The Wind

The wind gnawed clouds,
gnawed bones with a silky tint,
while a boy was playing on the balcony,
a seven-year-old boy.
He'd put a thick handkerchief under his chin;
the wind gnawed clouds, and freckles
hopped from the boy's face on the violin
and back.
A little sniper was shooting Paganini,
aiming at the very heart of the Universe. 

When you move closer

A woman's eyes. You can look at them indefinitely,
never growing tired,
the same way you look at the flame of a fire.
But when you move closer,
your clothes catch fire,
and your hair blaze up.
You will probably wake up in the city hall,
covered in solemn burns and black bandage of marriage,
but it's too late.

-

And the dark light flows out of her dilated pupils,
like a dolphin bleeding in the night sea.

It's so Quiet

The darkness thickens diagonally
as if someone plays Paganini's caprice on the violin
without strings, without lacquered cartilages,
without hands or a bow,
on the pure vibrating clot of shadows.
I want to come to the open window
and take a big lump of the blue sky,
dazzling bright, cooling down,
with my bare hands.
Anti-evening.
An anti-moth flies into the light of an anti-candle.
Everything is inside out in the rooms,
and all the mirrors are the entrails of a mirror carp.
The curtains, like horses,
drink the luminous dust at the drowsy horse-pond.
It's so quiet that the whimpering sound of the TV
from the floor below seeps out through the silence
like sonic blood through the steamed concrete bandages.

(translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian)

Author’s Biography

Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner,  Denver Quarterly, The London Magazine, Guernica, Plume,  Pleiades, NDQ, The Pinch and many others.. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). His poems have been awarded RHINO 2022  Translation Prize.  He lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine.