(no subject)
Not One Word
Not one word.
Purge the mind of what the eye has seen.
Woman, prison, bird.
Everything.
Or some wrong dawn
Your mouth moves
And a sudden pine
Needles through your nerves,
A trapped wasp crazes
In your brain,
And in the old desk's ink stain
A forest mazes
Inward and inward
To the unpicked
And sun-perfected
Blueberries
Where you now and now always
Must stand,
An infinite inch
Between that sweetness
And your hand.
Osip Mandelstam, 1930 (tr. Christian Wiman, 2012)
Not one word.
Purge the mind of what the eye has seen.
Woman, prison, bird.
Everything.
Or some wrong dawn
Your mouth moves
And a sudden pine
Needles through your nerves,
A trapped wasp crazes
In your brain,
And in the old desk's ink stain
A forest mazes
Inward and inward
To the unpicked
And sun-perfected
Blueberries
Where you now and now always
Must stand,
An infinite inch
Between that sweetness
And your hand.
Osip Mandelstam, 1930 (tr. Christian Wiman, 2012)