Pavlova - If there is something to desire: one hundred poems

ALSO BY VERA PAVLOVA Iz vosmi knig (From Eight Books, 2009)
Na tom beregu rechi (On the Other Shore of Speech, 2009)
Mudraya dura (The Wise Fool, 2008)
Tri knigi (Three Books, 2007)
Pisma v sosednuyu komnatu
(Letters to a Room Next Door, 2006)
Ruchnaya klad (Carry-on Luggage, 2006)
Po obe storony potseluya (On Both Sides of the Kiss, 2004)
Vezdes (Here and Everywhere, 2002)
Intimnyy dnevnik otlichnicy
(The Intimate Diary of a Straight-A Student, 2001)
Sovershennoletiye (Coming of Age, 2001)
Chetvertyi son (The Fourth Dream, 2000)
Liniya otryva (Tear on This Line, 2000)
Vtoroy yazyk (The Second Tongue, 1998)
Nebesnoye zhivotnoye (The Heavenly Beast, 1997) THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Translation copyright 2010 by Steven Seymour All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. All the poems in this collection were originally published in Russia and are copyright by Vera Pavlova. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Pavlova, Vera (Vera Anatolevna)
[Poems. English.

Selections]
If there is something to desire : one hundred poems / by Vera Pavlova; translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour.
1st ed.
p. cm.
This is a Borzoi book.
eISBN: 978-0-307-95758-0
1. Pavlova, Vera (Vera Anatolevna)Translations into English. I. Seymour, Steven. II.

Title.
PG3485.A875I37 2010
891.715DC22 2009022095 Cover lettering by Leanne Shapton
Cover design by Chip Kidd v3.1 The author and the translator
dedicate this book to
Bill Wadsworth,
with love and gratitude

In a nook I write, you would say crochet a fuzzy mitten for a child to be born. My parents were virgins. At twenty-two, even then it was unusual. And although Dad was known as a skirt chaser around the womens dorm, he visited women in order to get some food, because he was living on his stipend. At first he visited Mom also in order to eat. And when at the school they started talking about a possible wedding, someone slipped her a copy of How a Girl Becomes a Woman.

Mom threw it out unopened. It was scary for them to make me. It was weird for them to make me. It was painful for them to make me. It was funny for them to make me. And I absorbed: Life is scary.

Life is weird. Life is painful. Life is very funny.

On his back, on Grandmas bed, my brother was flailing his tiny legs. Hes gonna fall, I thought. Why isnt he falling? I wondered. Why isnt he falling? I wondered.

He was flailing his legs. Hes gotta fall! Pulled him by the legs closer to the edge. Still would not fall. Pulled some more. He was flailing his legs. Pulled a bit more.

With a horrific crash he fell head down, the dummy, and bawled so loud that Grandma came running: Who left the baby unattended? I said: Mom did. But not out loud, trembling in the dark under Grandmas bed.

Fell in love in sleep, woke up in tears: never have loved anyone so much, never has anyone loved me so. Had no time for even a kiss, nor to ask his name. Now I pass sleepless nights dreaming of him. Mother left early for work. Dawn was soiling the sky.

Virginity? The hell with it! High time. The first night happened at dawn, on September the first. The day before I had promised him, and I keep my word. Lover, take your reward for the evenings spent hiding in crannies and nooks. So this is what being a wife means?

Learn to look past, to be the first to part. Tears, saliva, sperm are no solvents for solitude.

On gilded wedding bowls, on the plastic cups of one-night stands, an eye can see, if skilled, solitudes bitter residue.

If there is something to desire, there will be something to regret. If there is something to regret, there will be something to recall. If there is something to recall, there was nothing to regret. If there was nothing to regret, there was nothing to desire. A beast in winter, a plant in spring, an insect in summer, a bird in autumn.

The rest of the time I am a woman.

I broke your heart. Now barefoot I tread on shards. I feel your flesh so full in me, that I do not feel it at all on top of me. Is all of you within me, a thing-in-me? Or is all of you outside of me, and only seems to be? Let us touch each other while we still have hands, palms, forearms, elbows Let us love each other for misery, let us torture each other, mangle, maim, to remember better, to part with less pain. No love? Let us make it! Done. No love? Let us make it! Done.

Next? Let us make care, tenderness, courage, jealousy, glut, lies.

Do you know what you lacked? That dose of contempt without which you cannot flip a woman on her back to make her flounder like a turtle, to make the heartless fool realize: she cannot flip back on her own. Whose face and body would I like to have? The face and body of Nike. I would fly past all those Venuses, would have nothing to do with Apollos. With the wind chilling my shoulder I would leave behind forever the hall of plaster copies! Why is the word yes so brief? It should be the longest, the hardest, so that you could not decide in an instant to say it, so that upon reflection you could stop in the middle of saying it. Sing me The Song of Songs.

Dont know the words. Then sing the notes. Dont know the notes. Then simply hum. Forgot the tune.

A girl sleeps as if she were in someones dream; a woman sleeps as if tomorrow a war will begin; an old woman sleeps as if it were enough to feign being dead and death might pass her by on the far outskirts of sleep. A light touch with a slant like a first-graders handwriting, with a tilt: you brush away a hair from my cheek with a motion vaguely tender, stretching my face slightly upward and to the left, turning me into a doe-eyed geisha. A light touch with a slant like a first-graders handwriting, with a tilt: you brush away a hair from my cheek with a motion vaguely tender, stretching my face slightly upward and to the left, turning me into a doe-eyed geisha.

With a slant, yet in a straight line: the shortest and the quickest path.

The trick is in the suffixes, diminutive and endearing: to diminish first, then to caress, and by caressing to reduce to naught, and then to search in panic, where can you be? Have I dropped you into the gap between the body and the soul? And all the while you are right here, in my arms. So heavy, so enormous! First, cursory caresses, on the surface, light, a kind of coloratura: crumbs of pizzicato in spots which seemingly require a brusque, tempestuous treatment, then with a bow across the secret strings, the ones that were not touched at the beginning, then across the non-existent strings or, more exactly, the ones we have never suspected of existing.