emaciated and with his tail between
the legs he awaits by the gate of death the day of
resurrection when out of dogs and poets the new word
shall resound, a wild song which will then have no
boundaries – the song of the universe.

Time of executioners. Time of baptists.

To this time in the world´s life belongs an episode
retold in the memoirs of Shostakovich:
in the Ukraine there used to be a kind of wandering
bards called lirniki and banduristi. The were the
memory of the people, in them was stored the whole
treasure of folk poetry and music. For some reason
they were almost always blind. In the mid thirties the
first All-Ukrainan Congress for lirniki and
banduristi was summoned. Several hundred of these
blind vagrant singers made an appearance, trustfully.
Almost all of them were shot.

When the mountain ash berries are red as the rising
sun, winter is already invisibly there: the judgement
is passed: bottomless – bottomless death.

The woman´s magical hands. They strike deep tones
from out of the universe. They´re wearing turqoise
rings. They are fettered with age-old silver
fastenings. They are tearing the fetters apart – all
shackles, all! – and the flesh goes with them. Like
myself you gave birth to children who weren´t children
but siblings. The magical fingers are scratched by
life like those of a child always playing and tumbling
around with the cat. They call forth tones from life´s
sleeping deep ocean. They caress roughly and hastily
life´s raging body – strongly and roughly, to be eaten
by it. The magical encounters, eye into eye – essence,
not woman. The motion of the words cut with a whip
like music a portion out of the sound the light the
shimmer, life is a woman-fortuneteller-shimmer sound
and light blended with unreachable velocity into
unreachable matter – the motion of the words cut a
piece of bleeding flesh from the flesh.

Marina, the words begin as butterflies.
Like foam against the lips, silver foam. Butterflies.
Vast oceans, suns, foam.
Like crazy butterflies. The way a white tornado leads
and clears the way out into the desert, out into the
dancing lead-density.
Joy, butterflies, silver. Black mirror death! Joy!
The white butterfly storm whirls over the waves.
Glitter! Birth!

One day when a hundred churchbells battle and
whimper. One day when the mountain ash berries glow,
life begins and death. Life begins.

The steppe queen comes on her horse of wind and fire.
Now the girl-king rides across the sky like a comet,
fire from eyes, fire from hands, fire-flutter envelope
her loins. The feline time and the time of death will
come. She heralds the end of the world and the
beginning of time.

Love is a bow string retracted so far that it finally
breaks. Then it´s nothing. Then it´s brokenness itself
which is also a voice – eventually only voice, VOICE –
the wind howling, the wind´s words written down in the
distant black sand.
Marina now they carry your strangulated body stiff as
a bow the blue tongue in a stiff curve between the
teeth to the pit in the stiff common earth. Your heart
whines and wanders like a dog, an estranged dog, a
straydog, a shadow over the nameless grave pit.

Now you´re taken out through the gates made of fire.