SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Eight
ANATOLY KUDRYAVITSKY
The Cornerstone of Tomorrow
Life you've been wading through, its
calligraphy... The boulders behind your back
practice the baby smile of footballers.
You collect church seashells, you invite
every dogsbody to your misbalance day – all this
plus the whisper of chrysalids will lead you
through this green parallelogram, the trapdoor of sleep,
to some "more often than not" place.
Thinking is a malady of our own interjection,
the stratagem of bewilderment.
Do you know all your "not-yets" yet?
We can see you, otherness, your eyes climbing
that cliff, following the path across abstraction.
The sea always sings goodbyes; the waves' mouths
gasp for phraseology. Tomorrow is a chanting megalith;
today, a building under destruction.
Game On
It may be off season but the game
plays itself. The score sings a score song;
what comes flying over the net gets returned.
The net is the colour of autumn's eyes;
it captures the constraint of the moment.
The mist is an allusion to 'isms and 'ologies.
Is there any human presence on the other side?
Can we discern a silhouette outline
readying to ask, Do you like crickets? –
or is there a ball machine bombarding us
with tomorrows?
The scoreboard is sick with emergency numbers;
spectators' brains are teaming with handshakes
and leg movements. The microphone
keeps count of centuries. In the tall chair,
there's a black hole. The match will have to end
before dark.
Down the Grete Stern's Well
Women are flying trees
wandering hands of the world
Crosses dream of becoming ladders
The weight of the moon is
too much for you
let's bleach our
biographical blotches
We giraffe through the continent
and take a trainsnake
to the eyes' coast
we fall into somebody's nostrils
and find our way onto a billboard
A spy in the sky
the self-evidence of cages
Hello this is your inner tiger speaking
without a mouth
How far can you go
if you carry non-being with you?
Cages break
into smaller cages
Anatoly Kudryavitsky lives in Dublin, Ireland, and in Reggio di Calabria, Italy. His poems appear in Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The Prague Revue, Plume, BlazeVOX, The Honest Ulsterman, The North, Ink Sweat & Tears, Cyphers, Stride, etc. His most recent poetry collections are The Two-Headed Man and the Paper Life (MadHat Press, USA, 2019) and Scultura Involontaria (Casa della poesia, Italy, 2020; a bilingual English/Italian edition). His latest novel, The Flying Dutchman, has been brought out by Glagoslav Publications, UK, in 2018. In 2020, he won an English PEN Translate Award for his anthology of Russian dissident poetry 1960-1980 entitled Accursed Poets (Smokestack Books, UK).
