Galina Breznheva | John Watson

Galina Breznheva: L’Amour Fou

From Triptych

Rondeau

Ukrainian saltfields soapstone dull

With reeds and mournful birds. A wall.

A girl looks out into a lane.

The circus riding into town

Is glittering diamonds. Raptly pale,

She strokes a pony’s braided tail

And hears the clothes-line raven call:

Look back, look back, and surely turn

To Ukrainian salt;

But follow down this sawdust trail

— That strongman is a lion male

Enormous in his pantaloon —

And raindrops hanging on the line

Are diamonds. Seize them and reveal

Ukrainian salt.

Triple Rondel

A forest like a head of hair,

A hillside like a bosom laced

With willow wands, a snowfield crossed,

A muslin gauze of sleet-filled air —

Prefigure wedding veils to greet

A forest like a head of hair,

A hillside like a bosom laced.

A wild child runs into the snow

She has (aged five) acquired a taste

For gin and tonic. Nor must she waste

A forest like a head of hair,

A hillside like a bosom laced

With willow wands, a snowfield crossed.

Rondeau prime

I want to be an actress. I could play

Anna Karenina of the peatmarsh plain,

But change her story: I’d seduce again

That fool, her husband. In a single day

I’d bring him to his knees. And, in a way,

I’d alter every role to suit the man

I want to be.

I’d even play a lizard — or the fly

Half crazed by aniseed that floods our lane,

Our Mars canal from all in the Ukraine …

And yet, I want more than mere fantasy,

I want to be.

Carol

I take on wings. I float, I soar,

While passion brings me to the floor.

The footlights glare, I cannot see

The audience. And so I’m free

To improvise outrageously.

I take on wings. I float, I soar.

I’ll choose the most romantic role.

My parts are greater than the whole.

My partners pierce me to the soul

Until I hear Encore! Encore!

By dawn my bed becomes a throne,

And gin a tonic on its own,

And several lovers all have flown

Who might perhaps not rise to more.

To live in this star-studded state —

Electric body wired for light

With switches linked to every part —

O let light flood from every shore!

An actress has a thousand lives

And I desire as many loves,

Like hearts worn on transparent sleeves,

Always impatient to adore.

Let vodka Life still freely flow.

I’m clinging to the longest straw.

I long to hear the lion’s roar

Then take the splinter from its paw.

The stage is strewn with sawdust now.

The circus strongman mops his brow.

He plants a forest with his plough,

While passion brings me to the floor.

Quatrains

Our language has peculiar force,

And in its accidence retains

Archaic features, like the plains

Perpetually renewing wheat.

The verb is beautiful, like men

Inflected by their gaze alone

To voice their pleasure, while the noun,

Like women, needs adornment from

Its prepositions linked like jewels.

Diminutives exuberant!

The metaphor sprung like a plant

Through every fissure in the earth!

And binary polarities

Whose features may be seen to trace

Each man and woman who embrace

Then separate, once more opposed!

In aspects phonological,

The affricates are dominant —

The breath-stream stops and must supplant

The fricatives till breath returns;

In this they are like heart stops — when

We catch the beauty of a face

Or tumblers on a circus horse

Which canters in its billowing tent.

Ancient Slavic languages,

Like meadows flowering every year,

Return to earth then reappear

Like diamonds thrown up by the plough.

Sonnet

You frown, dear father, and would have me join

The Youth League. But I am too fond

Of Boris (and Alexis and Yvain).

Their skin is brown like Kharkov’s fertile ground,

Their thighs are like the masts of Azov ships,

Their eyes as dark as peasants’ woven cloth

In the Poltava region. And their lips

Are red as silk embroidery in the north,

Where one word stands for “red” and “beautiful”.

I’d rather live with them in old Kieff,

Our khata built of wood and, on its wall,

Our votive shawl embroidered to the life

With scenes of love. I’d lie with them and be

Like flax which they made linen, lovingly.

Ballade

O heavenly and lovely specimen:

Yevgeny holding to the sweating light

The tangle of a dozen floating men

Of which just one would weigh on me like night;

And yet he lifts them all for my delight

And still has strength to burn me with his eyes.

O tree with swaying branches, each a prize,

Yet none so lovely as its base and keep,

Astride and teetering in his massive ease.

He plays upon me like a well-strung harp.

O smell of men and ore raised from a mine,

And eucalypts when summer’s at its height,

And reed-logged lake, and flowering turpentine —

All blooming in this tent in torpid heat!

This living tree which staggers, flowing wet,

Has raised in me a tent of ardent sighs,

A banner I would clasp about his thighs

Proclaiming my resolve and daring hope.

His tuning hands may wander where they please

And play upon me like a well-strung harp.

O smell of thunder, roar of flowering vine,

I’m burgeoning and melting at the sight,

And sawdust everywhere must surely burn.

O let me climb this tree of men and might,

And like a blossom in its branches float,

Then die upon its strength as frenzy dies …

And yet I faint and fear: he must not seize

Such weights. I want to see his face in sleep

And he have strength enough for days and days

Of playing on me like a well-strung harp.

O let me see the forest for the trees

And know the way this lofty oak to please!

Then let him come to me and shed his cape

And take me up and move through all the keys

And play upon me like a well-strung harp.

Ballad

“My dear,” the bearded lady said,

“He’s very strong. But then,

You must by now have found his strength

Is as the strength of ten.”

When snow was falling thick as stars

And Kharkov in its vice,

Galina ran into his clasp

To melt like heated ice.

“It’s said he’s strong in every part,”

The ballerina said,

“As much at home in circus tent

As in a lady’s bed.”

His strength is as the strength of ten.

Galina thought on this:

“Pythagoras thought ten divine.

To me it seems like bliss.”

Galina Brezhneva did not like

The India-rubber man;

She wanted someone more like stone

To share her caravan.

The tightrope-walker asked her up

To share his narrow berth

But she said, “I need someone who

Will bring me down to earth.”

The fire-eater left her cold,

The clowns seemed sadly dour,

The lion-tamer far too tame —

But O, the oak’s lithe power!

The snow was falling thick as wheat;

The strongman raised the roof.

Auroras roared about her. Then

She asked no further proof.

“Galina, bear-cub dressed in furs,

I lift you with one hand

And trail you in amongst the stars

Above your snowbound land.”

“Yevgeny, tower of strength and guide,

Conduct me through the maze.

O corbel from your granite walls,

Support me all my days.”

Rondel

When spring was lapped by autumn days,

Victoria, the flower, was born

While, in the Party’s dark machine,

Galina’s father closed his eyes

And for a year withheld his gaze.

His endless winter had begun

When spring was lapped by autumn days

And fair Victoria was born.

Then through the wheat sea’s summer haze

Across the frothing, rolling plain,

The little girl was brought; and soon

Her mother left her with some sighs,

When spring was lapped by autumn days.

Song

Rehearsing on the furrowed snows,

The acrobats are lean and fair

And tumble me.

Exponents of the high trapeze

Embrace a moment in the air,

Then fly with me.

The lion backs away and roars,

The lion-tamer wields his chair,

And then wields me.

The jugglers toss those plates with ease

Which never seem to leave their care,

Then care for me.

Yevgeny lifts a beam and stares,

He shouts of infidelities,

He drops the beam again and glares,

But I don’t care.

For Boris in his Cossack shoes,

Dimitri dancing with the bears

And Ivan with his whip and spurs —

Each pleases me.

Ballad

The Chairman of the Power Elite

Stepped from the aeroplane.

His overcoat was charcoal grey,

He wore his practised frown.

Galina had been rather loud

As stewards flocked around;

Her dress was not the Party line

And, as they touched the ground,

She thanked the staff for granting her

The freedom of the air.

Then Brezhnev’s frown, though permanent,

Grew even more severe.

Zagreb by day seemed dark as night

And suitably austere;

But in the street Galina burned,

An incandescent flare.

That night she wore her gypsy blouse

And dined and drank too well,

And loudly reappeared at dawn

To tell the whole hotel

(The waiters now were all her friends)

That she would soon be wed

And married to a conjuror

Who conjured best in bed.

The Chairman of the Soviets

In charcoal overcoat

Resolved that future travel plans

Must leave his daughter out;

In fact, as Chairman of the State,

He should always ensure

An aeroplane was standing by

For — say — Siberia.

Rhyme Royal

A plane was sent to bring his daughter home

From fierce Crimean vodka in the shade,

And spas and wine and Yalta’s temperate warm,

To Moscow and a proper Party mood.

The conjuror was conjured from his bed,

And vanished in the waving of a wand

To be remade by Party sleight-of-hand.

While under house arrest, Galina read

And studied modern languages with zeal.

Her spirits did not noticeably fade.

As if she had not left Sevastopol,

She made her own Carpathia in her gaol.

She dressed for spring and did not draw the blinds.

She dined on caviar from Party funds.

O ballet dancer in your leotard

With gas-light in your face like moonlit snow,

Your body is so inexplicably hard —

I’m floating down the Volga while you row!

So meet me in that whiskey bar we know;

We’ll dance a pas de deux there in its grounds

With entrechats sustained beyond all bounds!

Eyebrows were raised at the Praesidium

Each time Galina scandalised the town.

Amongst these, Brezhnev’s eyebrows reigned supreme

Like two black bears stretched basking in the sun.

But something urgent needed to be done:

A husband must be found for her, and fast.

The KGB must search from coast to coast.

Now in her forties, Princess Brezhneva

Was undiminished in her energies.

If not absconding to a whiskey bar

She might be found curled up on someone’s knees,

Or in his bed, or at the theatre doors.

Yury Churbanov of the KGB,

Now centre-stage, brings to this history

A marriage of convenience (although

The groom already had a family,

A minor inconvenience.) Even so,

Galina had her Moscow flat, and he

Could rise up through the ranks as Deputy

Of the Interior (where, it’s true,

Uzbekistan would prove his Waterloo.)

O Boris, Gypsy Boris, read my palm,

But don’t stop there, my gypsy. Never cease,

Read all of me, proceed along my arm

And read my own unfolding War and Peace,

Or seek and you may find the Golden Fleece,

And tales and mysteries. Nothing is barred!

O Boris, be my own Sheherezade!

Tail-rhymes

Some orgies seemed increasingly

Exhausting. Boris seemed to be

Less interested in her.

The steppes were very far away

And Boris was a shade distrait.

She felt strangely aware

Of body weight, mortality

And memories of the Azov Sea,

And something close to fear.

She longed for sleep in someone’s arms

But often woke alone. Alarms

And sorrows troubled her.

Some diamonds which she’d hoped to get

Had somehow fallen through the net

In Transcarpathia.

When Boris too was over-free

With a lion-tamer’s jewellery

And kept the lion’s share,

Her days with him were stolen too.

Soon only alcohol would do,

Drowning each sullen care.

Couplets

“What spirits have we here? And what’s the blend?

And cigarettes? Américain? I’ll bend

Your ear with memories of circuses,

Spring in Odessa or the Caucasus,

And three-a-bed, and candles burning low

At both ends in those days of dazzling snow

Which fell as palaces already formed. Where now

Are Lesya and Michail and all those Borises?

And ever-strong Yevgeny of the burning eyes?

— They say he’s lifting daffodils in Kursk …

These bottles are all drained. You’ve brought a cask?

Then I’ll go on. It is our fate at last

— And mine exceedingly more dire than most —

To turn into our fathers. Nonetheless

— Please interrupt me if I’ve mentioned this —

I married recently. This is a fourth

And final fling. The orange blossom path

Leads me again to bridal happiness.

I gave up alcohol for love and — may I stress

That I was sixty-five, he twenty-nine

And, if not oak or elm, a useful pine

Like those young saplings in the Central steppes

Or those on Mt Hoverla and its slopes

In summer with the circus. Ah, the tent

And smell of bitumen everywhere we went!

And lying down in fields like flowering snow

And being held at evening’s after-glow

By strong men’s arms. But that was long ago.

I thank you. Yes. No water. Gorbachev?

The mark of Cain! But still I cling to love,

And love’s the cure for all this body weight

And alcohol and diamonds and the flight

Of all the sawdust past. But fill my glass …”