Vasyl Makhno (Ukraine)

Vasyl Makhno is a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator. He is the author of twelve collections of poetry: Skhyma (1993), Caesar’s Solitude (1994), The Book of Hills and Hours (1996), The Flipper of the Fish (2002), 38 Poems about New York and Some Other Things (2004), Cornelia Street Café: New and Selected Poems (2007), Winter Letters (2011), I Want to be Jazz and Rock’n’Roll (2013), Bike (2015) Jerusalem Poems (2016) and most recently Paper Bridge (2017). He has also published book of short stories House in Bating Hollow (2015) and two books of essays The Gertrude Stein Memorial Cultural and Recreation Park (2006) and Horn of Plenty (2011), and two plays Coney Island (2006) and Bitch/Beach Generation (2007). He has also translated Zbigniew Herbert’s and Janusz Szuber’s poetry from Polish into Ukrainian, and edited an anthology of young Ukrainian poets from the 1990’s. His writing widely translated in many languages. Collections of po- etry, prose and essays books appeared in Poland, Serbia, Israel, Romania, and USA. He is the 2013 recipient of Serbia’s Povele Morave Prize in Poetry and BBC Book of the Year Award 2015. Makhno currently lives in New York City.

 

THREAD like a woolen thread you slide

through the tiny eye of a needle into this life and at once

you flee from this life
from nowhere and – probably – to nowhere that’s how you once slid out
of mother’s womb
the muscles of her abdomen
ejected you
the way a volcano discharges lava
and right away you shriveled up
from the cold
and loneliness
the eye of the needle is ever so narrowing

– growing shorter –

– thinner –
this thread
you search for the key
with which to lock
behind you the door
from whatever you want to fence yourself off and you pinch the thread
of life at first in order
to pull your milk-tooth
then to tie little knots
so as not to forget things
later you lose count
of the little knots
rosary beads
transform into
thick knots of losses
and the thin woolen thread
becomes a rope
and every time there is less and less strength to pull it

behind you
with that rope
there is no way to pass through
the eye of the needle
like into a crammed
bus and you are left at the bus stop
alone the next bus
as always is late
and you are left at the bus stop
alone the next bus
as always is late

Translated by Orest Popovych