Poems by Serhiy Zhadan

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SOCIALISM

Slow summer, endless, and some days are like young

blades of grass capable of totally changing their structure by tensing

their filaments; the sky stretches over the railroad, bits of news fly by,

on such days I always remember an old friend, we used to play on the same

team; he was about twenty years older than me,

in his day he was invited to join one of the

“major league” teams in a warm harbor town in what was then the Soviet Union;

he would have played for sailors, the sports club would have covered everything, in the evening

he would have strolled on the city beach – an idol for sun burnt boys;

however, for some reason he turned down the offer, became involved in black marketeering, sold hash,

and even spent a year in jail, someone had set him up, he said, but

personally I never believed that—hash, you know;

they let him out at the end of the eighties and he wound up playing on amateur

teams which he also trained, that’s when we met,

and for some reason I still think of him often.

You know, he would often say, the Soviets taught me

to keep it simple, in terms of myself, it’s enough to choose

only those bits you need; you want to know why I turned

them down? simply because I thought it really made no difference – to play or

not to play, there was no difference, you know?

my career? well, I can still play, but the hash, you know?

I constantly have flashbacks on the field, otherwise I’m fine;

obviously I understood little then, but now

I think – truly, there was reason to be tempted —

the sunny eighties in the big country, black marketeering was wrecking the Soviets,

communism, pop music, and Yugoslavia,

he still looks pretty good now, except for the flashbacks

during games, otherwise – he’s fine, a pretty good master of his sport,

as he should be.

It’s a bad habit to lug around all kinds of garbage from the past,

things you don’t need, at some moment you stop

and understand that you can’t carry all that grief and joy,

life offers you too many temptations, this life is too tempting a trick –

just short enough to be told in one sitting

and too depressing to share with others;

every summer it’s the same thing – you don’t understand

whether you lost or gained more;

and everything continues unbelievably,

and even water eventually heats up

from the rhythmic beating

of the malleable hearts of fish

BOOKIES

True joy and true despair in this

life can only be felt by a person who pays attention to

details, to things, which at first glance

are not important. For instance, circus producers

and retired

air force officers bet

on those Afghani

teens of average weight

who know best

the form and display of hatred

and luscious fits of nostalgia,

they are the only ones who can perhaps break through the thin

lining of time and for a moment

peer into the future, filled

with light, grass and street

birds.

I like men over

forty. They calm down and

stop worrying about age. Their life

fills up with all kinds of essentially

male things – heavy mechanical clocks,

handy ball-point pens and good cigarettes,

not any of that

American shit.

Usually they like to tempt fate,

stepping into her back yard

in order to feel their hearts beating again

dark and tough

like a pig skin purse.

It’s not even a matter of winning because what

is money when it comes to conscience

which always gets in the way of living, filling

their bed with hot coals and bottle caps every night.

After all, no matter how long you live, you will never

understand who gave you life

so when you finally meet him

you won’t be able

to say thank you.

LUKOIL

When Easter arrives and the sky becomes kinder

but everyone becomes more intense, saying, Easter, Resurrection Day

then the dead start to turn in the ground,

breaking up the cold clay with their elbows.

I’ve had to bury friends,

I know what it’s like to bury your friends in the dirt,

like a dog buries a bone,

and wait till the sky

                                 becomes kinder.

There are social groups

for whom such rituals are very important,

I mean, first of all, mid-sized businesses.

Everyone has seen

the sorrow that envelopes these regional

representatives of Russian gas companies

when they descend on the boundless

cemetery fields, to bury in the ground

one more brother shot through the lungs;

everyone has heard the loud beat of their hearts

when they stand near the coffin

and wipe their stingy tears and runny noses against their

dolce & gabbana

slurping hennessy

                         from disposable

                                                         glasses.

“So, Kolya,” they say, “here’s to you and the hereafter.

In the great field of offshore business

we fall into the cold pools of oblivion,

like wild geese in the autumn with buckshot in our livers.”

“So,” they answer, “when we

send off our brother

on his long journey

into the radiant Valhalla of Lukoil

who will accompany him

through the dark caverns of purgatory?”

“Bitches,” they all say, “bitches

he’ll need bitches,

good bitches

expensive ones, without bad habits,

they will warm him in the winter

they will chill his blood in the spring,

on his left will lie a platinum blond,

on his right will lie a platinum blond,

and he won’t even notice he is dead.

Oh, death is a territory where

                                        our credit won’t reach.

Death is the territory of oil,

                                         let it cleanse his sins.

We’ll place his weapons at his feet, and gold,

and furs and finely ground pepper.

In his left hand we will place his newest nokia

and in his right an indulgence from Jerusalem.

But the main thing are the bitches,

two bitches, the main thing are two platinum bitches.”

“Yes, that’s the main thing,” everyone agrees.

“The main thing are the bitches,” they agree.

“The main-main thing,” adds Kolya from the casket.

We’re all sentimental at Easter time.

We stand and wait for the dead

to rise and come to us from the hereafter.

You become more interested in death

when you bury friends.

On the third day as they flank

the doors of the morgue, on the morning of the third day

he conquers death through death, after all, and walks out

from the crematorium, he sees

that they have all fallen asleep exhausted

after a three-day drinking spree

sprawled out on the grass,

in vomit-covered

dolce & gabbana.

Then quietly

                              so as not to wake them up

he takes from one of them

the charger for a nokia

and returns

to hell

to his

blonds.

FUNERAL ORCHESTRA

Stories connected with murders, knife wounds,

suicides, botched abortions, in general –

stories connected with crimes interest

people because they’re parables, in these stories

men are manly and dutiful while children

braid roses of the lord’s omniscience

into their hair. In these stories

death always runs ahead, wanting to see

how it all ends, many people like the fact

that in these stories death begins in life

so you can glance into its adolescent

face.

In such stories sooner or later there appear musicians

who play funeral marches, they jump out of a dilapidated

bus onto the grounds of the cemetery and pull out

bagpipes, trombones and hunter’s horns from under their coats, roll out

drums and hurdy-gurdies and blow great cemetery jazz

over the deceased, the bloody unrestrained music of despair

and disobedience, heart-wrenching gangster melodies, melodies of old

tunes popular with sailors and prostitutes,

and then everyone who came to see the deceased on his last

journey starts to breathe easier, because these are the rules,

this is the ritual, or something like that, in a word

they’re not afraid of the dead – but of becoming one of them.

Also, as a rule, there are women in these stories,

they deserve a separate discussion – those

forty-year-old women who still display

the passion and indecisiveness of seventeen-year-old girls,

they cry about every senseless life spent on such

trivialities as love and faith, they remember how

the great depression began in our country

and still whisper the words

that were said to them in parting:

    everything is OK, girl, drugs won’t help me now

    I want to love you more than you want to have children

    life has not stopped, as we assumed, see – in the morning

    couriers will arrive from the train station and lovers will part on the stairs as usual,

    I will stay with you, watch

    when praying mantises sit in your palm and move over your

    sleeping body, send them patience, heavens,

    on their journey without end.

Serhiy Zhadan was born in 1974 in the Luhansk Region of eastern Ukraine. He lived in Kharkiv and now spends much of his time traveling from city to city reading his work to enthusiastic audiences. Considered the best poet of his generation, he is the author of the collections: Quotations (1995), General Judas (1995), Pepsi (1998), the very, very best poems, psychedelic stories of fighting and other bullshit (selected works 1992-2000), Ballads about War and Reconstruction (2001), History of Culture at the Turn of This Century (2002), UkSSR (2004), Maradona (2007), and Lili Marlene (2009) as well as the prose collections Big Mac (2003), Anarchy in the UKR (2005), Hymn of the Democratic Youth (2007) and the novel Depech Mode (2004). His work has been translated into German, English, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Lithuanian, Byelorussian, Russian and Armenian and is featured on Poetry International’s Website. In 2005 the Bowery Poetry Club presented a bilingual evening of Zhadan’s poetry with the poet reading in the original and the translators in English. Mr. Zhadan fellowships include: the Toefer Fellowship for a residency in Hamburg and Vienna 2001-2002, the Herman Kesten Fellowship for Germany in 2001, and the Kultur Kontakt for Vienna in 2003. He has also traveled to New York to work with the Yara Arts Group at La MaMa Theatre