A shudder: off my shoulders

with this mountain! My soul rises.

Now let me sing of sorrow which

is my own mountain.

a blackness which I will

never block out again:

Let me sing of sorrow

from the top of the mountain!

'The Poem of the Mountain'

This and 'The Poem of the End' are about the end of a love affair which

Tsevtayeva had while living in Prague (1922-1925).

I

A mountain, like the body of

a recruit mown down by shells,

wanting lips that were

unkissed, and a wedding ceremony

the mountain demanded those.

Instead, an ocean broke into its ears

with sudden shouts of hooray!

Though the mountain fought and struggled.

The mountain was like thunder!

A chest drummed on by Titans.

(Do you remember that last house

of the mountain—the end of the suburb?)

The mountain was many worlds!

And God took a high price for one.

Sorrow began with a mountain.

This mountain looked on the town.

2

Not Parnassus not Sinai

simply a bare and military

hill. Form up! Fire!

Why is it then in my eyes

(Since it was October and not May)

that mountain was Paradise?

3

On an open hand Paradise was offered,

(if it's too hot, don't even touch it!)

threw itself under our feet with all

its gullies and steep crags,

with paws of Titans, with all

its shrubbery and pines

the mountain siezed the skirts of our

coats, and commanded: stop.

How far from schoolbook Paradise

it was: so windy, when

the mountain pulled us down on our

backs. To itself. Saying: lie here!

The violence of that pull bewildered us.

How? Even now I don't know.

Mountain. Pimp. For holiness.

It pointed, to say: here.

4

How to forget Persephone's pomegranate

grain in the coldness of winter?

I remember lips half-opening to

mine, like the valves of a shell-creature

lost because of that grain, Persephone!

Continuous as the redness of lips,

and your eyelashes were like jagged points

upon the golden angles of a star.

5

Not that passion is deceitful or imaginary!

It doesn't lie. Simply, it doesn't last!

If only we could come into this world as though

we were common people in love

be sensible, see things as they are: this

is just a hill, just a bump in the ground.

(And yet they say it is by the pull of

abysses, that you measure height.)

In the heaps of gorse, coloured dim

among islands of tortured pines...

(In delirium/ above the level of

life)

—Take me then. I'm yours.

Instead only the gentle mercies of

domesticity—chicks twittering—

because we came down into this world who

once lived at the height of heaven: in love.

6

The mountain was mourning, (and mountains do mourn,

their clay is bitter, in the hours of parting).

The mountain mourned: for the tenderness

(like doves) of our undiscovered mornings.

The mountain mourned: for our friendliness, for

that unbreakable kinship of the lips.

The mountain declared that everyone will

receive in proportion to his tears.

The mountain grieved because life is a gypsy-camp,

and we go marketing all our life from heart to heart.

And this was Hagar's grief. To be

sent far away. Even with her child.

Also the mountain said that all things were a trick

of some demon, no sense to the game.

The mountain sorrowed. And we were silent,

leaving the mountain to judge the case.

Hagar: the slave and concubine of the patriarch Abraham, who bore him a son, Ishmael;

was sent away with the child at the insistence of Abraham's wife; and went to live in the Arabian desert.

7

The mountain mourned for what is now blood

and heat will turn only to sadness.

The mountain mourned. It will not let us go.

It will not let you lie with someone else!

The mountain mourned, for what is now

world and Rome will turn only to smoke.

The mountain mourned, because we shall be with

others. (And I do not envy them!)

The mountain mourned: for the terrible load

of promises, too late for us to renounce.

The mountain mourned the ancient nature of

the Gordian knot of law and passion.

The mountain mourned for our mourning also.

For tomorrow! Not yet! Above our foreheads

will break—death's sea of—memories!

For tomorrow, when we shall realize!

That sound what? as if someone were

crying just nearby? Can that be it?

The mountain is mourning. Because we must go down

separately, over such mud,

into life which we all know is nothing but

mob market barracks: That sound said: all poems of

mountains are written thus.

8

Hump of Atlas, groaning

Titan, this town where we

live, day in, day out, will come

to take a pride in the mountain

where we defeated life—at cards, and

insisted with passion not to

exist. Like a bear-pit.

And the twelve apostles.

Pay homage to my dark cave,

(I was a cave that the waves entered).

The last hand of the card game was

played, you remember, at the edge of the suburb?

Mountain many worlds the

gods take revenge on their own likeness!

And my grief began with this mountain

which sits above me now like my headstone.

'twelve apostles': Tsvetayeva is probably referring to the clock tower

on the Old Town Square in Prague where, each hour, the figures of the

twelve apostles appear and disappear above the dial.

9

Years will pass. And then the inscribed

slab will be changed for tombstone and removed.

There will be summerhouses on our mountain.

Soon it will be hemmed in with gardens,

because in outskirts like this they say

the air is better, and it's easier to live:

so it will be cut into plots of land,

and many lines of scaffolding will cross it.

They will straighten my mountain passes.

All my ravines will be upended.

There must be people who want to bring happiness

into their home, to have happiness.

Happiness at home! Love without fiction.

Imagine: without any stretching of sinews.

I have to be a woman and endure this!

(There was happiness—when you used to come,

happiness—in my home.) Love without any extra

sweetness given by parting. Or a knife.

Now on the ruins of our happiness

a town will grow: of husbands and wives.

And in that same blessed air, while

you can, everyone should sin—

soon shopkeepers on holidays

will be chewing the cud of their profits,

thinking out new levels and corridors, as

everything leads them back to their house!

For there has to be someone who needs

a roof with a stork's nest!

10

Yet under the weight of these foundations

the mountain will not forget the game.

Though people go astray they must remember.

And the mountain has mountains of time.

Obstinate crevices and cracks remain;

in summer homes, they'll realize, too late,

this is no hill, overgrown with families, but

a volcano! Make money out of that!

Can vineyards ever hold the danger

of Vesuvius? A giant without fear cannot

be bound with flax. And the delirium

of lips alone has the same power:

to make the vineyards stir and turn heavily,

to belch out their lava of hate.

Your daughters shall all become prostitutes

and all your sons turn into poets!

You shall rear a bastard child my daughter!

Waste your flesh upon the gipsies, son!

May you never own a piece of fertile land

you who take your substance from my blood.

Harder than any cornerstone, as

binding as the words of a dying man,

I curse you: do not look for happiness

upon my mountain where you move like ants!

At some hour unforeseen, some time unknowable,

you will realize, the whole lot of you, how

enormous and without measure is
the mountain of God's seventh law.