The Seasons by Pasternak
The Seasons
Issue 26, Summer-Fall 1961
I
Now the small buds are pronged
to the boughs like candle-butts.
Steaming April! The adolescent park
simmers.
Like a lassoed buffalo, the forest
is noosed in the ropes of shrill feathered throats—
a wrestler, all gratuitous muscle,
caught in the pipes of the grand organ.
The shadows of the young leaves are gummy.
A wet bench streams in the garden.
Poetry is like a pump
with a suction-pad that drinks and drains up
the clouds. They ruffle in hoop-skirts,
talk to the valleys—
all night I squeeze out verses,
my page is hollow and white with thirst.
II
The garden’s frightful all drip and listening.
The rain is loneliness.
A branch splashes white lace on the window.
Is there a witness?
The earth is swollen and smelly,
the pasture is a sponge;
as if it were August, the far off night ripens
and rots in the elm-dissected field.
No sound. No trespasser watches the night.
The rain is alone in the garden—
it starts up again, it drips
off roof and gutter.
I will drink the rain,
I, loneliness…
the rain weeps in the darkness.
Is there a witness?
But silence! Not even a wrinkling leaf.
No sign in the darkness,
only a swallowing of sobs and the swish of slippers…
in the interval, earth choking its tears…
III
Summer says goodbye to the station.
Running in its photographer’s black hood,
and blinding us with flash-bulbs, the thunder
takes a hundred souvenir snap-shots.
The lilac bush is a black scarecrow.
From hill and sky armfuls of lightning
crash on the station-agent’s cottage
to smash it with light.
Waves of malevolence
lift the coal-dust from the roof;
the rain, coming down in buckets,
is like charcoal that smudges a drawing.
Something in my mind’s
most inaccesible corners
registers the thunder’s illumination,
stands up, and steadily blinks.
IV
A driving rain whips the air.
The ice is scabby gray. You wait
for the sky to wake up.
Snow drones on the wind.
With unbuckled galoshes, with a muffler
flapping from his unbuttoned coat,
March bulls ahead, and makes rushes
at the frivolous, frenzied birds.
The season cannot miss you. It tries
to scrape up the candle-drippings in a snotty handkerchief—
it is safe now
to snatch off the night-caps of the tulips…
He is out of his senses, he musses his mop of hair.
He is buried in his mind’s mush,
and stammers scurrilities
against me—my resurrection in the spring.
V
Pinecones pop in the military gloom of our bedroom.
A gray smog boils in the overtime lightbulb.
The blue window simmers
over the snow-desert.
Our lips puff and stick.
Spring! I leave the street of astonished pines,
alarmed distances,
the awkward classical wooden house, apprehending its downfall—
the air blue as piles of faded sky-blue denim
lugged by the prisoners from their wards!
The age is breaking—pagan Rome,
thumbs down on clowns,
the wrestler’s vain swansong to the grandstand—
on the true!
The overpaid gladiator must die in earnest.
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