Yuri Tarnopolsky ANTI-NOAH poetry MAIN PAGE
*** NEIGHBORHOOD
1996-1997 *** Technos
2000-2001 *** Bagatelles
2002 *** Misprints
2003 *** Anti-Noah
2004 ***
СРОКИ
ДАВНОСТИ Statute
of limitations...(in
Russian) 1971-1984 ***
Still worrying that the world will disappear
if I close my eyes,
I’m counting my chances.
Who wants what doesn’t exist
always gets what he wants
right in the empty hands.
Who does not want what exists
gets four whitewashed walls
and a bunk.
Who wants everything that exists
gets a little.
Who wants something unique
looks in the mirror.
I've learned
much more than I’ve earned.
Looking at the dead deserts
of the Moon and Mars
somebody still wants to go there:
the machines in our shops
and the machines in our minds
want to be tested.
The animal purpose is to live.
The human purpose is to live,
thinking about death,
thinking and tinkering and teasing
around death
in a game of outwitting.
The human nature, at the permanent war
with its live creations, is at peace
with the machines in our mind.
The cold winter is tickling us
with its murderous whiteness.
The machines amidst us spin
the future for their kin.
The past is a mineralized tree
but the ever-deciduous history is alive.
The new and the old are
the two sides of the moon.
We can see either one or the other
with a thin overlap.
If so, what’s new?
And what’s for sure
if history is the end of all beginnings?
In the end we always come to human nature
and further back to the unhuman nature,
its secret beginning,
its skeleton in our cupboard.
Not because I am a pessimist
but because I am taught
to look at the youngest forces
I see the future
coming with a bear trap.
We need dense crowds
compressed on small squares.
If one of us dies
they will prop him up standing.
We need the golf greens
to be seen from afar by crowds,
flaunting the scores
in the game of life.
The four walls are for lying down,
not for standing alone.
How to see everything
as if for the first time?
Or as if for the last time?
We see it first, knowing no name.
We see it last, smile, and say good-bye.
We see it as a memory, frown, and forget.
The trees are the peasants of the soil.
What are we?
Landlords of solitude.
I recognize the ancient world
in the modern scale of tax brackets
The numerous are below,
The few are above.
But the matchless ones
Are like the stepping-stones in the ford.
The small numbers help us cross the River.
The pyramid of numbers
is heavier than all stones of Egypt.
I should be drawn to it in awe,
pulled like the ocean by the moon,
but I can’t stop wondering:
what is the force of repulsion
that pushes me off the stairs?
Neither in the low many
nor in the high few,
but for different reasons.
And, oh, no, God forbid,
in the middle, where
I will be torn apart
by the civil war in my mind
We do not have the visible Things—
they have us
with the unflinching support
of all the invisible things in the world.
The only thing is for sure:
the relativity of to have.
Only to have not is absolute.
I feel the numbness
in my index finger
tired of counting numbers.
I am a singer of the uncountable
but of neither the infinity, nor the Trinity
nor the single index finger
pointing at me.
The former servant has his piece of land
He has his clapboard castle, horse,
and gold-and-diamond ring.
The only problem is that oats and gasoline
to feed his family and horse
come from the earth
created in six days
but not designed for six millennia.
----- o -----
Is it still possible to take a cosmic view
of the whirlworld
looking like a big hurricane?
No, there is no planet, no globe, and no high orbit.
We are tagged, labeled, barcoded,
entertained on the Ferris Wheel
of the material turnover.
Neither riot nor rot:
Rotate!
The wheel will bring us back to the ground.
Freedom is opium for people.
As if not enough I have toyed
with the notion of time…
In the circular time
I'll restart my infancy void
in the hands of the grandfather’s clock,
till the time, growing annoyed,
drops me again like a rock.
With the fine
almost invisible line
writing my penultimate record.
In the end I will stop to drop
the dot of the ultimate second.
No way back to the time coves
where I was ashamed of my blunders
and—in my under of unders—
was ashamed of my shame!
I paid P.O.D* to each
Great White Egret
of regret.
*Pain on delivery.
Today, as a super-rich,
fed up with time, I have lost
all my sense of the cost.
The right looks like wrong
and the wrong like right:
I’m losing the measure of each.
Good night!
and beaten, seasick, poisoned, people
and all somnolent, static, statusquoed, stagnant, and soporific
and stupefied by circumstances, circumspection, and circus,
buttonholed by banks and addicted to ads people
are safe regarding the most subversive of all dreams:
the adolescent dream of another life.
No, fighters and mercenaries, pro as well as contra.
fighters for fun, hunters, champions,
stags, stallions, and studs,
triumphant weight-losers and simply losers.
There is no place for dreamers
in the culture of success, excess,
and knowing precisely what you want.
While the present is shorter than ever
I am finally getting clever.
A diver into the newness,
stirring the surface layers
losing my ontology
to oncology,
I want to divest
part of my securities
and reinvest in the insecurities
and their stimulating tingle.
I want to mingle
with the past,
wincing at the seductive future
which will survive me
like my furniture.
To have? What for? One cannot buy
the quiet hours
when the thoughts start
their slow mating.
Even if the matter is as combinatorial
as an ice-cream parlor
or an All-You-Can-Eat.
You cannot have it all.
A completed thought is always beautiful,
as if carved in marble by Canova,
with its subject, predicate, and object
in the triple embrace.
But the struggling
hungry half-thoughts
revolt and plot:
to possess, to have.
You cannot have them.
You are all they can have.
Is the freedom of buying
sweeter than the freedom of crying?
The clanguage is rising
from the dark waters of language
to serve the new history
of civilization
in its movement
from evilization
to e-vilization
The incontinental
canniballistic missiles
aim at the undecided
and unaffiliated
undividuals
missing the band wagon.
Influenza of influence
requires immediate insanitation
of all the laptopless.
It is strictly
required
and enforced to be wired.
The inundated youth
enters modern maternity
with the shopping badge:
“Youthful is useful.”
There is so much choice:
insulate and insinuate
insinulate and insulinate.
We forget what it meant
to incinerate.
I don’t belong to either R or D.
Not even to R&D.
Sorry, it would be a long story
why.
I belong to real individuals
who eat in privacy their victuals
as the dividuals are passing
by.
I’m afraid, I’m attached
to the ending, extinct, impending,
and nonexistent—too
much.
With the incumbent common, normal,
whether casual or formal,
I am definitely out of
touch.
The leaves disengage from he branches,
releasing energy in the cool air.
My soul absorbs and hoards it up
to knit winter sweaters
for my flu-catching but still barefoot
mind.
I still can wait and I can bear
while the words start sticking together
as water is freezing into snowflakes
and both are falling over my lair.
The trees with their peasant arms
the words with their false alarms
are numb of dread.
The words of winter
Are sons of winter
they only look like they are dead.
They made me so hollow
and heartlessly thin
that I can spurt water
from pricks in my skin.
My soulful atoms
are cringing of shame,
detesting my body’s
cylindrical shape.
My eviscerated
aluminum flesh
has only one function
to cool and refresh.
They sent me a summons
to check and inspect.
I stood at the trial
like ugly insect.
I, man-made and painted,
pathetically cried:
“Bring me to the childhood
of my ore’s oxide!“
But “You were created!”
They growled from the right.
“No, you have evolved!”
The left wing denied.
If I will go out,
then dressed as a fish
gutted and scaled
and laid on a dish
patted in flour
flipped over fire
dripping the juices
of my desire.
No risen eyebrows:
I will be O.K.
I will be just right
as boneless filet.
Race: Yes. Mr. Yellow
You are a good fellow.
No Mr. Blue,
What you are I don’t have a clue.
Well, Mr. Black,
You won’t fall through the crack.
Ms. Green and Mr. Red
You better go to bed.
Hey, Mr. Newman
To be of A race is human.
My own race
surfaces on my face.
The numbers without $
are like the noseless statues.
The noseless figure, even six-figured,
is disfigured.
The humants at the processing line,
toiling in the metabolism of numbers,
proudly display their aquiline
$$ and numbers.
Chewing on the data
is as sedative
as being productive
is seductive.
All the more, until
the future knocks on the door,
let’s celebrate our humanthill:
The future is as unthinkable
as Titanic was unsinkable.
When I was forced
to stay still when wanting to run
or to run when wanting to stand
I felt horsed.
When I was aroused
with the splendor of nature
and the grandeur of wealth
I felt moused.
When I fantasized
of flying like birds
and swimming like fish
I felt elephantasized.
6
Linguini
The upshot is that I am optimistic
about my pessimism
because of the pessymmetry
of half-empty and half-full.
But the bottom line is:
I am still pessimistic
about solving the optimystery
of half-full and half-empty.
----- o -----
A farewell to time
as tangy as lime
a farewell kiss
to all I still miss
good-bye silly norm
to work like a worm
see you silky skin
I’m no more your kin
bye anger and scorn
there’s nothing to mourn
there’s nothing to hate
I’m closing the gate.
The last times don’t last:
like food for the hungry
they go very fast.
The skeptical pessimist
could comfortably exist
if not for the danger
of being everybody’s stranger.
Thoughts, black like the seeds of
papaya,
will never buy you
any piety
toward the healthy society.
Oh, complexity of functions
waits for you at every junction.
But by adding odds to odds,
we get even with gods.
I know, this attitude
is sensible,
but indefensible.
The meaning and form swing
ding-DING.
Prolonging life’s pleasures
and cutting on life’s pressures,
I ask no more:
“What for?”
While I am still conscious,
no more am I cautious.
I certainly shouldn’t
be overly prudent.
But a remorse
would make it even worse.
The wind rhymes
the two-tone chimes.
She sends me her calling card:
with Mrs. N. E. Winter
printed on the whitest embossed paper
with rainy watermarks.
Whatever her maiden name was (Summer?),
remarried, she’s coming in her new glory,
wiping away the autumnal palette of colors.
She’ll watch me jumping the weather
waiting for my tumbling down
or dropping my twilight glass of life.
She’ll come to stay,
advertising the joys of sleep
but waking me up through the blankets
with her cold caressing fingers.
She’ll be writing me love notes
with the footprints of squirrels and cats.
In the morning I’ll shovel the nonsense
off my driveway.
The sound of glass keeps the glass in one piece
as the sound of the name keeps somebody alive.
The memory keeps the dead safe from rising,
waiting on for no danger of recognizing.
If falling into the abyss,
the ordinary has the cat’s chances to safely land.
What is unordinary? What we cannot understand.
What is ordinary? What we can survive.
Freedom, the lucky charm
from harm.
Faithful freedom,
Semper idem.
Freedom, indeed,
is my ultimate creed.
Freedom to choose
between the gander and the goose.
Freedom to raise or to fall
is guaranteed for all.
But freedom to rise is greater
in the elevator.
The year, having discharged
all its snow and rain and blood
and water and fury and fire
and passions and blood and ballots
and blood and lies and follies
and lies and money and sermons,
and money and divorces and weddings,
is quietly dying
like the salmon after spawning.
We are burning the candles and
money,
welcoming the new rain and snow
and blood and lies and follies
and money and clowns and money
and maybe more money.
On your voyage out of this flood
you are allowed, unlike Noah,
to take only one of each:
One strong desire
One secret dream
One true affection
And one affliction
for the end of the voyage.
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
*** NEIGHBORHOOD
1996-1997 *** Technos
2000-2001 *** Bagatelles
2002 *** Misprints
2003 *** Anti-Noah
2004 ***
СРОКИ
ДАВНОСТИ Statute
of limitations...(in
Russian) 1971-1984 ***
