The Sun Has a Musky Smell

If you let the postal codes, the pointers, coincide,
then powered by prehistorical cockleshell or fire bird’s feather
flesh’s imaginary grandeur will graduate from pink to ruddy purple
the difference between fish that facilitate childbirth and footlights
is almost imperceptible from such a flight.
beneath them and beneath me, apparently, the same stage,
namely, the lava, shakes and wobbles.
I don’t prevaricate, I only have my doubts,
I don’t know what gesture’s truth has to do with truth be told,
whether it has anything to do with the piece of fiction by the bench, where nobody asks any more how to get up, 
how to sit down, how the zero finger twitches
and how the vein walks around blue in a totally different part of town.
obviously:
the skin is the stage, the body is dressed,
and how rumpled the whole thing is, how battered and wrinkled,
how chilly how pointy how minty
how nettle some or something after all.

Into the flesh along the blue cut, as in old days go out as you got up
get up and forget to fall
the hoop, the toothless jaw of the event.
Stare, it becomes, to be out of oblivion.
Hop, if they say, if nobody says hop
into the lava, into the river, into the boat, into the fire heel on soil
slip, breaststroke to the lake of feast
to the bouncy float without a resistance
screen, without extra life-kit,
without handcuffs and inventing
going upstream

Ksenia Kononeko
Cycle of Poems for the Project "In the Salty Sand, the Sun Has a Musky Smell"
Translated, from the Russian, by Thomas H. Campbell