Fortunes like rockets fly routes parabolical,
Rainbows less widespread than gloom diabolical.
For instance, the iiery-red painter Gaugin,
Bohemian, though sales-agent until then:
To get to the Louvre from nearby Montmartre
He looped through Tahiti, just missing Sumatra.
Sped skyward, forgetting of money-born madness,
Of cackling wives and of stifling academies.
And so
he surmounted
terrestrial gravity.
The priests of the fine arts were eager to have
at him:
"A parabola’s fine, but a straight line’s far
shorter.
Better copy old Eden,” they scoffed over porter.
But Gaugin zoomed away like today’s rocketeers
In a wind that went tearing at coat-tails and ears
And entered the Louvre not through the front door,
But crashed his parabola through ceiling and floor!
Each reaches his truth with his own share
of nerve:
A worm through a chink
and a man by a curve.
There once lived a girl—just a few blocks away.
We took college together until one fine day.
Why on earth did I fly
like a blinking old ass
To mix with Tbilisi’s ambiguous stars?
Don’t blame me too hard for that barmy parabola,
Poor shoulders left out in the cold by a rambler!
How clear you rang out through the gloom of the
universe,
My slender antenna, in gales truly furious.
On and on I keep flying,
to land by your call,
My earthly antenna left out in the cold.
It’s difficult business to fly a parabola.
Yet when art, love or history is the traveller,
Then, paragraphs, canons, prognoses defying,
Parabolical trajectories they go flying....
_ _ _
Siberian spring drowns galoshes in water
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Perhaps, after all, though, a straight line
is shorter?
ANDREI VOZNESENSKY
Translated by Dorian Rottenberg
