#marina tsvetaeva
by Marina Tsvetaeva
Where does such tenderness come from?
These aren’t the first curls
I’ve wound around my finger—
I’ve kissed lips darker than yours.
The sky is washed and dark
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.
But I’ve never heard words like this
in the night
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.
Where does this tenderness come from?
And what will I do with it? Young
stranger, poet, wandering through town,
you and your eyelashes—longer than anyone’s.
“I love you, far-sighted night. Emblaze me, make ash of me,”—Marina Tsvetaeva, tr. by Robert Chandler, from “Black as the Pupil of an Eye,”
Anna Akhmatova
Marina Tsvetaeva to Rilke after his death
Personal poems, Elegy, Rilke
To Marina Tsvetaeva
Oh the losses into the All, Marina, the stars that are falling!
We begin it as joy, and already it wholly exceeds us; suddenly the force of our weight bends the song to lament
Yet, isn’t lament really a younger descending joy?
Can’t read this without the goosebumps
This Rilke deserves your full, trembling attention, my most charming reader. Your undivided, and divided, severed, body from mind, mind from body, embodied attention.
“Homes are a crossword puzzle I can’t solve”— Marina Tsvetaeva, from To N(ikolay) N(ikolayevich) V(ysheslavtsev) in “Moscow In The Plague Year” [translated by Christopher Whyte]
“And your name, sounding like: angel”— Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), from “Poems to Blok” (1916)
“И имя твое, звучащее словно: ангел.“
(viafinita–la–commedia)
