Alone [He] Stare[s] Into the Frost's White Face

Alone [he] stare[s] into the frost’s white face.   
It’s going nowhere, and [he]—from nowhere.   
Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle:   
Miraculous, the breathing plain.   

Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty—
The squint itself consoled, at ease . . .   
The ten-fold forest almost the same . . .   
And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread.  

Osip Mandelstam
January 16, 1937

Persephone's Bees

Take, from my palms, for joy, for ease,

A little honey, a little sun,

That we may obey Persephone's bees.

You can't untie a boat unmoored.

Fur-shod shadows can't be heard, 

Nor terror, in this life, mastered.

Love, what's left for us, and of us, is this

Living remnant, loving revenant, brief kiss

Like a bee flying completed dying hiveless

To find in the forest's heart a home,

Night's never-ending hum,

Thriving on meadowsweet, mint, and time.

Take, for all that is good, for all that is gone,

That it may lie rough and real against your collarbone,

This string of bees, that once turned honey into sun.

-Osip Mandelstam (translated from Russian by Christian Wiman)

I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear

And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,

Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.

It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power,

And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?

What is being? What is truth?

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,

All hover and hammer,

Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.

It is now. It is not.

 - Osip Mandelstam, “And I Was Alive”