Let us think on a clear day
sitting down on stump and stone
—Alexander Vvedensky
. . . so looked the svidrigalia of the night
through which Hnyu hurried, thinking,
and counting stumps in the beating of her heart
—Daniil Kharms
Hop hop hop
goes the busy noun
following its chosen object
around like an angry bee, but more
like a frightened rabbit
running away from the buzz
of saws in the woods
where every tree stands up before
if falls down and when it falls
down one can trace the arc of the fall,
so it’s not really falling down
but across the sky of the forest,
so the rabbit hops in an arc
and the saw spins on in circles
and the forest turns over its shoulder
to watch who of its number has
fallen, and keeps forgetting the count,
for it is still a forest, and forests
are without number. Were Hnyu to
sit down on the new stump a
hop, skip and a jump over
to the left, she would certainly be at
the center of things. Were she to cut
down the forest with a saber, one
by one, the trees would fall into
the earth and instead of stumps sticking
out, we’d have branches of shrubs all
over again. They would group up again
against the saber’s blade, and split,
and multiply, and the number of the forest
would be twice uncountable, infinite
plus another infinity, in the realm of
the series. And the noun would stop
hopping and stand still for once,
twice, three times,
attracted to the object of itself,
and then live forever.
