Marina Tsvetaeva
The Poet. 1. A poet’s speech begins a great way off...

1

A poet’s speech begins a great way off.
A poet is carried far away by speech

by way of planets, signs, and the ruts
of roundabout parables, between yes and no,
in his hands even sweeping gestures from a bell-tower
become hook-like. For the way of comets

is the poet’s way. And the blown-apart
links of causality are his links. Look up
after him without hope. The eclipses of
poets are not foretold in the calendar.

He is the one that mixes up the cards
and confuses arithmetic and weight,
demands answers from the school bench,
the one who altogether refutes Kant,

the one in the stone graves of the Bastille
who remains like a tree in its loveliness.
And yet the one whose traces have always vanished,
the train everyone always arrives too late to catch

for the path of comets
is the path of poets: they bum without warming,
pick without cultivating. They are: an explosion, a breaking in —
and the mane of their path makes the curve of a
graph cannot be foretold by the calendar.

Translated by Elaine Feinstein