Marina Tsvetaeva
Bus

The bus jumped, like a brazen
evil spirit, a demon
cutting across the traffic
in streets as cramped as footnotes,
it rushed on its way shaking
like a concert-hall vibrating
with applause. And we shook in it!
Demons too. Have you seen
seeds under a tap? We were
like peas in boiling soup,
or Easter toys dancing in
alcohol. Mortared grain!
Teeth in a chilled mouth.

What has been shaken out someone
could use for a chandelier:
all the beads and the bones
of an old woman. A necklace
on that girl’s breast. Bouncing.
The child at his mother’s nipple.
Shaken without reference
like pears all of us shaken
in vibrato, like violins.
The violence shook our souls
into laughter, and back into childhood.

Young again. Yes. The joy of that
being thrown into girlhood! Or
perhaps further back, to become
a tomboy with toothy grin.
        It was as if the piper
    had lead us, not out of town, but
    right out of the calendar.
Laughter exhausted us all.
I was too weak to stand.
Enfeebled, I kept on my feet only
by holding your belt in my hand.

Askew, head on, the bus was
crazed like a bull, it leapt
as if at a red cloth,
to rush round a sharp bend
and then, quite suddenly
stopped.

    ...So, between hills, the creature
    lay obedient and still.
    Lord, what blue surrounded us,
    how everywhere was green!

The hurt of living gone,
like January’s tin.
Green was everywhere,
a strange and tender green.

A moist, uneasy noise of green
flowed through our veins’ gutters.
Green struck my head open,
and freed me from all thinking!

A moist, wood-twig smoke of green
flowed through our veins’ gutters.
Green struck my head open.
It overflowed me completely!

Inside me, warmth and birdsong.
You could drink both of them from
the two halves of my skull —
(Slavs did that with enemies).

Green rose, green shoots, green
fused to a single emerald.
The green smell of the earth had
struck deeply. (No buffalo feels that.)

Malachite. Sapphire. Unneeded.
The eye and ear restored —
Falcons don’t see tillage,
prisoners don’t hear birds.

My eye is ripe with green.
Now I see no misfortune
(or madness — it was true reason!)
to leave a throne and fall

on all fours like a beast
and dig his nose in the grass...
He wasn’t mad, that sovereign
Nebuchadnezzar, munching

stalks of grass — but a Tsar,
an herbivorous, cereal-loving
brother of Jean-Jacques Rousseau...
This green of the earth has given
my legs the power to run

into heaven.
I’ve taken in so much
green juice and energy I am
as powerful as a hero.
The green of the earth has struck
my cheeks. And there it glows.

For an hour, under cherry trees,
God allowed me to think
that my own, my old, face
could be the same colour as these.

Young people may laugh. Perhaps
I’d be better off standing under
some old tower, than mistaking
that cherry-tree colour
for the colour of my

face...

With grey hair like mine? But then,
apple blossom is grey. And God has brought me close
to everyone of his creatures
I am closer as well as lower...

a sister to all creation
from the buttercup to the mare —
So I blew in my hands, like a trumpet.
I even dared to leap!

As old people rejoice
without shame on a roundabout,
I believed my hair was brown
again, no grey streak in it.

So, with my branch of green
I could drive my friend like a goose,
and watch his sail-cloth suit
turn into true sails —

Surely my soul was prepared
to sail beyond the ocean.
(The earth had been a seabed —
it laughed now with vegetation.)

My companion was only slender
    in the waist. His heart was thick.
(How his white canvas puckered,
    and came to rest in the green.)

Faith. Aurora. Soul’s blue.
    Never dilute or measured.
Idiot soul! And yet Peru
    will yield to the madness of it!

My friend became heavy to lead,
    as a child does for no reason,
(I found my own bold web
    as lovely as any spider’s)

Suddenly like a vast frame
for a living miracle: Gates!
Between their marble, I could
stand, like an ancient sign,

uniting myself and the landscape;
a frame in which I remain,
between gates that lead to no castle,
gates that lead to no farmhouse,

gates like a lion’s jaws
which let in light. Gates
leading to where? Into
happiness came the answer,

twofold...

Happiness? Far away. North of here.
Somewhere else. Some other time.
Happiness? Even the scent is cold.
I looked for it once, on all fours.

When I was four years old, looking
for a clover with four leaves.
What do these numbers matter?
Happiness? Cows feed on it.

The young are in ruminant company
of two jaws and four hooves.
Happiness stamps its feet.
It doesn’t stand looking at gates.

    The wood block and the well.
    Remember that old tale?
    Of cold water streaming past
    an open, longing mouth,

    and the water missing the mouth
    as if in a strange dream.
    There’s never enough water,
    (the sea’s not enough for me).

From opened veins, water
flows on to moist earth —
Water keeps passing by
as life does, in a dream.

And now I’ve wiped my cheeks
I know the exact force
of the streams that miss my hands
and pass my thirsting

mouth

    The tree, in its cloud of blossom,
    was a dream avalanche over us.
    With a smile, my companion compared it
    to a ‘cauliflower in white sauce’.

    That phrase struck into my heart, loud
    as thunder. Now grant me encounters
    with thieves and pillagers. Lord, rather
    than bed in the hay with a gourmand!

A thief can rob — and not touch your face.
You’ll be fleeced, but your soul will escape.
But a gourmand must finger and pinch, before
he puts you aside, to eat later.

I can throw off my rings. Or my fingers.
You can strip my hide, and wear it.
But a gourmand demands the brain and heart
to the last groan of their torment.

The thief will go off. In his pockets
my jewels, the cross from my breast.
A toothbrush ends all romance
with gourmands.
                           Don’t fall in their hands!

And you, who could be loved royally
as an evergreen, shall be
as nameless as cauliflower in my mouth:
I take this revenge — for the tree!

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