stanza my stone

"Fuck this sulk, these pansy stanzas tickling doom.
Devil me down to the roots of my hair,
And further—ah, François, le barbier débonnaire,
Scalp me back to the Paris of youth!

Odds are I’m alive.
Odds are, like a jockey gone to slop,
There’s skip and nimble in me yet,
There’s a length of neck to stake, and there’s cunning,
And there’s an animal under me running
Which, if I can hold on, will not stop.

Thirty-one years alive in cherry white,
Thirty-one years belong to blossoms.
Who hears them, the earthworms like jellied rain
Chewing through soil and the solid dead
While all of tall-sailed Moscow whips and snaps
In the instant’s wind?

Easy, boy: impatience, too, is candy,
And we are sulk-soft, silk-kneed, mild.
Let’s take the track early, and pace ourselves,
Until all the trapped acids trickle out as sweat,
And we take time between our teeth like a bit
And let fly the wild."

— Osip Mandelstam (tr. Christian Wiman), “Let Fly the Wild” (via gammasandgerunds)