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Anfisa Osinnik
Renoir
Renoir liked to enlarge women's eyes,
giving roundness to cheeks and lips.
Renoir liked to play with women's hair.
Excellent painter and magnificent hatter,
every hat in his pictures shouts:
I'm the spirit of nature!
When he mixed crimson, cobalt and cinnabar on his
pallet,
the oil in the paint turned solar,
the sun took unceremonious walks on his canvases
without noticing the frame.
The day he died
was gray, gray, gray,
or maybe it wasn't,
or maybe he died at night.
But I think that his spirit,
looking at his own portrait
in the frame of the coffin, thought:
Here's my worst picture.
Then the spirit fled,
surely towards the sun,
surely to step on women's hats,
surely to portray angels
with enlarged eyes,
with round cheeks
and fleshy lips.
Of course the angels
wear hats now;
the angels like
natural beauty turned spiritual.
Amok II
A Malay with a face of withered leaves
appeared in my dream.
Piercing my heart with a spear,
he said:
"This
is amok."
Midnight is impenetrable.
I am midnight.
The stars
are
my wounds,
the moon is my throat ...
Give me, Malay,
the
medicine
to heal my wounds
and silence the moon's
strange,
painful lament.
No medicine,
said
the Malay,
will cure amok.
How do you heal wounds
when they are stars?
How can you silence the voice
when the moon is your throat?
I know all that, old fellow,
don't
tell me ...
The solo of the moon in my throat,
in the dark star anise,
the bird
composes a chant
for me:
amok,
amok,
amok.
Dualism
I say bird
You say song
I say sea
You say anchor
I say road
you interrupt me: road home.
Your body is surface,
surface without secrets, without tides
my body is secret,
shipwreck to all your ships
you say bird
I say bullet
You say sea
I tear down the word with the wave.
You say road.
The sea has no roads.
English translation © 2003 by Johannes Beilharz
Anfisa Osinnik was born in Siberia, Russia, and studied at the Maxim Gorki Institute for Literature in Moscow. She has been living in Rancho Viejo, Veracruz (Mexico) for fourteen years. Her first poetry collection in Spanish, Dialectos del Fuego, will be published in Mexico in 2003.
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