1

Your name is a bird in my hand
a piece of ice on the tongue
one single movement of the lips.
Your name is: five signs,
a ball caught in flight, a
silver bell in the mouth

a stone, cast in a quiet pool
makes the splash of your name, and
the sound is in the clatter of
night hooves, loud as a thunderclap
or it speaks straight into my forehead,
shrill as the click of a cocked gun.

Your name how impossible, it
is a kiss in the eyes on
motionless eyelashes, chill and sweet.
Your name is a kiss of snow
a gulp of icy spring water, blue
as a dove. About your name is: sleep.

2

Tender spectre
blameless as a knight, who
has called you into
my adolescent life?

In blue dark, grey
and priestly, you
stand here, dressed in snow.

And it's not the wind
that drives me through the town now.
No, this is the third
night I felt the old enemy.

With light blue eyes his
maigic has bound
me, that snowy singer:

swan of snow, under
my feet he spreads his feathers.
Hovering feathers,
slowly they dip in the snow.

Thus upon feathers
I go, towards the door
behind which is death.

He sings to me
behind the blue windows.
he sings to me
as jewelled bells.

Long is the shout from
his swan's beak as
he calls.

Dear spectre of
mist I know this is dreaming,
so one favour now, do
for me, amen: of dispersing.
Amen, amen.

3

You are going west of the sun now.
You will see there evening light.
You are going west of the sun and
snow will cover up your tracks.

Past my windows passionless
you are going in quiet snow.
Saint of God, beautiful, you
are the quiet light of my soul

but I do not long for your spirit.
Your way is indestructible.
And your hand is pale from holy
kisses, no nail of mine.
By your name I shall not call you.
My hands shall not stretch after you
to your holy waxen face I shall
only bow from afar

standing under the slow falling snow, I shall
fall to my knees in the snow.
In your holy name I shall only
kiss that evening snow

where, with majestic pace you
go by in tomb-like quiet,
the light of quiet holy glory
of it: Keeper of my soul.

5

At home in Moscow where the domes are burning,
at home in Moscow in the sound of bells,
where I live the tombs in their rows are standing
and in them Tsaritsas are asleep and Tsars.

And you don't know how at dawn the Kremlin is
the easiest place to breathe in the whole wide earth
and you don't know when dawn reaches the Kremlin
I pray to you until the next day comes

and I go with you by your river Neva
even while beside the Moscow river
I am standing here with my head lowered
and the line of street lights sticks fast together.

With my insomnia I love you wholly.
With my insomnia I listen for you,
just at the hour throughout the Kremlin, men
who ring the bells begin to waken.

Still my river and your river
still my hand and your hand
will never join, or not until
one dawn catches up another dawning.

6

Thinking him human they
decided to kill him, and
now he's dead. For ever.
—Weep. For the dead angel.

At the day's setting, he
sang the evening beauty.
Three waxen lights now
shudder superstitiously

and lines of light, hot
strings across the snow come from him.
Three waxen candles.
To the sun. The light-bearer.

O now look how
dark his eyelids are fallen,
O now look how
his wings are broken.

The black reciter reads.
The people idly stamp.
Dead lies the singer, and
celebrates resurrection.

8

And the gadflies gather about indifferent cart-horses,
the red calico of Kaluga puffs out in the wind,
it is a time of whistling quails and huge skies,
bells waving over waves of corn, and more
talk about Germans than anyone can bear.
Now yellow, yellow, beyond the blue trees is a
cross, and a sweet fever, a radiance over
everything: your name sounding like angel.

9

A weak shaft of light through the blackness of hell is
your voice under the rumble of exploding shells

in that thunder like a seraph he is announcing
in a toneless voice, from somewhere else, some

ancient misty morning he inhabits, how he
loved us, who are blind and nameless who

share the blue cloak of sinful treachery
and more tenderly than anyone loved the woman who

sank more daringly than any into the night of evil,
and of his love for you, Russia, which he cannot end.

And he draws an absent-minded finger along
his temple all the time he tells us of

the days that wait for us, how God will deceive us.
We shall call for the sun and it will not rise.

He spoke like a solitary prisoner
(or perhaps a child speaking to himself)

so that over the whole square the sacred
heart of Alexander Blok appeared to us.
10

Look there he is, weary from foreign parts,
a leader without body-guard.

There he is drinking a mountain stream from his hands
a prince without native land.

He has everything in his holy princedom there
Army, bread and mother.

Lovely is your inheritance.
Govern, friend without friends.
1916-1927