Official paper, official jowls, unswallowable smells
Of vomit, vodka, cells, bowels,
And all these red-tape tapeworms gorging on reports.

Choir, stars, your highest, your holiest silences . . .
But first, sign here on the dotted line
That they may grant you permission to shine.

— Osip Mandelstam
(October 1930)

The people howl, the beasts speak,
And the splendid official, who on a lark

Hopped a daytime train without his papers,
Now pickaxes ice with a quiet tribe of lepers.

Taste it, that last glass of Black Sea wine he sipped like
freedom
In the dreamreeking tavern on the road to Erzurum.

— Osip Mandelstam
(November 1930)

Like a late gift long awaited, winter:
Personal, palpable stirrings.

I love the early animal of her,
These woozy, easy swings.

Soft atrocity, sweet fright,
As if for ravishment one first bowed and gave thanks . . .

And yet, before the forest’s clean, hewn circle of light,
Even the raven banks.

Power more powerful for its precariousness,
Blue more blue for its ghost of white:

Consider the river, its constancy, its skin of almost ice,
Like a lullaby nullified by wakefulness . . .

— Osip Mandelstam
(December 29-30, 1936)

Maybe madness too has meaning here.
Maybe conscience, knotted like a cyst,
Knowing and being known by sun and air —
Maybe life unties and we exist.

Bring to mind the mindless spider, its care
For the pillared invisible, little crystal temple,
All air and otherness:

As if a form could thank its maker,
As if every line of light back to one source were drawn,
As if, deep in wilderness
A raftered hall rose around the risen guests,
All pains purged from their faces . . .

As it is on earth, Lord, not in heaven.
On earth, and in a house whose walls are song.
Even the birds, even the littlest, fearless.
O Lord, to live so long . . .

Forgive me this, forgive what I am saying.
Whisper it, less than whisper, like someone praying.

— Osip Mandelstam
(March 15, 1937)

Then the hard blue eye grew harder
Than the cold forms and fossils of nature,
And saw, inside that law of rock and bark, creatures
Crazed and crying cries of oil and ore.

And somewhere skin under skin the fetus kicks and kinks
Like a mile made of music, hairpin hornturns of a road
headed home —
As if the forming brain became a thing space thinks,
Felt the promise of petal and the day of the dome.

— Osip Mandelstam
(c. 1935)

Provisionally, then, and secretive,
I speak a truth whose time is not:

It lives in love and the pain of love,
In sweat, and the sky’s playful vacancy.

A whisper, then, a purgatorial prayer,
A testament of one man, in one place:

Our bright abyss is also — and simply — happiness,
And this expanding, live-demanding space
A lifetime home for us.

— Osip Mandelstam
(March 9, 1937)

Spiderlight, sticky expectant dread:
I turn and turn, only more entangled
In today . . .

We need bread, and we need plain air,
But we need, too, some distant unbreathable peak,
Some eye-annihilating glare . . .

If the ache is nameless, how do I ask for ease?
If the I itself is exile, can the soul survive
Such private ice?

Old touchstone, to touch a stone, but in all that I have known,
Never, not once, such clear
Dreamsweeping distillations of atmosphere . . .

We need poetry to wake the dark we are,
To find us and bind us beyond us
To an age of wakefulness

In the one day’s unentangling sun,
Our breathing easy, ancient, like the pulse and peace
Of iambs counting down to silence.

— Osip Mandelstam
(January 19, 1937)

Shut up: to be alone is to be alive,
To be live to be a man —
Even hazied, even queasied by this madsmash hinterland,
Lost and locked in the sky’s asylum eye.

This is my prayer to the air
To which I turn and turn expecting news or ease,
Nerves minnowing from shadowhands
Toward shadowlands inside of me. This is my prayer

To be of and under a human-scale sky,
To suffer a human-scale why, to leave
This blunt sun, these eternal furrows,
For the one country that comes when I close my eyes.

— Osip Mandelstam
(January 18, 1937)

Like water trickling from the highest ice
Its bracing ache, its brain-shard sweetness,
Its nowhere air of utter now,

So my sigh has lost its source,
And I live by meanings I cannot comprehend,
For every instant I must taste the instant that I end.

— Osip Mandelstam
(1933)

We live, and love, but our lives drift like mist over what we love.
Two steps we are a whisper; ten, gone.

Still, we gather, we gossip, we laugh like humans,
And just like that our Kremlin gremlin comes alive:

His grubworm clutch, all oil and vile,
His deadweight deadwords, blonk blonk.

Listen: his jackhammering jackboots: even the chandelier shakes.
Look: a hairy cockroach crawls along his grin

At the the cluck-cluck of turkey-lackeys, and he busts a gut
At the wobblegobble dance one does without a head.

Tweet-tweet, meow-meow, Please sir, more porridge:
He alone, his grub growing hard, goes No! goes Now! goes
Boom!

Half-cocked blacksmith, he lifts from hell’s hottest forge
His latest law and with it brands a breast, a groin, a brain,

And like a pig farmer who’s plucked a blackberry from a vine,
Savors the sweet spurt, before he turns back to his swine.

— Osip Mandelstam
(November, 1933)

.

This poem is known as “The Stalin Epigram.” Mandelstam recited it to a number of people, one of whom informed on him. It led to Mandelstam’s first arrest, in 1934, and to his subsequent exile and eventual death.

Forget it. Don’t tempt yourself with tongues
Whose blood is not your own.
Better to bite a lightbulb, eat an urn.

How long the haunting, how high the cost, that sky-wide
scream
Of the bird we cannot name —
Like a happy man undone by an alley-flash of lace.

In the end, when the soul rends a man toward that timelessness
It was his whole ambition to express,
To speak a denatured thing is to fling the first dirt on your
own cold face.

Happy Tasso, bittersweet Ariosto, how they enchant us,
enchant us,
Until they don’t. And if it’s they who come, in the hour of ice,
Throbbing their blue-brained truths, their starved and larval
eyes?

So: you, then. Your animal urge. Your primal pride.
To you is given this sponge dipped in vinegar, bitter wad
Of silence: you, who thought love of sound alone could lead
to God.

— Osip Mandelstam
(1933)
translated by Christian Wiman

Fuck this sulk, these pansy stanzas tickling doom.
Devil me down to the roots of my hair,
And further — ah, François, le barbier débonnaire,
Scalp me back to the Paris of youth!

Odds are I’m alive.
Odds are, like a jockey gone to slop,
There’s skip and nimble in me yet,
There’s a length of neck to stake, and there’s cunning,
And there’s an animal under me running
Which, if I can hold on, will not stop.

Thirty-one years alive in cherry white,
Thirty-one years belong to blossoms.
Who hears them, the earthworms like jellied rain
Chewing through soil and the solid dead
While all of tall-sailed Moscow whips and snaps
In the instant’s wind?

Easy, boy: impatience, too, is candy,
And we are sulk-soft, silk-kneed, mild.
Let’s take the track early, and pace ourselves,
Until all the trapped acids trickle out as sweat,
And we take time between our teeth like a bit
And let fly the wild.

— Osip Mandelstam
(June 7, 1931)

My animal, my age, who alive can gaze
Into those eyes without becoming you?
Who alone can use, like a kind of sacrificial glue,
Word and blood to bind and mend these centuries?

Blood the builder brings forth the future
From the garroted throat of this very hour.
Meanwhile, some worm, some parasite of power,
Slime to the tip of his larval lips, licks them.

.

All creatures touched to life, clutched
By life, are the beings they must be and bear.
Mindsight, spinelight, and somewhere, nowhere,
The dark wave . . .

.

Blood the builder brings forth the future.
From the throat of nature
Blood the builder bleeds and sings
And like a fish on fire your life lands
On the hot sands of some far shore
While from a mortared sky
Blood the builder pours
And pours indifference over your final why.

.

My animal, my age, ravenous in your cage,
What flute might bend the bars, bind the gnarled
Knees of days, and bring forth a world
Of newness, world trued to music —
A lullaby for human grief,
Of human grief,
While the adder breathes in time in the grass.

.

Wave after wave of grave aboriginal green,
And then, buds plumped to the point of bursting,
And then, again, all the soft detonations of simple
spring . . .

But not for you, my beautiful, my pitiful,
My necrotic, psychotic age.
More cruel for the weakness that taunts you,
More crippled for the supple animal that haunts you,
You stagger on,
Staring back at the way you’ve taken:
Mad tracks in a land called Gone.

— Osip Mandelstam
(1923)

To taste in each leaf’s sticky oath
The broken promise that is earth.

Mother of maple, mother of snow,
See how strong, how blind I grow,
Obeying rain, intuiting roots . . .

Frogs, all ooze and noise, bellvowel
Their bodies into a single aural oil.

Are these my eyes erupting green?
This my mouth mist seeks to mean?

Mother of maple, mother of snow . . .

— Osip Mandelstam
(April 30, 1937)

And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering
power,
And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not.

— Osip Mandelstam
(May 4, 1937)