13469760.0021.115Absinthe2377-3456Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan LibraryAnn Arbor, MI13469760.0021.115http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.13469760.0021.115ArticleThere is Nothing There Нічого немає2014Fedirko TarasZychowitzJessica01032017211Precarious Europe: Writing in Uncertain Times2017This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Please contact mpub-help@umich.edu to use this work in a way not covered by the license.
© 2014 Taras Fedirko
Whoever can, leaves this place.
A flag on a hill—is all that remains in one’s memory,
the emptied carcass of a Leviathan,
rose-colored flesh of sky, hardened clay
over a lake.
A cruel presence one must adapt to.
Going away, they carry nothing with them,
one after the other, their windows go dark.
The body pulses as if one solid muscle,
writhing out from a net of hands, moving
to tear itself apart—
nakedness and banality—
it is as if the two, screwing before the whole village, are one and the same
to its onlookers
(whispering: “What greater purpose can there be in the lives of those who stay?”).
In the October twilight the Seret is aflame with burning reeds, nests. A seagull flies
over the heads of those who ignited this, who remain, looking on—
a sign?
Bareness as a metaphor for pain: the long-suffering, beheaded body of the nation
and the nation’s blossom — “a guelder rose bent toward the ground,” they write
in letters home, “only ten euros and they’ll
publish my opinion in the paper.”
For those who have left the ashes, the world has sped up.
“Wives leave their children and husbands, God will punish them,
God has punished us,”
time is up.
The world turns on stilts of arrogance, ignorance—blessed are those who, not knowing,
return. A new world of pleasure is spun by those who remain
beyond the horizon.
The levers of this verse, too, are thrust into their flesh—
this is what makes my gravity and tragedy possible: it’s not compassion, but contempt,
the twilight of Europe,
in which those in the other world still believe there is a dawn. They won’t find out,
they won’t believe it—
they’ll say a poet populates their possessed bodies with ghosts,
flesh bursting with voices, straining, twisting,
and one word will miss its mark—a word possessed with power that grinds up what is beyond
a word’s reach
at the millstone of metaphors —
“truth.”
Tell me, o Muse.
“Beyond a wide field of grain”—a sea of highrises overtakes the BAM district.
(speechlessness, night, crossing of the world). A stream of concrete shot out into the dark.
There are people who will not survive, people who survive because they were “left behind,”
and then there are people who thrive, preying on both.
Mothers and fathers atone (“Hedonism in the heart of the provinces!”).
Ternopil expands outward,
growing over the ravines, walls
to which “those who return” will one day pray.
Each time that I return—there is nothing.
February 2, 2013
In the motionless heart of August,
when the stone starts to cool,
up close (as I count aloud to fifty)
that which we are seeking
is looking right at us.
The sun dives deep, over the ridge in Hlybochok
into a net of streets,
(like a withheld breath released into the dead air of a small room—
an alley window between buildings, the sound of a siren
and this space into which arms reach outward—
and the hum of Chicago—the bustling night—
I swallow, again and again).
That we are looking,
means nothing here.
A windy place—
and then she moves, losing her balance,
through the room to the window behind the corn, full of weeds,
she does not see me open the gate—
the stalks of dill and goosefoot are swaying,
“I keep searching,” I say, “but this doesn’t mean anything.”
August 18, 2013
Past the bend in the road,
at daybreak—
hawthorn, quitch, and blackthorn,
the road between the bare maples descends at a sharp slant.
It’s windy here too;
an underwater shadow, spreads out its arms,
glides over the riverbed of the Seret: autumn days
sailing past—like wild creatures returning out of the blue.
“If a person broke like cast iron,”
I read—
random names—
broken bodies that the turbid night
would carry onshore.
November 10, 2013
When the hunter’s footsteps melt away with the snow,
how will you hunt the hunter?
Things abandoned at the border
can only speak of
fear in the face of fear
and rage—
the fear of belonging to another.
But fear, like the sea, is already closing in
on the bay, thrashing around,
and all around—only fields, a wide sea.
The tracks left by the hunter melt away with the snow.
March 15, 2014
Don’t rock the boat, they say
don’t show your palms —
along the middle current of the Seret
all is quiet.
In this brave new family,
no one recognizes anyone, they say.
Tell your future on the first bird
that crosses the river before the tide
moving down its throat,
reaches its muddy mouth:
on this far southern shore
the wave has arrived
It is still quiet here.
March 24, 2014