Pub by the Pond—Den Stein

I’m just passing through a town
Whose name I can’t remember.
But I recall a legend that lives here
Of the light of truth.
A bright glow once arose above.
Everyone who was near
Froze in their tracks for several days,
Plunged into deep thought.
The town has several colleges,
Universities, and academies.
And a lonely bar
On the shore of a pond,
That’s exactly where I need to be.
I am eating roasted duck,
Another duck swims slowly in the pond.
Suddenly it freezes.
There is fear in its eyes.
Here, at last, is my beer.
The bartender barely shuffles along,
Looking about sixty.
A wiry, wrinkled hand,
Covered in badass tattoos,
Slams the glass onto the table.
And in his eyes – terror.
The Bad-Tempered Clavier
Among Armenian mountain forests,
In a cozy corner,
A girl filmed a video with a piano.
Playing The Well-Tempered Clavier,
But I did not see her.
I wandered nearby,
Aimless.
Sick, trying to find a way
To somehow deal with it.
The Clavier echoed among the mountains,
As if the world played for me alone.
I knew this day had come.
The day I made peace with my illness
And won.
Later, they told me about this girl.
I thought: how much I want to ask
If she feels God

While playing this music?
And if she wants
To fuck me in a hotel room.
I’ve got money, there’ll be pricey wine,
And anything she asks for.
I will praise her body,
Hiding from the music — too intimate,
Too raw.
Perhaps this is vulgarity,
And also — a protest.
Not mine to separate wheat from chaff,
Nor favor the divine over the earthly.
Met I Bach, I would thank him
For this music,
And he would laugh at me.
I will kneel before the girl,
But not before God.
Perhaps there is more darkness in me
Than reverence,
More than romance.
Always, wandering among the mountains,
Hearing the music,
I will be looking for this girl.
And God will keep healing the incurable,
Keep gifting music to everyone,
Including me.
Meta
If a Cortázar book came alive,
It would write Cortázar.
In a basement with several Empire-style windows,
Our philosophy club is discussing
Which things could be alive
And what they would do.
Old Soviet books in service to the state,
To reinforced-concrete ideology,
Imagine them marching toward a brighter future,
Barely chewing their buns, washing them down with kvass,
Arguing over which of them will end up fatter.
Marching across the barely evaporated dew,
Across droplets where rhymes and alliterations play with the light.
Trochees crack, consonants crumble, an amphibrach breaks its back.
Duck, dactyl, while there’s still time.
No, actually, it’s hopeless.

Come up with another fantasy. This one stings.
Ruffs and corsets,
Unemployed,
Hug themselves ferociously.
A stylish sight, not a pathetic one — imagine that.
Stockings dance a waltz,
And the right one never picks its left partner.
Vinyl records smoke seven packs a day
And rasp, rasp so soulfully,
The way everything old can rasp soulfully,
Except for a human being.
Audio cassettes and slide projectors
Will take you back
To before you entered this basement,
Back to 40 minutes ago.
Remember? How quickly time flies.
Anything can have character, will, and meaning,
You only need to give it life,
And we can do that.
Everything around us will come alive except ourselves.
Why not us?
Because otherwise,
The poem could not exist.
A poem cannot ask
Where the basement got its windows;
Why people happened here;
Why real life passes by while you wander through this dream.
Simply because here we do not need to wash our faces, get dressed, or
iron our clothes.
This is meta, and it has fucked you over,
But it is also the extract, no foreplay,
A tantric search for meaning in everything,
We’ll decide later which meanings are worth keeping.
Right now, you are not ticking away.
Look at the window.
See how beautifully it exists here.