Updated April 14, 2014
The Anthology of
Armenian Poets THIRD EDITION Edited by Samvel Mkrtchyan
Volume II
I’M STILL BALLASTING THE BOOK
It’s impossible for me to contact ALL the poets for my anthology--I’ll try to contact them when the book is put into final form. I’m working on it, and nothing can stop me to prepare a REASONABLE book of Armenian poetry. If you are really “enraged”, please let me know, and I will exclude your poems from the anthology. My emails are jassamvel@yahoo.com, samvel.mkrtchyan@live.com.
You can follow me at www.samvelmkrtchyan.am. I do thank all those truly original poets in Armenia and Diaspora, who have encouraged me--with advice or by submitting their poems. -Samvel Mkrtchyan December 22, 2013.
P.S. for some copyright-addicts: James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (the 1922 text) is in public domain since January 2012. My translation was published in 2012.
Hans Hofmann, Autumn Gold
2014
S&H PROJECT
The Anthology of Armenian Poets, Volume II. Third Edition, formerly titled “Selected Armenian Poets,” 2013, revised and enlarged.
Originally published in 1993 by SamSon Publishers. Second revised edition published in 2012.
This anthology © by Samvel Mkrtchyan 1993, 2012, 2013, 2014. S&H Project supervised by Hasmik Danielyan. Design: Samvel Mkrtchyan.
Sources and Acknowledgements
Sources of poems reprinted in this selection (Volumes I and II) (by permission, when copyrighted):
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The Heritage of Armenian Literature. Volumes II and III, Edited by Agop J. Hacikyan (Coordinating Editor), Gabriel Basmajian, Edward S. Franchuk, Nourhan Ouzounian. Wayne State University Press, Detroit 2000-2005.* © by Agop J. Hacikyan, Gabriel Basmajian, Edward S. Franchuk, Nourhan Ouzounian. Armenian Poems. Rendered into English by Alice Stone Blackwell, Boston 1917. Anthology of Armenian Poetry. Translated by Diana Der Hovanessian, edited by Diana Der Hovanessian and Marzbed Margossian. Columbia University Press 1978. © by Diana Der Hovanessian. Modern Eastern Armenian Poets Selected and Translated by Samvel Mkrtchyan. Nairi Publishers, Yerevan 2004. © by Samvel Mkrtchyan. Contemporary Armenian Poetry. Compiled by Levon Ananyan, Edited by Diana Der Hovanessian, Writers’ Union of Armenia, Yerevan 2006. © by WUA. Armenian Poetry Old and New. Compiled and Translated by Aram Tolegian, Detroit 1979. © by Aram Tolegian. Armenian-American Poets. A Bilingual Anthology. Compiled and Translated by Garig Basmadjian. Detroit 1976. © by AGBU Alex Manoogian Cultural Fund. Soviet Armenian Poetry. Translated by Mischa Kudian, Mashtots Press, London 1974. © by Mischa Kudian. The Other Voice. Armenian Women’s Poetry Through the Ages. Translated by Diana Der Hovanessian, Edited by Maro Dalley. AIWA Press, Watertown 2005. © by Diana Der Hovanessian.
The editor also acknowledges permission to reproduce copyright poems for the following authors:
For Arshile Gorky: Arshile Gorky, Sing when you receive this letter. Winter 1994 issue of Ararat Quarterly. For William Saroyan: My Name Is Saroyan, A Collection Edited with a Commentary by James H. Tashjian, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1983. © 1983 by HBJ. For Archie Minasian: Selected Poems, Ashod Press, 1986. © by Helen Minasian. For Leonardo Alishan: Leonardo Alishan, Dancing Barefoot on Broken Glass. Ashod Press, New York 1991. © 1991 by Leonardo Alishan. For Diana Der Hovanessian’s Playing with words and Teaching you Armenian: How to Choose Your Past, Ararat Press, 1978. ©Diana Der Hovanessian. For Shoushig Dasnabedian: Selected Poems by Shoushig Dasnabedian, Translated by Samvel Mkrtchyan, Edited by Antoine Kehyaian, NorDar, Yerevan 1999. © 1999 by Shoushig Dasnabedian. For Aram Saroyan: Complete Minimal Poems Edited by Aram Saroyan and James Hoff. Ugly Duckling Press (2007). For Vahé Armen: Vahé Armen. Scream and Other Poems. Translated by Samvel Mkrtchyan. Van Aryan, Yerevan 2000. © 2000 by Vahé Armen. For William Michaelian: William Michaelian, Another Song I Know. Short Poems. Cosmopsis Books, San Francisco 2007. © 2007 by William Michaelian. And: The Painting of You. Author’s Press Se-
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Sources and Acknowledgements
ries, Vol. I, Salem, Oregon 2009. © 2009 by William Michaelian. For Lorne Shirinian’s Armenian Poets: Earthquake: Poems by Lorne Shirinian.Mellen Poetry Series, Volume 16, NY 1991. © Lorne Shirinian. For Paul Aloojian, James Baloian, Brenda Najimian Magarity: Armenian Town. Foreword by Dickran Kouymjian, © 2001 by the William Saroyan Society. For Violet Grigoryan, and Karen Karslyan: Deviation. Anthology of Contemporary Armenian Literature. Inknagir, Yerevan 2008. © 2008, Inqnagir Literary Club. For Ara Mgrdichian: Random Agenda. A Literary Journal, Edited by Anahid Aramouni Keshishian. Volume I, Los Angeles 2005. © 2005 by Arena Productions. For Sylva Dakessian: Birthmark: A Bilingual Anthology of ArmenianAmerican Poetry, 1999. For Tina Demirdjian: Birthmark: A Bilingual Anthology of ArmenianAmerican Poetry, 1999. For Alan Semerdjian: araratmagazine.org/2011/11. ©Alan Semerdjian. For Yeva Adalyan: Yeva Adalyan, Honey A La Carte. Arax Press, Los Angeles 2003. © 2003 by Yeva Adalyan. * “et al” in Translated by Agop J. Hacikyan et al in this book refers to Gabriel Basmajian, Edward S. Franchuk and Nourhan Ouzounian.
Editor’s Notes
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Editor’s Notes to the 1993 and 2012 editions “When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same 'music,' the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano. Language too is an instrument, and each language has its own logic. I believe that the process of rendering from language to language is better conceived as a ‘transposition’ than as a translation, for 'translation' implies a series of word-for-word equivalents that do not exist across language boundaries any more than piano sounds' exist in the violin [...] What must be saved, even at the expense of making four strings do for eighty-eight keys, is the total feeling of the complex, its gestalt.”
The passage is from John Ciardi's preface to his “transposition” of The Inferno. The “total feeling of the complex” he writes about becomes even more complicated when one compiles an anthology of different translations since every translator has his or her own special form of procedure. Some prefer a simple prose translation, or paraphrasing; others render, “move over” poetry into another language. It is said, too, that a metrical translation is recreation. Terms, I believe, do not matter. What matters is the quality, the approximation of the logic of the translation to that of the original. By logic – or self-logic – I mean not only the apprehensible attribute, but also the invisible qualities Vahé Oshagan once referred to: “the culture in which it (the poem) is embedded, and the secret rhythm, the respiration, the surge below the surface.” After all, if we conform to Shelley’s description of poetry as “something not subject to the active powers of the mind,” I believe the recreation of a poem may be considered as an intuitive process. This selection offers a variety of translations and methods, that, I do hope, does not demolish the framework.
In any survey of Armenian poetry it has been mentioned for better or for worse, that Armenia was the first state to adopt Christianity. As a matter of fact, Armenian poetry is Christian, though it trades back to pre-Christian era, some fragments of which have survived. Medieval Armenian verse is genuinely religious. Grigor Narekatsi stands out in particular with The Book of Lamentations. Then came poets who wrote about romantic love, and somewhat monotonous poetry became at once witty and earnest, ironic and visionary. In the 18th century, which coincides with the Renaissance of Armenian literature after a relative fall, the politically separated nation developed two literary dialects, Western and Eastern. The Armenian Romanticism was immediately followed by a political oppression and
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Editor’s Notes
tight censorship imposed by the Turkish and the Russian governments. During the Turkish massacres beginning from 1896 the Armenian poets were surprisingly productive. The 20th century Armenian poetry has developed in two branches, one in the Diaspora, the other in Armenia. Included in this volume are also poets of Armenian origin having written or writing in English.
The book representing Armenian poets during the past 1500 years aims at exhibiting Armenian poetry to the English-speaking world – a somewhat venturous undertaking in the case of a small nation speaking and writing in an idiosyncratic language. There are several useful anthologies, published in the United States, representing Armenian poetry in English, but they also comprise much secondary material. Of course an anthologist is indebted to his or her forerunners, and it is demanded of him or her to expurgate, append and make it diverse enough to encompass each poet’s individuality. For me, the contribution of comparatively recent diasporan Armenians writng in English and somewhat resisting assimilation through poetry has been very valuable.
In transliterating the Armenian names into English Eastern Armenian is used, without diacritics, for all the poets, except those who lived or live outside Armenia and used or use the Western Armenian transliteration (Varoujan is an exception: j is pronounced as s in “pleasure”). Since the names in poems may vary in spelling (as Petrus Dourian-Bedros Tourian, or Baloian-Baloyan) the particular spelling of each individual poet has been preserved. Therefore, the reader may also find cases of both British and American English spelling.
If the chief end of poetry, as John Dryden said, is to delight, I would like to think this selection will not disappoint. With no biographical notes, still the chief end of this third edition is to introduce Armenian poetry. And, hopefully, to delight. A Note to the 2013 edition
This is a substantially improved and enlarged edition of a book that originally appeared 20 years ago, in 1993, with only 68 poets selected – a rough draft of what would emerge in 2012 as a major book. Yet, as soon as the latter went to press with the translations and original works of 139 authors, new poets and poems “emerged”, making the third edition almost indispensable. I could say this edition of 2013 appeals to me, should the feeling of incompleteness haunting any anthologist cease to agitate. But then again, what is complete?
S. M. Yerevan, 2013
The Poets KRIKOR BELEDIAN MARIAN MESROBIAN ALAN WHITEHORN IGNAT MAMYAN SAMVEL KOSYAN HRACHYA SAROUKHAN VEHANOUSH TEKYAN ASHOT AVDALYAN TANYA HOVHANISSYAN HRIPSIMÉ BRENDA NAJIMIAN MAGARITY BAGRAT ALEKYAN KAMO GYANJYAN GREGORY DJANIKIAN GHUKAS SIRUNYAN EDWARD HAKHVERDYAN PETER BALAKIAN LEONARDO ALISHAN HAKOB MOVSES EDWARD MILITONYAN HRACHYA BEYLERYAN SONA VAN HRACHYA TAMRAZYAN MICHAEL MINASSIAN SHANT MKRTCHYAN ARMEN SHEKOYAN ZAVEN BEKYAN SHOUSHIG DASNABEDIAN ARTASHES GHAZARYAN HOVIK HOVEYAN WILLIAM MICHAELIAN GAGIK KILIKYAN AVAG YEPREMYAN SAMVEL ZULOYAN SAMVEL MKRTCHYAN NORA ARMANI VAHÉ ARMEN MARINÉ PETROSYAN TIGRAN CHERAZ SEVAK HOVHANNISYAN ARA MGRDICHIAN ANOUSH NAGHASHYAN VAHAN VARDANYAN LOLA KOUNDAKJIAN VIOLET GRIGORYAN ARMEN “VON” GEVORGYAN KHACHIK MANUKYAN SYLVA DAKESSIAN TIGRAN PASKEVICHYAN HERMINÉ NAVASARDYAN MONIQUE AVAKIAN SAGO ARIAN HARVART MHER ARSHKYAN DAVID NORIAN ARMENUHI SISYAN
The Poets
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The Poets
CHRISTOPHER ATAMIAN TINA DEMIRDJIAN YEVA ADALYAN RONALD L DZERIGIAN ALAN SEMERDJIAN NARINÉ AVETYAN ARA SHIRINYAN TONDRAK ELENA MASEHIAN KAREN KARSLYAN LORY BEDIKIAN ANNA DAVTYAN ALINA GREGORIAN HASMIK SIMONYAN MANÉ GRIGORYAN MEDRIK MINNASSIAN
The Anthology of
Armenian Poets Volume II
Edited by Samvel Mkrtchyan
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KRIKOR BELEDIAN 1945-
FESTIVE RUPTURE
we have come this far that I may lose you o exile from you from your absence this exile with you you who has pensive no single name and you lean upon to these mountains’ correlation to the sea to the desert you came you combine you clasp inside hand me over moving on sand from the remote to more remote to the air opened the space of air you open out flight of destruction you soar you bend down my shoulder to the feast to the call tearing you apart and I bring forth live you disintegration to the air not to any air which closes itself to the narrowness of the higher respiration, voices so far away they sculpture statues of resonance they release you from my fingers towards the earth towards a paradise of fires and waters there were some here some there some beyond
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we don't exist suspended in the air an external and traveling dust the breath delivers you groping to the time of the legend and the arid acrid bits of metal rising in the garden finely-carved uninhabitable city in the non-earth where you are consumed with the untimely names in the service of the gleam which unites your hand to the touch of the antimountain you untouchable torn apart nothing will be able to save you as I embrace your body scattered what while spikenard hooking enticing into itself compressing sky-high a whole night and what unspeakability of speech on mountains we became different undisjointed lightened liberated in the untenable we came that you may abandon and I abandon you neither salvation nor perdition we 0 thou o I that we have both one name and no connection at all you-no-one-else you possess everything between fire and pilgrimage not a single ear to accept you in its silence and echo this turnaround from the razor-sharp countries your expiration towards the Coming of the Spirit or its irruption between the breath and itself the panting and the destruction you donate me to an intimacy closer than all
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fire raging on the sea or festive rupture separating the mouth from its origin nothing could come out of the desert in all purity so far away I enter between your infinitely debilitating intimacy and you which later became formidable I begin the last great alteration which will perhaps again be an uncovenanted harmony between the voice and oblivion o you-no-one-every one of non-event blessed bo your nothingness so blessed behold daytime is darker and the night more scorching -Vahé Oshagan
THE CHIMNEY
It feeds us back the cremated past ripping up the clouds with the bitter soot, its metal aim piercing, bleeding the sky’s cold arteries shoving up from the depths of childhood’s resurrected windows a shine like the sun through thick petroleum its roots grow up into a glistening tree that fuses above with the storm branches change into roads rising into dead-end clouds the chimney open into the remembered O of a dead father’s mouth. -Diana Der Hovanessian
UNTITLED (excerpt)
Apollo Orion Orpheus To forget you, to forget Blind Orpheus crying for the dead body of that desired woman dissolved into absorbed into darkness, the word underlined : without you how to live
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between wind and rock your name like white salt statues and cities of fire that fall like question marks Blind Orion flung your name into stars without shelter red mountains the same height as dreams stone crosses carved by historians who ignored the red fogs rising from cities the old land a sterile woman now walking through a desert into exile and Mher waiting in the dark -Diana Der Hovanessian
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MARIAN MESROBIAN 1946-
DIAMOND DUST
They say you were a shooting star that burnt out too soon, A molten ball that turned cold– You who taught me to embrace Spring as I would our newborn girlchild, To chase the pollen through the wind-stirred trees, To love with a heat that could not be contained Condensing on limbs made powerful with passion, You who could swing a hammer home In two strokes, Who could swan dive twenty-five feet into the icy quarry water, Who wrote, ’Grow old with me my love and we will watch each other’s eyes grow wise– You are now released particles of light Darting out of my reach While your ashes, like diamond dust, lie entombed in a container The size of a shoe box. Could I find you again If I sank beneath the marsh grass beyond the pond.
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GARIK BASMADJIAN 1947-1989
FIRST DREAM
The honed talons of anonymous birds whose wet eyes strain in their heads puncture the plaintive breast of a mermaid. Their beaks foam On shore, other birds sharpen their beaks, whittle at bones and the beach drowns in metallic sound.
The mermaid's chest weaves webs, a crescent of spine plunges in the sand, and crows tear the web their beaks adorned with leaves of olive.
The wind grows weighty and serious on the sand, the waves rise rise and smash, shattering the spine.
A child beats a pail with a spoon, a mother in the sand-dunes reads, accepts the sun and the pages of a newspaper. -Khachik Tololyan
SEVENTH NIGHT
The massive steel of a steamboat furrows the roof of the ocean dwellers, rends the sky of their peaceful sleep.
Before the exam a sharp-nailed student claws the silence and blackboard of the classroom.
The stars of the deep clash and fill my silence with the clanking of chains. Light curdles and stains the darkness. -Khachik Tololyan
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IGNAT MAMYAN 1947-2007
THE ETERNAL MARTYR
From the depth of the centuries, facing darkness and, chased, He is still running – for him there is no time to waste.
With the breath of death behind him, the swish of the arrow in his ears. He is on top of the mountain, he is in the abyss.
His bare feet are torn from the thorns and the stones– Lord, how this martyr is carrying his bones.
No one knows his sin – but still he is wanted, By dogs and servants he is eternally haunted.
The wild dogs are almost catching his trail and smell, Yet he always manages to escape so well.
Somewhere in my life I heard how he sighed. He passed me by – his breast torn, and a wound on his side.
One glimpse, and he was gone - vanished into gloom– His forehead was like the sun, his eyes were like the moon.
I am dying and being reborn, and I see He’s still roaming in clothes as bloody as can be.
Breaking all the barriers of death and life, He’s running unsinned – an eternal strife.
He can always escape but it’s hard all along, Slipping and sliding and bleeding but strong.
Many a dog and a servant have come into this world, Yet the wounded martyr’s flag is unfurled.
So he goes, hanging on the rocks of salvation– Above the sinful morass of many a nation.
... And if you see one chilly morning instead– The dogs, are back again blood-mouthed and fed,
Then know this is the end of our prayers and calls, Conscience is dog-food – and the eternal darkness falls. -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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SAMVEL KOSYAN 1947-
You are the distant blue bird, skylark, lost and unable to find your way out of your solo air. Your friends listen only to their own songs and to fruits ripening on their beaks. But you are my lost blue bird, finch, bell-bird, lost at night and drying your tears in the handkerchief of the night sky. Do I still love you? Or is it only habit carrying me over matted grass below you without dreams toward you? But I am coming, Coming towards you, Closer, Closer. -Diana Der Hovanessian
SONA
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HRACHYA SAROUKHAN -Samvel Mkrtchyan
1947-
FAITH
Like Time that is permanent and eternal, Unending like Wine and Bread, My Native Land is in my room, my kernel— Around my solitude—silently spread.
AN EPIGRAM
What a big surprise, they said, what fool Does inspire himself, playing a poet, That Mary is his one and only mother, Himself—little Jesus? Didn’t we know it?
—Oh Mother of God, in your holy lap I am my own son, and my suckling father— These blockheads are poking their noses In the wrong place, elbowing each other.
PARDON ME
Pardon me, Gentle and strict saints— Roslin, Greco, Raphael— Here I dare Cleanse with my tears The dust of the hues To keep it in my heart. My fingers weep for what they have lost. This departure is awful. Leonardo is my big hero, Yet Narekatsi is alluring me.
Accept me, Dante, Garcia Lorca, Charents, Baptize me in that sacred water; Whatever the brush didn’t do in my life, The pen will— Skillful and delicate. Night has numerous shadows
SERENADE
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And a body so chilly; Moon’s gloomy phantom Seemed a little silly.
They’ve hidden my love from me, They’ve taken away my dove— I’m walking the nightly fields To find my love.
I spot yellow sadness In the autumn hay again— They told me my bitter tears Were in vain, in vain.
Night has numerous shadows As cold as the death-bed— Moon’s gloomy phantom Is a hangman — red!
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VEHANOUSH TEKYAN 1948-
TRASH COLLECTION DAY
Greetings. I’m collecting dreams today. Give me your discards on this spring cleaning day. I am gathering everything I can. Dreams don’t live long on dead end streets so I layer them all in a huge shipping trunk. I spread yellow on yellow. Then lock them in. Let them stare into each other’s eyes until their words lose meanings, lose pronunciation and even their very molecules die from inactivity, unmedicated, unmeditated. Then at the right time I will set fire to the whole lot and calmly watch their demise. Multi-color dreams will meld in the dark like poisoned flames keeling over. Then the dreams will collapse fold by fold. Won’t it be fun to watch them disintegrate? I’ll collect any variety of dream you have. Instead of burning flags for peace let us set fire to dreams. -Diana Der Hovanessian
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ASHOT AVDALYAN -Samvel Mkrtchyan
1948-1985
DEEPER IN SLEEP THAN A THOUSAND YEARS
Deeper in sleep than a thousand years I am kinder than a thousand fairy tales, And more than any spring the mists here Can hear the purling of the warmest creeks.
Emptied by my forefather’s hand And in his hand completed, ended, Live these days on the warmest sounds. Having walked upon the coolest streams.
I am leaving for another region now Where delights and winds are in full blossom; Placing another sky upon the ground I do believe in another song,
Leaving, having lived the tenderness And the ancient compassion of the stars; Neither yearning nor bread shall desert me And I shall not ride other people’s mares.
Do not look around to find me again, I did not exist, forget gossips and lies. I, emptied by my forefather’s hand, And in his hand completed, I.
CALL ME, O DAY
Call me, O Day– it’s to reveal oneself, let the hired maids of memory sing in chorus, let the rain declare a day of boredom, let me bear echoes and droll fantasies. I hear anew that return of exhaustion has no memory, the diamonds of the morning are just breaking, application of faith opening like a door. And I, like a conciliating hand, and I, like a legitimate eye, and I, as a man waiting for the new – weave ornaments out of rain’s delight
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to donate them to petitioners. Do open a door: I am free of losses, Here I come to compensate a song, And the chorus will isolate the seer.
AND YOU WAKE THE DAY
And you wake the day In the horns of abundance and you bring slumber to the dawning poem; where are your years of conception and re-reading? where is the image your life is reiterating? where is the day that brings you earnest conception? where is the wind enhancing nightmares and visions? where is your face? The days elapse and the word "joy" is fading, and your night is slipping like a blessed speech, and the wind is sound asleep on these exuberant fields– where is your love? No illusion of return within you, slide down; every beginning is fatal, every colour dark, see how your face turns to the ground, hardening– where is your death?
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TANYA HOVHANISSYAN 1948-1988
THERE ARE GOLD-HAIRED LITTLE MIDGET
There are gold-haired little midget males, innocent lambs whose bleat is not even lungful and does not involve or move even their own noses and throats, and whose hair is not black and does not sit tight in the skin because it has no root, and when they walk feebly.
It’s the stones and pebbles that hurt their hearts and little feet, not them thundering upon the ground; they drink from streamlets and little waters, they chew little medicinal herbs, they eat gaunt little flowers and beneath their little tongues and little teeth they have their fill with little sweet honey, and they Just can’t digest the stone, swallow dust, climb a rock or a mountain– damsels damsels damsels, that’s what they are, my innocent lambs, my humble lowly men.
Loving and midget—they must not meet an enemy, a beast; thin-armed sentimentalists, how can they cop a foe? My little ones, from beneath your transparent and little skin your blood flows like juice mixed with water, how can I be wife to you? how can I lean on your thin shoulders? how can I hope in the midst of cold and knife wound, racket and war, looking at your acorn eyes and nut hearts? my dear innocent lambs, handsome and cushy and meek, softhearted tame boys without a pole-axe, a helmet, no falcon, no arrow and bow, beardless, eternally trimmed, with silk skin and shirt, damsels my damsels, powerless little creatures, I love you enough for my grass, my ants, my candles, my birds, my beetles, my sons and grandchildren.
Don’t take pains to come and ask my hand: I can’t be wife to you, I, the mistress. I. the fair lady.
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I, the opposite sex. I will only spread my wings. I will give you sweets, protect you from the Northern wind I’ll do Mommy, tenable : Loving Mommy, alas—to you. -Samvel Mkrtchyan
I AM NOT A PAINTER
but if I could just paint my eyes on canvas and name my painting “Sadness” I’d be famous. -Diana Der Hovanessian
SNOW
When it’s snowing and the woods are hard to see we’ll kiss under the branches and climb the cold tree. Everyone seeing us will exclaim Look how that tree has blossomed in flame. -Diana Der Hovanessian
was to live as a human called the most able after God.
My fate was to live in this fearful century.
My fate was to have a dream I could not reach and to die without kissing even your eyes. -Diana Der Hovanessian
MY FATE
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HRIPSIMÉ 1948-
EATING POMEGRANATES
It is said the fist is exactly heart sized. How can this be? My fist is so small. While the huge pomegranate of your heart fits in my heart where it’s installed.
Everything is as it should be; we sit with a pomegranate to share. Everything is fine except that my key doesn’t open your door.
You do the talking. I listen. Perhaps we are halves of one whole. You say I am yours and you are mine. Why doesn’t your key open my door? -Diana Der Hovanessian
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BRENDA NAJIMIAN MAGARITY 1948-
FOR MY MUSE: WHEREVER I MAY FIND HER
Oh, black-haired nine that did brave my most grave moments to send me a song: Each day, you bask in the sunshine of my praise, and like seashells nesting on an ocean bank you wait for me to cast my net and gather your choral wave of heroic hymn.
Pierian roses, I found you on the low end of the city in the open hands of the ragged man asking for work. “Anything’ll do,” he said You ached to reach into the deep pockets of his coat, but could not.
I found you in the reflection of a barroom mirror, costumed in sari you stole a magic carpet to cut an extra hour out of the night, then gave it up when your sad eyes signaled you home.
I found you in a gallery, too shy to speak to the artist; you hid in the shadow of a corner of the room. I managed to carry your words home in a basket and watched as you hung them out to dry.
And once, when I thought you were lost to me forever, I found a remnant of you caught like a loose thread between the lines of an old poem; and I rediscovered the simple beauty of a single word: Muse, and you played a symphony in my mind. I
It is 1910, and I hear
CARPET WEAVERS
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the voices of young women as they weave.
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One says, “Let us read Sayat Nova at midday.”
“I, too, am a poet,” another says, “but tell no one, the Turks despise Armenian poets.”
And they giggle with hearts that flutter like those of doves in spring believing life will go on like this forever
working, weaving casting the dye into a deeper, deeper purple that they weave around a sunburst design.
II
In 1915 everything changed;
a nation’s people were lined up and marched to sea.
Hands, that could write rugs in the language of color, colors derived from herb and root and the earth itself,
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hands, that could write rugs, fell limp at their sides.
Most died crossing the desert, bones bleached by the sun left sticking out of sand pointing, pointing to a God they had known.
One nation jostled out of a sweet dream and forced to leave their carpets sleeping, one nation caught in the Turk’s jaw, his iron teeth clamped down and opened the grid of genocide.
And the breast of Armenia ached to suckle the children who were gone.
III
It is present, yet memory makes the past present too.
Somewhere one still collects the wool from the backs of sheep,
and somewhere one still weaves a double-headed eagle that dreams of Eden’s Garden when it was new,
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and somewhere in a place not unlike Mount Ararat the nightingale sings of an angel woven into an unfinished design.
An angel, who patiently waits for her weavers who call themselves Armenians. Why Saroyan are you not of this earth anymore?
Where will your typewriter blink out the lights tonight?
And when will your ashes shower over Bitlis as you wished?
You have taken all the answers with you cunningly, succinctly, and left the world to argue as you willed it?
Yet, in the end you asked: Had not this earth the time to make another day with you?
ExIT SAROYAN
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LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS
Flowers aqua and yellow pressed between your Russian and our English.
Flowers tidy and dry colored portraits pastel shades a flattened bud pointing to a word or phrase: A reservoir left open.
I have forgotten why I put them here these book barnacles living on the rhythm of a line all these years getting lost in translation.
Ah, Akhmatova
I wish I could have softened the down of your cold pillow in Kiev.
THE EFFECT OF GENOCIDE ON TWENTIETH CENTURY THOUGHT
The death instinct is at work again today-
Yet, I've come to celebrate it now that I am churlish enough to crave
days of living in and out of fog I can assume a new repose and languish in this refrain-
Oh, what a beautiful day to die
as I charge like a mad Indian bent on revenge of her lost tribe
as I charge fleeing against the wind
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as I charge holier than thou can even guess
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and deliberately make my heart joyful to the thought of
the grave's imposing draw.
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BAGRAT ALEKYAN 1949-
MY FATHER
It’s been so many years I’m coming to you carrying your stone And I’m not there yet. I’ve lost my way, father, I’ve lost my way. Your stone, hardened from pain, Has pierced my blood, And we, already one bodyFor so many yearsThrough each otherAre coming without knowing Who brings who Towards you. -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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GREGORY DJANIKIAN 1949-
APARTMENT HOUSE AT EVENING
Something about a hundred windows lit up like a ship's upper decks, something
about the weed trees tossing like water below
and the cumulus steam from the boiler stacks billowing away
and something, too, about a woman taking off her heels and leaning
dreamily on the balcony railing as if there's an ocean about her
and something about the laundry strung up between apartments
like flags signalling the future and about the samba now
wafting in the cool breeze and moonlight falling from everywhere
and Nevrig dancing on the rooftop with Aram and the city blazing with lights
like a harbor about to be left behind with its customs house and identity cards, the lines untied, the deep horizonless night rolling in.
WHEN I FIRST SAW SNOW
Bing Crosby was singing "White Christmas" on the radio, we were staying at my aunt's house waiting for papers, my father was looking for a job. We had trimmed the tree the night before, sap had run on my fingers and for the first time I was smelling pine wherever I went. Anais, my cousin, was upstairs in her room listening to Danny and the Juniors.
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Haigo was playing Monopoly with Lucy, his sister, Buzzy, the boy next door, had eyes for her and there was a rattle of dice, a shuffling of Boardwalk, Park Place, Marvin Gardens. There were red bows on the Christmas tree. It had snowed all night. My boot buckles were clinking like small bells as I thumped to the door and out onto the grey planks of the porch dusted with snow. The world was immaculate, new, even the trees had changed color, and when I touched the snow on the railing I didn't know what I had touched, ice or fire. I heard, "I'm dreaming. . ." I heard, "At the hop, hop, hop. . . oh, baby." I heard "B & O" and the train in my imagination was whistling through the great plains. And I was stepping off, I was falling deeply into America.
FIRST SUPPER IN THE NEW COUNTRY
Uncle Hagop was grilling kebab in the fireplace, sitting on a crate, basting each morsel of lamb with yogurt and oil. "This is for your mother," he was saying, as he drew the brush along a skewer, "and this is in memory of your grandfather who swims with the fishes." There was hardly any furniture, all our rugs had been left behind, there were so many echoes.
Outside, it was Pennsylvania heavy with snow, the sidewalks had disappeared, streets had become a mirage of dunes.
"Uncle Hagop," I said, "the place is filling up with smoke." Our eyes had begun tearing, we were opening windows, flapping towels by the front door.
"Look at these beauties," he said, turning the onions on their sides, singing O rise up my Armenian heart above the jeweled Caucasus!
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There was nothing to do but shrug helplessly as the neighbors passed by the door looking in, amazed to see something like a campfire in the middle of the city and Uncle Hagop lifting up his glass
to the sheep herders of Yerevan and the hardy grasses and grape vines rooted deep in the rocky soil.
My grandmother was looking heavenward, my sister was asking if we could return to normal, we were all wiping our eyes, waiting for sirens or the eviction notice
and Uncle Hagop was singing another chorus about the heartland, forking the lamb to its soft pink center, and bringing platefuls of it like an offering to the makeshift table
where we sat down, raising a toast to the old life and new, eating and saying as we ate how everything had been done to a turn, how really there was no other way of doing it.
MY NAME BRINGS ME TO A NOTION OF SPLENDOR
No one could pronounce it without mutilating spindling tearing even my best friends would shrug halfway giving up and always the long pause on the first day of class after Dillon or Dinsemore or Dix every face turning to me even though my name was not yet called and mangled in every probable way oh why wasn't I Jenkins or Jennings something safer and mannerly anything but this minefield of letters set against each other sticking in the mouth as if the fault were mine as if no other name were as impenetrable not Knoebbels or Steinbacher not Stoltzfus or Schmidt how did they come to be so inconspicuous who were they playing kickball tracing maps of America doing long division on the blackboard
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as easily as if they were walking across the street in their sleep no worries no boundaries to trip them up no Mr. Bielfield telling my mother I'll straighten him out what was so crooked? even my past life seemed now a dark labyrinth of passages my grandfather standing on the wharf in Alexandria waving goodbye and me on the great ship waving back not knowing where the prow would finally lodge on what rock what piece of exquisitely verdant beach who knew I would have to unravel the tangle of circumstances that put me in a small landlocked lumber town in Pennsylvania face to face now with Joe Schunk and having to explain the D was silent easy enough to say once you got the hang of it but Joe didn't and it was five or six fast blocks of losing him down Hawthorne and across to Pine my heart thumping and beads of sweat glistening on my arms before I heard Louisa Richards suddenly call out DeeJay to me from her porch in a way that stopped me in my tracks because nothing had ever sounded so good and nothing came easier than to walk up the stairs and sit down by her and begin telling her who I was. IMMIGRANT PICNIC
It's the Fourth of July, the flags are painting the town, the plastic forks and knives are laid out like a parade.
And I'm grilling, I've got my apron, I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish, I've got a hat shaped like the state of Pennsylvania.
I ask my father what's his pleasure and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare," and then, "Hamburger, sure, what's the big difference," as if he's really asking.
I put on hamburgers and hot dogs, slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas, uncap the condiments. The paper napkins
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are fluttering away like lost messages.
"You're running around," my mother says, "like a chicken with its head loose."
"Ma," I say, "you mean cut off, loose and cut off being as far apart as, say, son and daughter."
She gives me a quizzical look as though I've been caught in some impropriety. "I love you and your sister just the same," she says, "Sure," my grandmother pipes in, "you're both our children, so why worry?"
That's not the point I begin telling them, and I'm comparing words to fish now, like the ones in the sea at Port Said, or like birds among the date palms by the Nile, unrepentantly elusive, wild.
"Sonia," my father says to my mother, "what the hell is he talking about?" "He's on a ball," my mother says.
"That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands, "as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll . . . ."
"And what about roll out the barrels?" my mother asks, and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says, "let's have some fun," and launches into a polka, twirling my mother around and around like the happiest top,
and my uncle is shaking his head, saying "You could grow nuts listening to us,"
and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai burgeoning without end, pecans in the South, the jumbled flavor of them suddenly in my mouth, wordless, confusing, crowding out everything else. I ASK MY GRANDMOTHER IF WE CAN MAKE LAHMAJOUN
Sure, she says, why not, we buy the ground lamb from the market
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we buy parsley, fresh tomatoes, garlic we cut, press, dice, mix
make the yeasty dough the night before, kneading it until our knuckles feel the hardness of river beds or rocks in the desert
we tell Tante Lola to come with her rolling pins we tell Zaven and Maroush, Hagop and ArpinĂŠ to bring their baking sheets
we sprinkle the flour on the kitchen table and it is snowing on Ararat we sprinkle the flour and the memory of winter is in our eyes
we roll the dough out into small circles pale moons over every empty village
Kevork is standing on a chair and singing O my Armenian girl my spirit longs to be nearer
Nevrig is warming the oven and a dry desert breeze is skimming over the rooftops toward the sea
we are spreading the lahma on the ajoun with our fingers whispering into it the histories of those who have none
we are baking them under the heat of the sun the dough crispening so thin and delicate
you would swear it is valuable parchment we are taking out and rolling up in our hands
and eating and tasting again
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everything that has already been written into the body.
*
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GHUKAS SIRUNYAN 1949-
MY MOTHER IS ASLEEP
My mother is asleep beneath the rows of red pepper, Beside the gourds relishing the sun like grandmothers— In the windy warmth of the autumn leaving the meadow. My mother is asleep beside clemency, worth, and fruit-trees, On the edge of vigor, jealousy, and precarious undertakings, Beside the smoldering hearths, vivacious thoughts and profound laughter. My mother is asleep in miraculous events That are fairy-tales; look from afar, Or come near—they are her very life.
I know my mother will not wake up although she is asleep, Because hers is the slumber Of a bird in the nest; For the first time, she lies so solemn Like an astronaut before the flight.
Later, when the ship sailed over the shoulders of men And took my mother out of this world, The meadow’s beautiful wind entered our home, With the hoe in its hand, directing the lost calves— It came, sat on the threshold beside my shrunk father And said: Well, well, I dunno. I DIDN'T DIE AT 10
I didn't die at 10 because I hadn't climbed high mountains to have a great fall.
I didn't die at 20 because I was dying to know what was going on behind the locked door of my blonde landlady.
I didn't die at 30 because I detected God's knees and was eager to see His face
I didn't die at 40 because my childhood was over and I was wanted to know what was coming up.
I didn't die at 50
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because I was too tired and so eager to find my way home at last.
I didn't die at 60 because I saw the sky was too deep and looking upwards was cozier than even being there.
Remember, my friends, in any event, how hard it was reaching you how hard it was protecting myself from youor else how could I be here? -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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EDWARD HAKHVERDYAN 1951-
QUIS HIC LOCUS, QUAE REGIO, QUAE MUNDI PLAGA? Conversing with Dante, T. S. Eliot, and Farrugh Farrokhzad—for you.
I. Why should I mourn— The raven that flew Over our heads Prophesied your death The squeal pierced my heart Like a blind bullet.
No one knows, No one knows Who will return From the eternal reflection of mirrors, And to what extent the dark womb of time Will be encumbered.
We stopped and saw The tearless lamentation Of small fountains, We stopped and saw The money epidemic And the ink stains Leaving our fingers unhurriedly.
Trees do not run While daily grand miracles Bring but tediousness To the beasts of prey in the quagmire. No one knows, No one knows Who is going to pay The fixed price of cowardice And with what commandments we shall patch up The shattered soul of the rose. We stopped and saw The estrangement of the sunflower Blushed from infamy. We stopped and saw The fake corona Of sinister prophets— And our self-effacing love Burned to no avail.
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II. Why should I mourn— We have to acquire We have to acquire the black frame; What must happen does happen Before the thought about it And the pursuing lights of death Connect and disconnect From time to time. I saw The swaying rope Weaved with kisses, And your body— A sunflower. Trees do not run They ascend all the time Sinking.
Time… Time whispers but one word In a sexless voice HESITATION. III. Why should I mourn— Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign? Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? Where April is not the only cruellest month, Without rain, And a crowded army of rogues Erupts Off the fertile womb of a nation—of Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning Death Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning Death Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning Death Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning Death While the country, hopelessly sick, The country, cruelly etherized Upon the table Screams silently O MY PEOPLE, WHAT HAVE I DONE UNTO THEE
IV. The shoot of the tree was prompting me about living The small fountain was prompting me about living
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The burying seed was prompting me about living— The stiff rock, the rolling stone Were prompting me about living While Death was the enormous tree On whose exhausted branches The living of This Side, the “Beginning,” Were hanging strips, praying to their saints, While the dead of the Other Side, the “End,” Were scratching their phosphorescent roots. Death, the greatest counsellor, Death, the eternal companion, Screams silently Nothing matters more Than touching you although I haven’t touched you yet. While we Thirsting our own blood Used to shout out at the squares The march of death with Long live and Down with…
V. We are the cold-blooded wolves, Lord, pray for us. No prophet, no king—we don’t want anything. No holy sermons, no commandments—we don’t want anything. We are the cold-blooded wolves, the depleted souls— Neither God nor the devil wants us. Lord, pray for us Devourers and munchers. Cross your face and burn your sacred torches For our hollow bodies Have no heart of compassion… Lord, pray for us At the hour of our birth And at the hour of our death. VI. The dying seagull prompts me about flying The dying seagull prompts me about flying The dying seagull prompts me about flying The dying soldier Prompts me about man’s ignorance. No one knows, No one knows Who will save Our legacy From single-celled protozoa; Who will turn the desert into an orchard;
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By what miracle Our distorted faces Will show The sweet gladness of self-recognition.
Let us go, then, Let us go firmly To the overwhelming question WHAT HAPPENED TO US? -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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PETER BALAKIAN 1951-
Everything was tangled up in blue. Seeping glaze on the Delft jug,
BLUE
liquefaction of the Virgin’s silk as it spread in Titian's cobalt
to a fleshy embrace and the green meadows in the distance fade to hammered light.
Light we pulled into a string of glass that seeped out of the long vibration
of Miles’ Blue in Green like slow time in the empty lot
after soot and rain and rush, the Ferry out of sight,
my bones electric with the hum of the cable of the Bridge at 3 a.m.
and the dying lights of the Bowery. Bill Evans making the rain thin
to a beam of haze before the horn comes back from underwater.
ROCK'N'ROLL
The groove in black vinyl got deeper— What was that light? A migrant I slid into a scat,
and in the purple silk and the Canoe
there was a sleekness and a rear-view mirror.
And the Angels flew out of the cloisonné vase. They were the rachitic forks hanging in the midnight kitchen.
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And so I called you after the house was still. My turquoise Zenith melting and you asked: what was that light?
I was spinning. I was the trees shivering, and the snake of coiled light on the ceiling was moonglow.
I wasn’t a fool in a satin tux. I was Persian gold and blue chenille, I was the son of the Black Dog of Fate.
I said: I saw a rainbow of glass above the Oritani Theater.
Lord, lead me from Hackensack New Jersey into the white streak of exhaust.
SAIGON/NEW JERSEY
It was russet light, Orchard Lane, white-shingle colonials and the ch ch of the sprinklers, small rainbows in twilight,
the fabric-smell of the funeral parlor on us. From a fence we fell to the fairway on all fours, a sky of purple berries, and my hand swollen from a doubleheader, Ho Chi Minh, a tin sound in the air.
A brash oak casket was less than the absence
of your brother's arm still clear as the ghostly rubber of the mound. Your Heaven Scent heavy as we slid into the trap,
and the white number of the flag grew incandescent. You who loved
the classics said Orion’s eyes
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were wild birds against pure black,
and our bodies burned into each other.
THE END OF REAGAN ERA
Endless horizons of wheat and corn out of Willa Cather’s reach, and Ross Perot moving through it all.
I clicked a lever for my candidate, the curtains opened like at Oz, and my vote blew out the doors of the Jehovah Witness hall.
I walked back through the saffrony maple leaves just wet enough to stick to my basement trap door, and sat outside and read some student papers on the Gulf War.
I thought of the states floating in their electoral colors on the screen the way the scuds and patriots flickered in their matrix dots before and after
the Giants played the Bills on channel 4. In another century Galileo said “but still, it moves” under his breath, and today the Vatican agrees.
Since legends keep us sane, I think today of Cianfa, one of the five thieves of Florence who was clasped by a six foot lizard
who ate his nuts and went right up his torso until the two of them were two-in-one.
I love the clemency of roads this time of year the way they tail off to the beautiful barns. The slips of the daylilies come off.
The wind blows in from Vermont, blows the silk kimonos
off the delphiniums, blows the satin cowls off the jack-in-the-pulpits.
PHOTOSYNTHESIS
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Let it blow the detonated-pollen green, acid-rubbed,
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plumed and rotting day-blow into the leaves their silver undersides wet you at night.
Slide your tongue into the green dark
so you can see the ultraviolet scars on the goldfields where the bees come in the day.
The night air rises like steam from a mud-pot,
and you see nothing. Hear no voice. See no light. Just yourself staring back at you in middle age,
as if the novocain of the sea urchin froze your lids.
You see the window you built
where you placed your hands and broke your turquoise jars and saw the stones
of scalding yellow where the steam had burned things back to where your private lust and your longing for history were colorless, and the blood of the dianthus was gone.
You see your life rise
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and slide away like steam,
feel a goat-tongue lost in a mountain wet you down.
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LEONARDO ALISHAN 1951-2008
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
My father was the sculptor of the gods, my mother, their dream. my mother was my father’s obsession, refusing conversion into marble. When my father attempted and failed to sculpt her I was conceived. I was a dream that was a dream.
I could not be. I am her nightmare of marble and his nightmare of formlessness.
The gods are busy with other things. my father is preoccupied with symmetry, my mother, with pure content. I am the only one who is obsessed with a clean, hard, marble-white madness, reusing from, refusing all that could be formed, yet, swelling in the mind of gods, swelling in the heart of marble, where father meets mother in a frustrated violent embrace. The wind releases seagulls from the foam of the waves but the boat Is glued to the blue glass.
When my brother dived, pieces of the shattered blue dropped on the deck.
UNTITLED
We watched him float face down for many days, we watched the wind release seagulls from the foam of the waves and wished that we were light that our fetters were feathers that the wind...
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but the wind kicked us in the groin.
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Somewhere there is my brother fishes nibbling on his eyes, and we, glued to the water, lick our parched lips dry and think of the seagulls and wonder which seagull’s nest is held together with your hair my brother.
MONOLOGUES OF THE HOLLOW VALE
For Ehsan and Latifeh Yarshater
I
We will bring down everything to ruin— and then we will go on and destroy the ruins. -Alfred Jarry, 1990
Come Aristotle, behold the ragged wailing women of Persepolis, study the patient effort of the worm as it pierces the Persian aristocrat’s eye to penetrate your pupil’s heart. The Mongol hordes were not taught the poetics of politics but the flames were as tall and the worm was as busy when their horses neighed in Nishapur.
For every bomb that falls from heaven, for every child who is laughing, playing, buying or biting a loaf of bread as she dies, a usurer rejoices in his heart of no heart where jackals couple with delight.
Come Aristotle, behold how like unto our gods we have become that we may now pluck the tulips from our fresh graves with our clean gloves.
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II
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When thou art gone whose is the kingdom, where is the kingdom when thou art gone? Within us wail the wandering winds.
I have seen the basket of Summer fruit. I have wandered from sea to sea, I have run to and fro and I have not found the apple that was not within the dominion of the worm.
When thou art gone we art gone like the wind that passeth away and cometh not again. Our civilization was thy biography . . .
When inequity changes hands like the dollar bill forgiveness is a tax deductible contribution. Gone is the Macedonian armor, gone is the Mongol’s war cry. One of us will push the button now.
III
Astral corpses hang like idle balloons after the feast is done. Moira, Aristotle, as my Muslim masters understood, is his will. The stars only conveyed commands, idle messengers dying in the courtyard when the king’s dead.
Khayyam, sober, smashed his astrolobe against the mosque. Not even fate is to blame when the planets wander about like cattle in search of plants. We are left with nothing to curse but our hands, hands that crowned the king only to murder him.
The shepherd is dreaming, drunk, or dead. The cattle run wild in the wheat field. War is still here. The king is not. This is Gaugamela: Darius quietly fled while thousands fell amid the clash of brass.
I have studied St. Francis and know Rumi well, but like a church on Friday or a mosque on Sunday, the heart is vacant.
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Vacant is the heart like the king’s throne. Only the worm wriggles in the hollow of the heart.
IV
Avicenna knew the domain of the worm– wrapped in barbed wire, devoured by cancer, or like a boat on the river Styx, rocking to and fro on an old rocking chair. Avicenna sought the salvation of the bird.
When the king is dead, the cage is empty. The cage is an end in itself— a bag of bones rattling in the wind.
When the worm is done with the cage no bird shall spread its wings against the smoggy sky.
I have watched flowers bloom and grow. I have seen them scatter in the Autumn wind. Flowers arrived next Spring, as fair but not familiar. The wind that passeth away cometh not again.
We have strangled the king and do not know what to do with his crown. Aristotle was the appetizer, Avicenna, the main dish. The worm gives neither a second thought as it slips into the bomb shelter. The bird died in the king’s throat.
V
What is left when the king is dead and the stench of rotting corpses fills the air? Guinevere naked amidst a host of dead knights. Artificially induced illusions. Alcohol, cold unholy Camelot.
Pills to sleep. Pills to tolerate the day. Alcohol to forget the pills, the bills, the good mornings and good nights. A joint, not to put the limbs of Arthur back, but to laugh at the worm in the heart of Lancelot.
Yet, the mind selects memories with the precision of a torturer selecting instruments. Cancerous lungs can’t afford to laugh. Camelot crumbles and the crystal chandelier shatters, pieces scatter in the brain and heart.
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For the right price, pushers provide pills, powders, guns or Guinevere. T.V. preachers offer pieces of the Cross. Tax deductible contributions are always welcome. The junkie dies by the drunk in the street.
VI
Had there been a war worth fighting all wars would have had some wisdom and I would have found a wise war to meet the worm. If Lazarus were returning I would have gone through wars to greet him.
But no sage can make the dead king rise. No king can make a war look wise. No wisdom will lead me to paradise. Sanity is left as the sole sin when the sane sit by computers and calculate acceptable losses in limited nuclear wars.
Forgive me, poets, if I am blunt as prose, but where there is madness there is no art. Bach is in the hands of an organist worried for his job. It rained on the renaissance. I am a beggar begging for order in the ruins of Persepolis.
Tourists give me dollars. Cain offers drugs. The cage rattles in the wind. A mad mother searches for the flower of her womb among the dead. When thou art gone only the earth is at peace with the worm.
VII
Andromache, most beloved earth, the worm waits somewhere outside the crumbling walls and nothing can protect you or me or the children to whom you have given birth. Hope is a horse with a broken leg. Come, Andromache, let us forget the king and forgive him for the promises we made him make and made him break. I promise, no more talk of Camelot, no more Guinevere. Give me your warmth.
Andromache, most beloved companion, we have wailed enough in the ruins of Persepolis. What you or I were before Gaugamela, no one can restore.
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Let us care for and enjoy the flowers we have planted together.
Come, Andromache, let us light the darkness from our fireplace and sit beside it tonight with no drinks, no pills, just open hearts. Let us watch together, perhaps we will share a few sunrises before a vision of the mushroom cloud. COMMUNION
Bach? No. Give me mad Komitas. Give me the compositions he composed in the last years of his life in the last cells of his soul, and wrote on the desert sand. No. Bach’s God is a cathedral God, mathematically too precise. Give me my mad Komitas searching for his handful of notes amidst one million and five hundred thousand dead. Give me music made with bread baked with blood. Let the flawless Father be Bach’s, let Bach’s flawless music be his Father’s. Give me that simple necklace made with the teeth of a mutilated God. Yes. Give me Komitas.
MY ARMENIAN HISTORY BOOK
Broken bridges. Burnt books. Shells filled with sharp shrieks. Madmen wandering in tattered shirts dragging shackled dreams along. Blood seeps through a shroud of snow. Black days. White bones. Bishops in bonfires. Brides with long black hair.
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Brides with short white dreams. Snakes nesting in abandoned churches. Winds resting in abandoned brains. Stranded daughters. Branded sons. Bloody boots. Loud cries. Deaf gods. Frightened sheep. Waves, waves, endless, relentless, red waves running over burnt books, broken bridges, battered bones. THE HERITAGE
The forest burns. Why do you stay with the trees when the antelope runs? These drums beating thick roots into your feet are Granny’s worm-infested bones beating against her stretched skin. These drums belong to this forest, this forest to this fire. Why do you with those antelope eyes, stay with these trees?
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HAKOB MOVSES 1952-
HAKOB MENDSOURI
Come at the sowing time. I have sown the vetch, the wheat, the barley – and in your furrows, O Pain, I wrote a palmful of words at the break of day. There are signs, which, I say, how can we forget? the wind, the dawn, a little scream bent upon the edge of a cornfield or the Venus star – this be my grant to your Mount Kapoutlous through Autumn nights, God said. I am telling my story, come– and you, my twilight, blue ox, my sign of the full moon under your ear, and my donkey, with pitchers of honey on each side, the light green and blue, which, oh– and you. Yearning, following me like a lonely partridge, where I hang over the waters of memory your golden branch. Motherland, oh– I am telling my story, having returned from a long pilgrimage and having brought shoes, a belt, a bosomful of songs; so come and take them – how can we forget? that’s the way he came, that’s the way we saw him– sitting. In the evening, according to your timid precept – you, seven villages on the right bank– stooping and old, a trembling hand on heart, having supper with our warbling old men by the waters, oh partridge, you were on his right shoulder, and on the left, you, Motherland, Oh— -Samvel Mkrtchyan
COME YOU WHO ARE VOICELESS AND SILENT
Some riders are roving in the field, and are enjoying in the dead of night. on the tender pad of a child there is the odor of lilies in white.
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Some girls, gathered in the night, are decorating the stage curtains, ah, it must beam, suddenly flash out, it must catch fire - the ruby of promise.
In the dead of gloom, get out depressed the old men talking in deep voice, the shepherd silently getting kneel, and the fishermen singing speechless.
Some boys, too near each other, are standing at the sources, they are pricking the ears there to the pealing organ's melodies.
Come you who are voiceless and silent, in whose hearts blooms the flower of hope, it has already been promised - the bright birth of the faraway uncertainty of your great love.
And the beamy fruit of your expectation will be put on your tables today. And to the quiet waters, tonight, must be put the symbol of your love and the durable mark of your hope. -Christine Kocharian
THAT'S WHY I GO HUNTING AGAIN
Talk whatever you will in my absence; I’m your huntsman, so smart, down the river; Take a look at my spectacular sandals, Take a look at my arrows and quiver.
It's from screaming (don't you take any notice) It's from screaming my voice is so hoarse: I've been constantly missing the mark For I've been nudged as a matter of course. I scattered my voice to position The hunting places of my silence in vain; That's why I took hold of my quiver, That's why I go hunting again.
(He conducted me briskly in silence, And instructed me, If you let it fly, To strike it without doubt and for sure You must aim at your heart in the sky.
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Good hunter, He'd cheer, You're my hope, My promise that you ought to keep; Yet why'd He be kissing my eyes, then? Yet why would He suddenly weep?)
Why would the deer keep evading? Why would the doe stay away? Each time I returned from my mountains Empty-handed, shedding tears on the way.
That's how I frightened my hunt; He has left me all on my own; My partridge is hidden forever, And my skylarks have eternally flown.
Maybe I will fail once again, Lord, To see all those beautiful faces, But I know now those birds so resplendent, I know all their clandestine places! -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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EDWARD MILITONYAN -Samvel Mkrtchyan
1952-
CAESAR’S QUESTION
Caesar’s body Was being knifed Like an overcome flag Upon the blades of daggers. His friends and sneaky foes Had put their commas, Dashes, and finally, periods on it. The question—And you, Brute? Received no reply. History repeats like a stubborn child: And you, Brute? And you, Paul? And you, Peter? CICERO’S VOICE
No one can shut Cicero’s mouth. They put pillows on his face. They lock him in labyrinths, Cover him with sacks of sand, Throw him into atom waste pits— No way. We can hear his voice from the depths of history: O tempore, o morale, O humanity. ARCHIMEDES
He went into a bathroom and shouted: Eureka! No one shouted Eureka in bathrooms. So they thought it was a discovery. Each time we take a bath We’re cleansing and relaxing— This one must be our eternal discovery: Eureka! Caesars came And passed over you, Like the Nile upon the sands.
CLEOPATRA
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Now you look like Sahara, While the Nile is whirling about your leg Like a snake.
SOCRATES
xanthippe, unrestrained woman, Don’t you fatigue, Socrates. He has to Philosophize, Measuring the world’s drivel in his own drivel. xanthippe, unrestrained woman, How did you break Socrates’ feather That he has left us no word. The poison! How wonderful is the poison! It saves From prison, xanthippe, the forecasters to come. Except this drivel in a written from.
ALExANDER THE GREAT
Alexander the Great Was weeping on the shores of the Indian Ocean. There was no land anymore to conquer. He could not conquer water It ran between his fingers, The ocean flew though the sieve of his mind. One has to die to conquer everything, Therefore, he died fast, Sending the sealed envelope to us That we cannot open All these centuries. And we are weeping like him— Weeping with his tears Against this Cosmic Ocean.
THE UNEMPLOYED POET
The unemployed poet doesn’t write: He’s unemployed all the same. Some of his readers have fled to Germany, Some to the Netherlands, Some to India, Some wayward ladies to Turkey, Some - seemingly gay - to the States. There’s hardly any reader among those who have stayed. It’s very special, it needs management. Here is the desk,
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Where the poet’s wife is drying basil; What a smell! They’ll have tasty meals in the winter, The dry basil will be reminiscent of the summer. Probably the poet will be recalling his songs, Which, like paper doves, Used to fly out the window.
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HRACHYA BEYLERYAN 1952PAN
I saw Pan in a glade—he was so discouraged, So incomplete, looking older. With a white crooked fang stuck out of his jowl, With a speckled moon on his shoulder.
Green was his goatee Fecundated in his mother’s womb; Every heavy pace of his goat’s heavy hoof Made the full moon go boom.
An echo was swelling far in the distance, Scattering leaves that were sear; A ladybird was rolling down his sad cheek, Like a salty tear.
Suddenly an iris fainted beneath my feet (The fear was blind, epileptic) When out of Pan’s ear the hysterical crickets Leaped off intersected.
Yet he gave me a sign, hand on the laurel cup: With a voice from a cave (no doubt), He started to talk of his Flute—oh the goat Wrinkling from gout.
Shepherding the herd of the vapor he played And refreshed the iris again; Injecting stars into the eyes of the night, He blew a dandelion away.
He spread out an unknown, irrevocable way By his magic mouthful of air— An awkward phantom, he went to mingle with The shaggy mist there. -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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SONA VAN 1952-
My grandfather was a minister. He believed in God from 9 to 6. At night he would rest.
My father was a physicist. From 9 to 6 he ignored God. After 6 he secretly believed.
My aunt kept all her love letters in her Bible. And read them both with the same rapt look. Watching her through the keyhole I couldn’t tell which redemption she preferred.
I almost forgot to mention my mother. She was too busy to believe or not. She was too busy making things, baking all day long.
My father, the physicist believed in Christ’s manger birth. He said most ridiculous stories were true because no one would make up such stuff. He also believed in miracles. For instance Mother.
Father always said
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
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she was a miracle and had made us all from dough. -Diana Der Hovanessian
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HRACHYA TAMRAZYAN 1953-
-Samvel Mkrtchyan
TITLE
There is my end in my words—the past, The present yet to come for seeing, Like a frame, like a drawing cast Upon my words comprehending my being.
Do they indicate a way of choice Or they are merely explicating the way? But for the past nobody has a voice, Erasing every name every day.
The way stretches—up to where? Up to where? But still there are words unsaid; And words that will never sound fair, And I promise to wait like the dead
For my death, which is my guide As a title of a book unfinished; It had shared its fate with me to glide With the line and the rhythm diminished.
LIFE IS AN ALIEN SOUL
Life is an alien soul, a sky drowned in a flash; The eyes are sniveling from blind images Like stars turned to ash.
Dark ashes of yearnings, A gloomy dream, a superior reflection, A scorched sun—struck through with dashes— With one last effort The soul rises from hot ashes.
CITY—A BLACK PEARL
City—a black pearl in the shell of the night, The stars are meek as compared With your lights. Night is your black dawn When your shutters are unbolted
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before frightened eyes— When you float out of the jelly of the dark, primal and old like words; And you are touched by the trembling lips Of the Earth—the woman—the magic woman.
YOUR WAY IS A SOUR THROAT
Your way is a sour throat, Your past is a piercing scream, When time, like a distant echo, Crosses your dream.
To dreams—by the call of the blood, Stifling the desert’s yell— Where life’s tight arrow is open, Where a lost voice is crying bell.
A stony myth of a dead city, A spirited body, a bloody steel, A knight fighting the winds, Life’s arrow that will squeel.
All this is a dark dream, My sister, told by the stars unkind. Death’s gardens grow so in the vainly Sparkling eyes of the blind.
Here is your body—a lively alcove, And your end—a target so narrow, When the eternal time passes, though Your dream, like a chiming arrow.
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MICHAEL MINASSIAN 1953-
THE HILLS OF MEMORY
In the evening with the sun gone I could see the stars appear one by one, then in pairs, trees deep dark green stark against the disappearing gray, silhouetted like the hills of memory.
They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord! We know what we are, but not what we may be. - Ophelia
There, near a row of pines feet cushioned by the dewing grass, I thought of the owl that was the baker’s daughter; was she chaste as a bird, the heat of hunger in her breast chasing prey at night, the push and rush of wings as currents of wind stroked back feathers, talons out, sweeping low to the ground, striking and feeling the last frantic beats of some creature’s heart, beak parted, eyes so wide she could almost fly backwards through her sight; at that moment, did she remember all the way back to her other life, the smell of bread, the taste of sweet cake. CHERRY TREES
Down a foot worn path on the outskirts of the forest the cherry trees stood surrounding an abandoned field some farmer had left to the sun, wild grain, and dandelion fuzz.
Picking cherries, the sun beat on our backs as my grandfather held me
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among the branches, my limbs stained red with cherry blood, my shirt stuck to my skin with the sun’s hot breath.
One day we took a different path home our pails bumping together, brimming with cherries full of sun and juice and pits to the home of a woman, an old friend, my grandfather said, and gave her a bag of our stolen fruit.
Later, I heard, this woman would sing to her chickens before she wrung their necks, and bare her breasts to the sun, loving life, she said; then disappeared from memory for thirty years, until I brought her back, wrinkled and naked, yearning for the warm juice of fresh-picked fruit, the skin of old men, and young boys asleep on the neck of a bird. I
DESERT SONG
As I rub my eyes with cracked hands, objects appear to waver, dissolving like a mirage along hot, dusty roads; we turn the windshield wipers on, next the headlights; sand seeps in through the cracks around windows and doors. The car stops, its parts clogged with sand.
The wind blows and blows; the desert loves itself; it moves, it changes, it kills for more.
There is too much dust in the air; sand spills from the mouth, the nose;
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motes the size of boulders clog the sight.
This is what comes of looking too far. I yearn to see Ararat, but stuck here a thousand nights away, I swim in the desert like a star lost upon the milky way.
II
Ararat, I burn for you.
Ararat, I slit my wrists for you: out comes sand.
Ararat, I kiss your breast shaped peaks; the nipples I thought were cool white snow are sand.
Ararat, I cry for you; these tears a mirage, this smile a scimitar, this ride a trip back through deserts of time.
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SHANT MKRTCHYAN 1953-
MY FATHER’S COMING HOME
My father’s coming home, And the door is singing; Trumpets are ringing To sadness and groan.
Is this a fairy-tale Or a pomegranate Has whispered sweet dreams?
Who can ever ban it?
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My father’s coming in With an apple in his handThe light is oozing sweeter Than any band! -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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ARMEN SHEKOYAN -Samvel Mkrtchyan
Our private & our public our path & our highway our one & our sibling our heavyweight & lightweight
1953-
OUR FATHER
our gift & our aptitude our prose & our verse our rescue & latitude our grain & our universe
our support & provision our padding & outer surface our real & our vision our pale & our perfect our spring & our summer our autumn & our winter our soother & our calmer out champion & our winner
life’s meaning & life’s odor our honor & our splendor our provider & our loader our destroyer & our mender
our gracious & our cruel our somber & our smiling our hoarfrost & our fuel our candid & our wily our answer & our question our reasonable & our absurd our hunger strike & our rations our chosen & our preferred our intimate & our superior our official & our valid our idol & our hero our rosy & our pallid
our every day & our everywhere our conviction & our doubt
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our beginning & our end our within & our without
THE WRITERS’ UNION
They come so independent and very attractive, But if occasion serves, they might as well be cripples. The newspapers print all their beautiful portraits With their thumbs on their preoccupied temples.
Some of them have really sold out their books, man, They have no reason at all to cry or to laugh. They’re really peculiar and atypical folks, man— A little bit naïve and comical enough.
This one’s been considered to be aristocratic, That one’s a hoodlum and he likes to pry; The third one’s so shipshape he’s almost frantic, He’s invaded belles-lettres with an orderly tie.
This one’s an artiste, he’s been talking too much And missed the great competition in Cannes. That one is ill with the pains of the nation, But he’s determined to do what he can.
This one’s been rejected; his eyes are still frozen. He’s the worst among his identical peers.
That one’s a living classic, and he is the chosen That has been rhyming by eye all these years.
This one was watered in a different manner; Good for nothing, he has had just nothing to lose. That one’s written essays to put in plain words How his poetry must be heard and perused.
This one, when disgraced, has been fighting All his editors, proof-readers, and critics. That one’s been trying to count his imbursement But he’s badly informed in mathematics.
This one is soaring amongst the waifs and the strays; He always appears to be playing the fool. That one’s been coveting a trifling position Not to be trampled or just ridiculed.
Their roads have crossed here through poetry and fiction, Now they sound out of key and compose out of rhyme. This one has been wanting his own crucifixion
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But they’ve persuaded him to get down every time.
Well, you know this scene and what’s going in this show, It is truly the most shocking place in the town. I am amongst them, yes, and sadly I know I’m both the crucified and the one takes ’em down.
Some of us have really sold out our books, man, We have no reason at all to cry or to laugh. We’re really peculiar and atypical folks, man— A little bit naïve and comical enough.
I’LL DIE FOR SURE
I’ll die for sure because there’s no other choice, the Lord won’t hear my voice or my appeal—of course. I’ll die for sure—there’s no other deal or such things; everybody dies, you know, both surfs and kings.
I’ll die but I’m scared He will know that I can’t be.
UNLESS
No more being low. Everything’s the same. The same old thing. Cool and clean as ever. (Unless I meet an Arian by name or a goddamn head to sever).
That’s what the end is (the end of our run). Can’t ride my tired donkey—no force. (Unless, my countrymen—for fun, you make deathless my freezing corpse). WORDS
Love. Hope. Dream. Words, and words again— tear-stained, and as sharp as knife. Words have burned me, caused me pain, yet they haven’t turned to life.
Did I say life? Another word, so unconscious, full of doubt, ancient, bitter and absurd—
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my cheek’s still burning from its clout.
I said burning. It sounds just swell if we add lights just not to grope. Let my vernacular do well by inserting love and hope.
Did I say love? Oh well, I meant it’s something never can be found. It’s just a lamb so innocent until it puts you in the ground.
Yes, ground I said—a simple sample unless it’s occupied by wizard— I know more words, for example, wolf, coyote, or just lizard.
You saw me rhyme. It’s my career, connecting words when I’m awake. Although I’m not quite skilled, my dears, I like to put my life at stake.
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ZAVEN BEKYAN 1954-
GIFTS FROM THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
A light with tangible and inflated brocadefor virgins. Compasses (remember) for Thomas. Beaming skin for arms That the nails will not fail. Clippers for human times. And rise of conscience rate for beggars.
A mausoleum with fire-proof walls for iron-written books. For Caesar—a gold coin 30.000 square km size. A valley of lilies for vipers, as a curtain to shroud the light. An instruction to mend all the lighters. Blaze for a poem that nobody wants... And this one—for Zani. -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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SHOUSHIG DASNABEDIAN -Samvel Mkrtchyan
1954-
BIRTH
the scream of the healing waters of your mother’s wombyour beautiful departure while you flow on my heaving bosom winding & binding succumbing & calmingit was an equitable word of utterance once again cleansing and anointing, it was orient and fire EASTER
my new love came to life one gloomy Good Friday there were multi-colour eggs in caliginous death the coveted Sunday of Resurrection (the sun shone after rain) a heart-throbbing pregnancy awaiting its birth golden flowers and an enceinte coffin a wakening love needs candles my love craves for an affectionate lover of prayer Friday is solidly amphibianly long on the crossroad of life & death my wearied body stirring its own Easter
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ARTASHES GHAZARYAN 1955-
WRITER’S BLOCK
There is no way to write. It’s impossible. Nothing comes. Well, inly some ashen words that cause more pain.
Let’s say today was not the day to speak. Or if it were, I was not the medium. Then someone crosses the sidewalk towards me with smiles and tears and I reach out a hand. -Diana Der Hovanessian and Christiné Kocharyan
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ESTHER HEBOYAN 1955-
but one Thursday without you i was dusting the – your super 8 nikon you left (and went) that sits on its shelf
THE RANGEFINDER
(when) our gladness youthfully sneaked up the Englert theater stairs only to land by a blue lagoon
Hollywood’s sine qua non for technicolor consent thereupon we – two smitten surfers smiled the hour away in love’s (un)fairness and rotating close-up among the places where he’s done time there’s a street i know i see every time i ride Bus number 43 heading North (to work) an Eastern lane marked “Bus” carries Bus number 43 to 74, Rue Taitbout Paris how unwonted i ponder the day of the mustache
BUS OF THE HEART
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up on the fifth floor the world’s a laughter will the Manboy i wonder
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will he or will he not peek out his Parisian window stroll out that perfect door in the slack water of dawn and no horizon dear or sleek
enters every sad bureau more than sad boutique a Manboy to tell (the same world, unfinished) that after all
there shall be times when your heart shall be unable to give your tongue one word of speech to utter (– օր պիտի ըլլայ սիրտդ մէկ բառ անգամ խօսիլ չպիտի ուզէ այսօր ես քեզի ըսեմ William Saroyan, The Human Comedy, 1943.) AWAITING THE EUROSTAR AT ST.PANCRAS
awaiting the Eurostar at St.Pancras i think of all the things we could have done you and i through the London Eye
you and i
you and i
stop off at Ramsgate
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look! the Fisherman’s Corner then sail to Antwerp and skate on Brueghel’s river train-ride to Vienna and hear Mahler’s lieder sojourn in Trieste and grandly surrender you and i
you and i
awaiting the Eurostar at St.Pancras i think of all the things we could have done you and i and never did
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HOVIK HOVEYAN 1956-
MY RUINED CAPITALS
My ruined capitals Flow in all my veins; My sky clears slowly As suffering’s big valley Where, instead of sheep, Thousands of gravestones Graze. The back of my dreams is covered With the salt of Noah’s flood, And the bulls Lick up my back With their thorny tonguesIndifferently and lazily. My ruined songs Flow in all my veins. -Christiné Kocharyan
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WILLIAM MICHAELIAN 1956-
I, LEONARDO
I, Leonardo, have but one more thing to say: no day is just as you imagine — no world, no man, no mortal lump of clay. Life is a blind wind that devours words and bones. It is a fervent hope, the breath of breath itself, a poison that is its antidote. Flesh of my flesh, child of my child, learn this song and sing it well. We are orphans on this road. Our triumph is to be alone. My mother’s old Seth Thomas runs a few minutes slow.
SETTING THE CLOCK
When I move the hands, she doesn’t know I feel like I’m stealing. This table, these typewriter keys and pale-worn volumes, the room slowly turning, Noah tilted in his ark, surely mad, surely mad. The crows are at it again: in lieu of wisdom, they are loud on the backs of houses.
They remember the stones of flooded streets and the nervous fingers of keening women, their eyes shot with blood.
From the braces and rafters in Noah’s well-pitched dome, they ignore the world above, mock the world below.
NOAH
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Noah dreams of sun and sloping vineyard rows, picks the fleas uncounted from his beard, ponders the meaning of dung. He almost drowned when his mother refused to come along.
The rain sang to all her graves, dread-hair fanned out in every sad direction, limbs, combs, names, thumbs, the bodies of loved ones bumping against the boat. A thousand years have flown, but the blind-green waters have not receded.
Noah waits: the timbers groan, his fertile wife lies sleeping. According to the crows, time has lost its meaning. Land. Land. He carves a window in the hull: to his wonder, fresh air rushes in.
THE DEEP END
Across the deep end there waits the forest of the damned, far below, dead moons and pale Atlantis out of reach.
The sky is dim. I feel a hand upon my leg. I cannot breathe. I cannot beg. I cannot swim.
So soon the end. So at peace alone in the cold dark waters. Ask me where I’ve been. Beware the answer. Come on in. The water’s fine. Can you imagine this page as a leaf in your hand? I can: the lines are veins, and the spaces between
ALMOST THE SAME
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flame and recede in the light.
Now look at your palm: so different, it is almost the same.
Where has it been? What does it know? How long before it fades?
LOVE LETTER TO THE UNIVERSE
I was going to write this letter a century ago, but I wasn’t born yet, so I didn’t. I had to wait instead. Finally, when my impatience got the best of me, I was born, only to realize I was approximately one million letters behind.
I’ve been writing letters ever since, just to clear a path to this one.
Picture me blowing on some dandelion fluff: that’s the moment I’m trying to describe. Now it’s night; the dandelions have eyes.
BARE TREE, BRIGHT STAR
Bare tree, bright star, grave child, thy kingdom in what your mother knows when the last leaf blows.
SHE BESTOWED CANDLES
She bestowed candles on the statues and lit them well.
“Winter, my soul. Behold.”
It was a song, and as she sang it, the candles burned low.
“Soon. Very soon. Soon, she will know.”
The statues grew cold. But oh, how they loved her. They loved her so well.
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Were I the bird you seek
WERE I THE BIRD
far out upon a limb
with the grace to plead
no sweeter way to end
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN
The distance between two snowflakes
is a kiss is to melt is
to say
even death will be felt
this way
SACK OF DAY-OLD DOUGHNUTS, FIFTY CENTS
Sack of day-old doughnuts, fifty cents. Barnyard gnawing vineyard brush. Boys smoke whatever’s at hand. Found butts. Dead leaves. Horse shit. Cross that desert, cross my heart. And that’s the end of it. Except your ghost, and this loneliness.
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GAGIK KILIKYAN 1958-
-Samvel Mkrtchyan
JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL
…when you break into the sea
I shake like a fish on the sand; if I sleep— if I ever sleep at all— cover me with your rebellious feathers.
ELEGY
There will be a choice of pain and widowed days. How shrill is the tenderness of glass lips; no need to quiver— our faces are the fingerprints of the past. Let’s date On silent hills, let’s date beside cherished graves. Love is invariable— between reflecting worlds.
MOBY DICK
the winter a vindictive whale drifts with compelling valor drifts through our veins and our realm with compelling valor like sweltering chill we spread white flags upon every fir-tree and oak-tree we light bonfires of penitence in fragile abodes we screech agitated terra firma is far from our seas the whaler upon our Mountian is just a poetic trick what do we have to do with captain Akaab we promise enticement to the leviathan all the gold and copper of the realm forty golden-haired virgins
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but he is deaf with retribution he is but blind with fury he has come to devour the land this leviathan with bronze scales this whale this vindictive winter
SERENADE
Cricket, friend to my sleeplessness, see how fragile the night’s gold is; my eyes fell and broke to pieces— who will inspire me in the morning?
Cricket, friend to my sleeplessness, the night’s gold has chilled down again; my eyes wide open, I’m stalking your gasp— who will tell me I am not dead yet?
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AVAG YEPREMYAN 1958-
-Samvel Mkrtchyan
TRULY I SAY
Where we left each other, Our children Will come and go From our disease they will suffer, I know otherwise—
upon our tombs, out of our dust roses will grow.
As an unuttered word, the Whole is here, indeed, the Ruins of Past-PresentFuture—in the Same Pre-Seed.
DEAD POINTS
Eternal like rust, The Whole is here—immaterial Sand and Dust.
JOSEPH BRODSKY, LIKE
the last Adam who Before the Beginning names one by one each creature (alive or lifeless) passing before him and every time is the Last Time.
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SALUTATION
What What poetry What poetry is What poetry is this What poetry is this that What poetry is this that does What poetry is this that does not inspire
Elevated feelings? For the liar?
THE WORLD THAT ExISTS
The bones of the deceased live beneath the earth; above the earth, the bones of the living subsist.
The souls of the deceased live above the earth; beneath the earth, the souls of the living subsist. Who are you? Show yourself. I’m running out of hope.
MAN CALLING
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SAMVEL ZULOYAN 1959-2007
NO, I WON’T DIE
No, I won’t die, I will remain without you. With no substance, stuck in the web of days. And in my cold and glassy eyes, for you to see, Your memory will forgive my coming crimes.
Oh yes, I knew someday you would spit away This delirium (which maybe was a real love). No, I won’t die, I will remain without you. To pray for those survived, escaped, rescued loves. -Ani Azizyan
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SAMVEL MKRTCHYAN 1959-
MAN LIES IN THE WOMAN'S WOMB —A SONNET And while I was inside I might have been undignified. -Frank Zappa, I Have Been In You. ............ Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength... -Anaïs Nin, Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
Then goes into the world, his work, his battle, art— Having washed his hands. Having washed his face. After the dualistic theory of Rene Descartes or the aggressive nature of the human race. Yet was man's climax hers? Oh reminisce the swim In amniotic fluid since prehistoric times. Psychologists have found there is a phantom limb Of all these accusations and all these grievous crimes. It is more than that indeed. More than delight and birth. More than rebirth, completion, more than "having sex". Orgasm, true and feigned, is a 100 dollars worth, And it's more than the average individual expects. Only for a moment man lies in the woman's womb. As soon as man is born, he lies in the woman's tomb. A hundred doves ago The rainbow was at hand I had the magic wand A hundred loves ago
No matter what I did I’d never be subdued Because we weren’t dead A hundred deeds ago
AUTOGRAPH
Time was the word was ‘bliss’ These days it’s meaningless Yet there was no ‘alas’ A hundred lies ago
We felt that we still lived Whether we wept or laughed
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Or when we kissed and left A hundred lives ago
We heard the flutes of Pan Foreshadowing the pain Of a broken heart in pawn A hundred pangs ago
So granted under seal Away I gave my soul There was no buy and sell A hundred sales ago
The sun would go insane Above the threatening scene It started all too soon A hundred sins ago
And you could never tell Why it befell until The church bells ceased to toll A hundred tales ago
Or could it be we messed Around with dreams that must Have vanished in the mist A hundred myths ago?
A hundred doves ago The rainbow was at hand I lost the magic wand A hundred loves ago
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA
It takes whole lot of nerves, persistence, A bustling lifetime of distress To realize that as you sow, so Shall you harvest, more or less.
This will not work, however, if You cast your pearls before the swine, Yet that’s exactly what you will do Inspired and cheered to toe the line.
The bread falls marmalade-side down. The things that can go wrong, they will. The chances are that God is cruel or
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The humankind is gravely ill. It takes so many observations To come to the mere conclusion That glasses are just good for nothing When life is an optical illusion.
It takes so many disappointments To face the most apparent facts. Between the devil and the deep sea We vote the fucking maniacs.
You hope against hope: you think it ain’t Over till the fat lady sings. You join the choir invisible Forgetting that bad news has wings.
It takes a lot of time and thinking To think about time and what you do— To end with, you start to doubt (Goddammit!) If one and one and one is two.
It takes us years to get a friend who Speaks well of us behind our backs. Still we believe in liberal assholes And vote the fucking maniacs.
WISH LIST
1) René Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (which was a pipe), or “Decalcomania”; 2) For Goodness sake, pills for a good night’s sleep; 3) A tiny cottage, say, in Lithuania. 4) A marriage made in heaven to exclude perversion; 5) How about a king-size bed? 6) Never ever Munch’s “Scream” in any version; 7) The Complete John Donne will be opportune, instead; Give me 8) some truth; 9) the Chinese wall; 10) Bring me some reggae from the Bermudas; Give me 11) my Jack Kevorkian! 12) Mark Knopfler’s Gibson Les Paul; 13) a clockwork orange with 14) The Gospel of Judas; 15) My precious unborn daughter; 16) My treasured virginity; 17) The love letters of John Keats, whose name was writ in water; 18) My symbiotic opposite—my infinity; 19) The femme fatale with subliminal sex signals and a psychedelic smell; 20) The real Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band accompanied by an upper class clientele; 21) Cleopatra’s severed head;
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22) A Tornado drum kit to blow the neighbor’s mind; 23) A philosopher’s stone to turn gold into lead; 24) Dante’s La Divina Comedia—signed! 25) my unanswered prayers; 26) my state of grace and trance; 27) give me a breathing space; 28) something that will boost up my Moral Renaissance; 29) a Smith & Wesson 9-mm. pistol, just in case. Lastly, 30) a reserved lucky postmortem number from a fashionable clinic— (Maybe the best place for an eternal slumber but obviously not for a cynic). there are primary concerns like luxury and consumption society is built (they say) on a certain assumption made equal from the point of view of stupidity s/he’s developing towards cupidity
TATTOO
born free (as proclaimed by any constitution) we've heard warlords talkin' 'bout a peaceful solution this piece of work must be a rational creature since mindwank is becoming her/his distinctive feature
the whole world is led by these mental maggots p.i.m.p.'s are replaced with straightforward faggots violence of aggression or violence of defense? it might as well depend on coinsidence.
Хуй сосайте, Joseph Brodsky used to call "high society" that has screwvenired y'all.
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ORIGAMI
First they shave you into thin slices. Then you’re Pulped. Your water is removed. And when You’re construction paper, you’re rolled and fed
Into a feeder and cut. When you’re ready for the life They lead, they will fold you anyway they like. They will make sure you’re good to be recycled.
Now you’re a swan, a parrot, a flower, a crane, A spider, a frog, a pig, a fly, a dragon, a fish. Fun, easy, inexpensive, and great for sharing.
I don’t think it’s the tyrant to blame. It’s the lackey, The pawn, the tool. The one who pulls the trigger, The slave who builds the pyramid. It’s the instrument
That erects their monuments, makes the gas chamber, Chops all the trees. The brand-new crusaders In shiny shoes and stylish suits, with briefcases
Filled with matching obituaries and other paper Craft. And when you feel or even see it’s raining Blood down on the roofs and walls, don’t worry:
They will handle you. They take care of everything. You’re safe because they follow the instructions. The moment they put you into the good shredder,
Thousands of acres are deforested. Plus 9 coffee Trees per one cup of coffee they drink, when you’ve been Comfortably shredded down to Rest In Pieces.
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NORA ARMANI 1960-
HOME
Home is where the hearth is Home is where the heart is Home is where the earth is Home is where the art is Home is where the ear is Home is where all these exist in harmony. But can someone please tell me where… My home is?
YAN
Abovian, Nalbantian, Hanrapetutyan, Tumanyan, They all end in Yan.
Said one woman who was there for the first time.
She had no notion what they meant, But added, At least they are names… Not numbers like 46th, 50th, 8th, 4th and fist. The waitress is under age Says she can’t serve me wine herself. I ask if she has sex She smiles, through a blush and says yes!
CALIFORNIA 2009
Impaired judgments That destroyed nations Or sometimes built them Could be blamed equally on sex Not as often on wine!
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A world gone awry about Not serving wine till you’re 21! But killing, at any age, seems fine.
I AM WRITING NOW
Mother lived her life like this pen Beautifully wrapped in its original box, Never stained with ink, Waiting for the day, when a special occasion Would warrant its use. That pen, she never used. That special day must have come. I her extension, am using it To refer to her unlived life, Like this unused pen. Mother, you lived for me. You kept this pen for me. Can I in turn live for both of us?
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VAHÉ ARMEN -Samvel Mkrtchyan
1960-
AN ELEGY
By the pathway stretching out to the infinite I meet the crowd that passes me by Uncaringly, even through me– Smashing the bones of my soul under its feet.
The crowd did not spot me; It didn’t notice the lofty Waiting of the lovers In the waning of the flowers: Could it be they spotted That all the walls risen with the bricks of law Are an abyss, a chasm? Could it be they spotted the height of the hillock And death’s death Under your feet? Could it be they spotted– grand as crucifixion– The peculiar mystery of hanging oneself, After a treacherous kiss?
By the pathway stretching out to the infinite, Where the multitudes, Their eyes fixed on the corpse of death, Pass by the hillock– There I encounter myself; There, in the same crowd, I hold in my fist the first stone I’ve picked up To throw at the sinner.
I was disregarded. They crashed the bones of my soul
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under their feet, Walking away–inside me.
Maybe the truth Is warm Like a woman’s body; Or cold– Just the size of a beggar’s palm.
THE TRUTH
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MARINÉ PETROSYAN 1960-
POTATOES
These potatoes on my desk Resemble the poem I would like to write.
Unwashed they are - like my soul. Real they are - like my body.
These potatoes on my desk Are my mother And my ashes. Translated by the author
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TIGRAN CHERAZ -Samvel Mkrtchyan
(TIGRAN BALOYAN) 1960-1983 I HAD FORGOTTEN
I had forgotten I couldn't forgetThat's why I'm dancing in the street.
It had slipped my mind (the way I soar when they're plucking my wounds, caressing and caressing me) you could give my straw dog to another, as a gift. That's why my eyes are wet.
It didn't cross my mind that a girl with eyes of yours could trade my love for a pin. That's why I feel for my hobby-horse.
Now I remember remember how you told me one time you were going to give All your love to Only me I remember That's why I can't stop cracking up. You have no love At all.
HEMPSEED MORNING
My hands flying a hempseed morning like a pickpocket's borrowed leg no easy chair for the flood my eyes running a dog's grief. Poet is my title with wild shoesAgain, I found tears on my face this morning How could you be sure it wouldn't happen again? my feet are fleeing out of town like a rainbow's neck.
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TELEPHONE
I’ve heard there’s blood in the knife they ask me if bread has father I wonder if our house is in the globe I wonder if trees wear shoes. When you hang up your reflection vanishes from the glass. I’ve heard childhood.
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SEVAK HOVHANNISYAN -Samvel Mkrtchyan
1961-
LIGHT OF LIFE, 1988
I. I’ve been thrown away out the Big Road, Like a pebble stone trampled under wheel; From all sides I can see those heavy loads— Upsurge and circuit, decline and ordeal.
There are scores of wheels—conceited outcasts, They come scurrying and scurrying they race… All they leave behind is this grubby dust, And these glutinous trails upon my face.
I got along to know the Good and the Bad, But alas, no Peace came down on my soul; The third one, Infinity, the dark autocrat, Is shifting their places and keeping control.
I’m surrounded with Doubts: uncertainties Are talking, tormenting and tearing apart… I carried this world’s heavy load with ease, But was walloped down by the Pain in my heart.
II. There are no more Mysteries left on earth; And the Life itself is one authentic Lie. The Ideas are depressing and adverse, And the Matter (Matter!)—unconcerned and vile.
Everything flows, flows without end; A Second’s break is a remorseless death. All, all bears the bitter leer of the Unknown, All, assuming on and within itself.
Everything remains half-way, incomplete, Turning into dust in its name and eyes. Both Unjust and Just, the Evil and the Good Are mere shadows of the Force disguised.
Love and Destiny, Law and Fantasy… All is a Mystery — unnamed and unheard. Unified are they in one callous whip, And they thrash me on like they’d thrash the herd…
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III. I entered this world through a nameless door, And I found myself—right off — in the Light; Could not I have stayed here just a little more? I turned—and the door was locked up downright.
I listened—there was nothing I could hear, Nothing except the beating of my heart… Driven, I measured the Bottomless in here, I walked to and fro—met only my part.
Centuries of Hope passed me by and went. Still I am standing before Infinity. And when I removed Light’s wild masquerade, This compelling Dark erupted on me.
A waking Memory still calls in the distance, Even now untamed for the flows of Time… I must have had another Existence; I must have been living a posthumous life.
IV. From the day I was born , a radiant Halo, Along with the Dream, has decreed the brith Of an enormous and purifying Love— Stretching out from soul to the Universe.
It is gleaming still—in quiet isolation; Never troubled by the clamor of Life, With its bubbly zeal of copied Regulations, And the vehemence of Pain and Delight.
It gives me the grief of Reconciliation Against all Temptation and Catastrophe, It offers me some Indifference so gracious Against all the losses that happened to me. It throws upon the World and upon my soul Eternity’s shadows wordless and wide. I am, I shall be as long as it glows, Till this spacious World—darkling—collides.
V. I know that, for me, there will come the day When a gloomy Time will explode at once; I shall be alone against the World again, And my cherished Hopes will roughly collapse.
All the radiant glimpses of my life I have blindly lived, without aspiration,
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Will be piercing me, turned to sting and knife, With the dark delight of evil Inspiration.
The wordless fantom of entirety That I have cherished in my heart and flesh, Will pour on my face its chilly sarcasm— And I will perceive my Death in a flash.
The uncertain scales of Plot and Belief Will be staying poised in a gloomy Hall… The Good and the Bad will sit at a trial To banish my Life once and for all.
VI. Like God, I haven’t been around and seen: Far from everything I could see the light: I could watch the world, I could see the scene, Could grieve a kid’s grief, and live a lad’s life.
When Mind woke, my soul turned to be a rebel, Weaving in the air a ghost of Innocence; Life formed an endless Beginning—dishevelled, As an atonement for Fate and common sense.
I get mad, going wild, kick the wall, lose connection… The World is so dim, I can’t make out all this. They’re hiring, conspiring both Faith and Affection, While my feet lead me to the void and abyss.
I wish I could find a luminous Moment, When I’d see my face, forgetting all wrath, O I’d die then—to be so pompously dormant, Closing my eyes to the Man and to God.
VII. I’ve been searching for Man, searching everywhere, With the mind of a toddler, the love of a child— Even in the Water, the Wind, the Sky, the Air, Even in Dreams—by sweet sleep beguiled.
I couldn’t believe I was as well a Man, That a man was a Man—I couldn’t believe. Each and every second I was waiting for Some Wonder to glow with tremendous beams.
Neither good nor bad, neither weak nor strong— Just a Man—a Man!—I thought ’twould be fair… Then Sufferings and Calls, day and night, all along! Alas, I did not find him anywhere.
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Here I am again, empty-handed, mislaid. Oh where can I be with my young Reverie! The whole World is jeering and leering again, But I’ve found that Man, the great one—it’s me!
VIII. Time in and Time out, each and every day An invisible Wheel is turning round and round; Each tiny instant storms a Shaft of Ray, Revealing faces you can never count.
Are they different, or are they the same? What is the Writing on their foreheads now? There must be some place—no one knows the name, Still the Wheel is turning and turning somehow.
Some Victory there, some Principle here Flash for a moment, and then they are gone… All Births and Heights, all Chasms and Tears Are just History—do, did, doing, done.
Oh let the Wheel turn forever and ever; The sec of my life is motionless and dense… Hung over this chasm, I will endeavor To visualize my consecrated Self.
Ix. All my Dreams, they glowed—vanished in the haze. Some dark evil Hand is forcing me down; Someone is trying to lead me astray— And a hideaway is nowhere to be found.
Is this an Accident, or the highest Law— Freedom to be given to Tyrants and Kings, To the Greedy, all the Possessions and more, To the Unworthy, all the Joy and Bliss?
Justice betrayed me destroying my hopes, Freedom took away all my liberty, Truth just crippled me, still it blindly gropes, Peace redirected death sentence on me.
It Was what was not, it was not what Would. I still carry my face, broken and bare. The Past merely lasted, the Future won’t come— Life was created against me, as it were.
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x. I’d been sleeping long with lack of sensation, Only my name was somewhere around; Gloomy insurgence was shaking my nature, With Memory drawing dull circles and rounds.
Till a distant Voice reached my ears one day, Like my first snivel at the hour of Birth… I opened my eyes to these chimes and rays, For the second time to be born on earth.
I can feel it now: how, cell by cell, my Sight, That used to be so blunt, shakes off all my Fears. Muscle by muscle I’m turning upright… One more second and—I’m complete, it seems.
Bright is my Hope, my Faith is so clear; If I invoke my Love, and make the first stride, This Land will tremble ’neath my sturdy feet, The whole World will not endure my fervent might!
xI. In the Light and Dark of the Universe, From its very Birth to the very End, Over this dying and resurrecting Earth— A holy Spirit soars world without end.
It has neither Face, nor a Name and Voice, Neither is it a vague mem’ry of the Past; It’s not the Coming glow that is null and void, Nor the Current shadow that may vainly last.
Every single hand is yearning for its touch, Every single dream dreams it all forlorn— To reach it, acquire it, comprehend it—but They hurtle one by one and wane for evermore.
It is shining bright ’gainst this sightless World, Illuminating still the route of Everything. What’s happening is in times of yore, unfurled; What’s already happened, will still be happening.
xII. I had an awful dream— sinister and grim: The whole Universe was crumbling like sand. Dust stormed everywhere, burying the myth Of the Good and Bad that no one understands.
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I was standing there, in the far-off Light, My heart gamboling in ecstasy and joy: “At last the great hour of Atonement arrived— You destroyed me then, now you will be destroyed!”
A light Melody was streaming up to me Out the smoldering ashes in the gloom; Oh it seemed to be the song of Harmony, For centuried I seemed to have desired the tune!
Then some desperate dread wrapped around my soul, I opened up my eyes, probably from Nil… The World was all the same—I wasn’t there at all— Just saw a small procession carrying me still.
xIII. My heart is in a fever, for sleepless nights, perplexed, The World is pitiless, so gloomy and unreal. Even all my dreams are spitting blood and vex… Oh I wish I’d die—for not to know or feel!
Seated on the throne of dark Mysteries, The unpunished Plot is feasting all day long. While the giant crowd of hangmen and preys Is dancing forgetfully to the feaster’s song.
Oh where shall I flee from this nightmare and dread? All the doors are locked, all the ways are brittle. They’re stinging and striking from the right and the left, There’s no ray of hope to get hold of a little.
All my Hopes and Dreams now are lost in the mist. Anguish and tears are the price for my labor… Blessed are you, God, who doesn’t exist, Damned is the Man considered a savior!
xIV. With a meaningless stare and a heart wholly emptied, Elevated and noble like Mount Ararat, Here I stand again—untroubled, untempted— Upon all the World is my shadow cast.
Here in my shadow, right under my feet, Life and Death play games. and will never bother. Love and Hate are battling for the only Seat. The Good and the Bad are stabbing each other.
Like a thousand flocks in perfect disarray, Time is flying by, haphazardly and fast;
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While sad Eternity, in a glittering tear, Keeps but watching it come and flutter past.
They are trampling me—each and every day— Clamor and Clatter, Ebb and Flow, Time, Course… Still, I am voiceless, unconcerned and deaf— In me, God is shedding His tears of remorse.
xV. In my daily way of godly Non-existence, In my virtuous realms limitless and broad, I was generating some ethereal radiance, Lest I may be scared of the stifling Void.
Suddenly a drop spilled out upon the Dark… In its dusky shade, I could clearly see The particulars of my corporeal face, And I lost myself—irrevocably.
I searched for my Essence, left nothing unturned… Within me, without me—could not find a thing… Awaiting forever the holy Return, I’m strolling round the world, I’m still wandering.
Am I just a Human, or a Godly Creature? Or am I just Nothing—neither dead nor alive… I know I have lost Life and my true nature, I know I’ve found Death in order to survive.
xVI. Time up and Time down—each and every day— I’m going through the Blares of the Universe. Passions are flooding all around me again, Spilling Desire, Affliction, and Curse.
And I always feel, fixed upon my face, Some shadowy Stare—so sneering and cold. I can see my Hopes are dying again, I can see my Fears are gaining control.
Suddenly a vague Memory is born, And I stop to watch, in this brutal Pain… Some invisible captivating Force Tears myself from me and carries me away.
Standing in grief, looking way too far, Estranged from myself, and strange to my life, I shall disappear one day in the dark, It will seem, however, I am still alive.
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xVII. When my face was touched with beams of Revelation, And Love stirred in me like a boisterous fish, My life seemed to be my Will’s compensation: I would live and die just the way I wished.
The Dark seemed to be left far far behind… I AM! Whatever may come or may go… The whole Universe is following my mind; I am to decide if it lives or dies.
When I turned I saw I was filled with Death, And a great deal more threatening me still. Here my Life proceeds exhausted and upset, And I follow him—maybe always will.
So here am I standing—lonely and defeated, Leaning on every Second that flies, Guarding my Seconds to be honestly treated, I’m eagerly trembling over all of my Lives!
xVIII. Life seems to me to be an enormous Eye, The whole Universe subsisting in its Gaze. Each time it opens and closes the eye, Darkness descends and covers all in haze.
Then the atrocious Instincts awaken— Hatred, Intrigue, Massacre and Pain… The depths of Infinity are suddenly shaken… And the Eye watches quetly again.
The Evil is filled with more evilness, And the Good assumes goodness immortal. While I am groping always between them But I never reach the consecrated portal.
He, who’s the Eye of each Revelation, Is blind: he can’t see himself in himself… That’s why I subsist, as an experimentation, Lest he be draped in the darkness of Hell. SILENCE
The Sea was static. Some serene Numbness had descended— blemished And tranquil like a Dream. A great Mystery was flowing
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In my direction—wave by wave— Wayward, murky, unknowing.
My soul had just cowered, Crying bitter tears—no rule Against the Infinite, no power.
A Star broke off at once In the secluded distant skies And in the Sea it sunk.
Deserted and mute, once again, Surrendered to the endless sleep, The sea was motionless. In vain
Struggled the fallen Star in it To turn to a gleaming pearl, To encompass the very Infinite.
The Sea was motionless, and faint; My soul was screaming furiously— Pointless, futile, and drained…
DEATH
The Sea was hushed, deserted. Only sands— sizzling and thick. The gull’s soul was dying for certain— So hopelessly,old and fatiqued.
Was dying. And in its eyes The Sea’s vision was fading like this; While the watery horizon Seemed an enormous abyss.
A wave came up, in the distance. Crashed. Nothing was left. So poitless was past’s reminiscence So pointess, the very last zest.
The Sea’s azure horizon Was strange, so painfully strange. A nameless fire ignited In the waning eyes, as to change.
Was it a shriek that it heard Of a memory remote and single? It screamed then, this expiring bird With the falling miasma to mingle.
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ARA MGRDICHIAN 1962-
I
SONGS OF LOVE AND ANGER I-IV
(a) The smell of Mastiki gum smelling up my ashtray. I think of you again, and watch the cigarette extinguish against the hardened chewed up gum you left behind. (b) I watch me extinguish the cigarette against your used up piece of gum sticking to the ashtray. (c) I watch me extinguish the cigarette against what was rubbery and vibrant in your mouth. That which was once salivated full of your spit give it brief heat while killing what usually kills me.
This kiss a very familiar phenomena. II
I picked up the dead rat with metal smelting tongs, by the tall. It ate the poison cookies. Greedy parasite of urbanity, greedy, poor, unwanted pet of production, roaming through the junked up shadows... You are dead. I pick you up with the tools of my... my... work. And I drop you into a ziplock bag and deposit you with the rest of the that putrefies – that was once animate, that had something. Poison cookies for the greedy bastards. (This is a very familiar phenomena) III
La Traviata pours through the rain soaked windows as you drive away from yourself. Seek out a plausible past, seek out a plausible future in between the real places you go, in between all the things you make yourself do. In between, your career oriented formal wear and calculated, from young men weaned on music videos and sexual objectification, Frank Capra Movies, and detective shows... In between, you revel in your car. Even oblivious to the iconic meanings of rain and La Traviata and driving. But, you’re awakened every time you exit the dream machine and speed’ You awaken to a world by which you’re bound. Maybe this obsession for self oppression explains a similar tendency towards sadomasochism and bondage in your sexual life. Then, again, it may not. IV I pick you up by the with smelting tongs, out of my ashtray,along with Mastiki gum and extinguished cigarette butts – used self destructive consumer
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Items and you. You hate it, but you re dead. And, in your own vicious circular way, you ask for more, Moaning, assuming a Lordosis position, asking that I grip the tongs even harder. I hear this as I hear your La Traviata in the rain. I drive you away this time into a plastic zip loch bag and place you on the heap with the rat and the other things that were once animate. WINDSHIELD
Scenic routes and the rumbling trees a transient sight, an ephemeral green something rustles underneath across the bank of gray a tinge of red and mammalian breath riding the hard concrete "a smudge on glass?"
an irritant
abrazen and dislodged the blood and guts of smaller things broken against your eye Inert now (like you now)
blind and mute and deaf and dumb
give us a smudge, an anomaly along with Waves of Grain purple mounds and majesty defying rooted lanes give us respite from news and love and give us our daily bread give us more dead bugs against the glass
a cow on a hill... a water tank and the long liquescent road
sit inside the dim lit room smoke slithering gray like raucous, ancient iguana sit and recite the reprieve the residue of obsolescence
coked up and phallic-moving surreptitiously inside the would be,
across the tarmac, to the southwest
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across the heart of resonance
the ashtrays and wafer the alchol and blood of christ and... sing out the reprieve, sing... sing out across tables and chairs and hallowed ground...
for hallowed ground seven heavens for neophytic love and self-proclaimed severed head count your round when you shoot
and remember all the guys AURAL SHADOWS, HATCHET JOB You walk into the smoky room-genetics flung together in pure rush geometry. Perfection wasted. Internet cafe, on-line gaming. E-mail fantasies, chat room chidings. Children playing the killing games. A nation of video warriors. Haig and Pel gone to hell... A rash of killings on CNN-murders, truck bombs, suck bombs, all the time bombs, but one sticks out like a sore thumb, like a sharpened hip bone — white and dry. Even now, while they yell and scream and crawl toward this new addiction. One sticks out, barely attached to the neck. Der Zor reminiscence, Baku beckonings, chalk dust deserts and bad cappucino from the Russian Nescafe machine. Webs now weaving nets, catching prey praying, microcosms merging. Millennia. Cancering lungs filling centurian gaps, with blood and guts. Marlboro, Coca Cola, hook noses, hairy chests, black jackets, sweaters, pointy shoes, and the sound of ash. Fanta. The world was conquered by addiction, not by arms. The wars are just to keep the junkies busy. Hatchet job. Handle to the ax. Evolution my ass.
Shut down the satellite, see what happens. Try to get to sleep, see what happens. See the streets fill with blood, living and dead.
Shut down the box, cut off the sugar drip, let the stranger in, see the blood flow into the dead head and watch a world realize how it has been duped.
Duped and duping — penny ante mythic-legendary.
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Micro lascivious.
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Hatchet job Budapest. Hatchet job Yerevan... Internet cafe 2004.
1 in the morning, 2 in the morning, 3 in the morning...
Sending mail on LA time, for LA time, doing time again, on my own time and yours. Sitting there — here — not pretending these things don’t happen — they do, they did, they will. Long lost revolutionaries now alcoholics, yoga serenity souffled, tofu tarts and pseudo-vegetarians selling their asses for a nickel or a crime or a remodeled kitchen....
And the 7 or 8 young men, now, at 2 in the morning at the internet club, with me in the corner — me, still strapped old man — working dimestore metaphysic short cons for a love gone sour... These children, with headsets cradling their ancient skulls, crackling songs along their immense noggins, they are oblivious to their own voluminous yelling. And they are still oblivious to all this blood...
They are oblivious to trash digging grandpas near the “Kaskad,” with their perfectly combed, lice ridden hair, to Survivors (you know which ones, baby) wrestling haggard dogs for table scraps at some of the best bins in Armotown.
Oblivious to the barbed wire and explosions two blocks away, to their brothers running through the park as the truncheons come down.
Fuck you, Yerevan.
“Budapest Killed Your Honor Student” bumper stickers.
“To Protect and Serve” Militzia posters.
“America the Beautiful” cell phone ring-tones clamoring in the background.
Maybe some ascots, too, Tamar, to cover... to cover all this blood... When in doubt, accesorize. Wash it down with fire hoses and bring in the clowns. Rencom Internet Cafe, Apovian and Moskovian. Explosions down the street, but no one can hear, just like their Mother’s voices coming out of the ground. The dialogue is familiar, the setting is frighteningly absurd.
The big one calls out — a thick neck, craning, head, shoulders hunched, his backward profile - “Sniper!! Sniper to the left!! Who’s that?? Who is that? Gun!! Gun!!”
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The immediacy, the drawl, the Armenian slurring, bloating into Karabakh dialect, orders, firing, shouted out.
Explosions, on the screen and in the streets.
Ten years past. I’m in a time warp, a mind trap.
Karma police on crack.
I blink once and my finger twitches (Garo, you know which one).
They are Karabakhtsi kids 15 to 19, maybe more, playing “Soldier of Fortune,” “Counterstrike,” “Badge of Honor,” on the server, playing the killer games, the killing world their fathers actually and reluctantly lived and died. I am not in Mardagert, not Arachatsor, not Hadrut or Maili Beili, 10 years ago... This progeny of war, our consequences, the horror of peace.
Now, their screens scream-viscera, masturbatoria, simulacrum-with smoke and sugar and repressed sexuality, with distended introjected icons and fragments of overdetermined meaning... It has got them and, now, me by the balls.
You can’t imagine it unless you lived it then, the horror of the bombs falling, the brave dying, the bodies rotting and to see it now — feel it here in the sullen vicarity of the internet killing zones... how immediate, how urgent are the profanity filled declarations of these children gone to rot, the yelling, the anger and competition, not at one or two in the morning, but all day long, their interim-our interim-trying to be filled.
An interim that may never end and will never be filled, no matter how many cafes are built around Opera Square or how loud the music blares... or grenades explode. I am a cultural adoption agency — orphan and orphanage, both. Your world of senior citizen salad bar brawls are so much cotton candy and suburban lawns. I didn’t damn you the first two times around—90 to 93—but this time I do. This time I damn you all for selling your grandparents bones so cheaply at your own garage sales and trying to buy them back at the Vernissage. This time around — 3rd tour — 1 damn you because you damned yourselves. This time, I will tell you about the hatchet job in Budapest and all the ax murders in Yerevan.
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ANOUSH NAGHASHYAN 1962-
LOVE MASS
I loved you—but love was in my heart and head; I preserved my love like Communion bread.
My love was a Mass on the altar of love; It was whispered only to the Lord above.
Now it was time to hand it to you, dear— The Communion bread I kept in holy fear.
All you bring to me is your healing wine Vented from your love, by God’s will divine.
May no one else hear about our Mass tonight: No other believers at our private rite!
There is just one faith, there’s just one prayer; We’ll be praying to God who is always there.
May love be the agent of our permanent union; May it be our holy bread of Communion;
May kisses be blesséd with words from above; And may our life be a holy Mass of love! -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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VAHAN VARDANYAN 1962-2013 MY TIME
My time does not exist in Byzantine crossroads— It’s nowhere to be found. My time does not exist in Russian snows— It’s nowhere to be found. My time does not exist in Egyptian deserts— It’s nowhere to be found. It does not exist in Alpine mists— It’s nowhere to be found. Upon stony slopes— It’s nowhere to be found. In the downland hurricanes— It’s nowhere to be found. In orchards plenty of fruit— It’s nowhere to be found. In yesterday’s and tomorrow’s bliss— It’s nowhere to be found. It’s nowhere to be found, alas. -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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VIOLET GRIGORYAN 1963-
ELEGY
In the empty cage of autumn, there are yellow feathers—bloodstained and scattered, bloodstained feathers—the whole thing;
the cat has eaten the fiery bird. And everything was lost, irrevocably. White gloves on the keyboard, and on the effulgent piano there is a red rose—solid and fierce; The little gentle fingers play intelligently the tune of the inquiry: “Did you like the bird’s leg?” “I did, I did,” ejaculates the chorus of four black cats. And everything was lost, irrevocably. Blue veils—rebellious&fading, and a dancing girl, erect and smart, twinkles and dwindles in the blue; Now she rushes, now she recoils, twisting on her toes—how she is twisting! both doggedly and enchantingly provoking dead feathers... “Eaten legs do not resurrect, alas,” Hiccups the mighty chorus of the cats. -Samvel Mkrtchyan
HOMELAND
My country, your yellow rotten fang is stabbing my very throat; push it or take it out, don’t leave me wallowing like a butterfly pinned on the wall.
My country, a shooting-ground in a circus, I am the target upon your stage, the muzzle of the gun against my open eyes, and it’s my finger on your trigger.
Fan-like, in the rhythm of a phoenix, I, your tenant, die and resurrect— like some cannon fodder beneath your colors, like a leech sucking in your vein.
Like a mule, I carry dutifully your rusty past, my sweet scrap, yet my only body is being torn apart—
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you don’t feel sorry for my single body.
I won’t bargain anymore—what else have I got to sell? My life weighs nothing on your scales; I did lose my single life, And I forgive you, my single country. - Samvel Mkrtchyan
UNFINISHED ODE: UPON MY CLITORIS
Clit-clit-clitoris mine, my itty-bitty fidgeter, my voiceless little stammerer, my tongueless little twitterer, my curly-haired baby bull, my gluttonous little gullet, my rosy-pink-lipped cuntlet, my windowless little chamber, my stuttering baby gurgler, my pretty little floater, my giddy little giggler, my boastful bonsaied puffer, my naughty itchy toddler, my ever erect mini-phallus, my cherub with the golden tresses, my groggy midget mourner, my miniature clap-clapper, my little underground trickster, at times unshaven and at others unfeathered and bebarbered, my dwarfish flat-and-skin-head, my inarticulate liplet, my rose-fraganced breathlet, my silent bashful bridelet, my hider and lay-lower, faint-hearted little groaner, my full-of-nooks-and-crannies, my coquettish mini-bouquet, my hyacinth, alpine poppylet, garden-foundling, night-time warbler, sparrow’s winglet, fledgling flier — my breathless to-and-froer, my daredevil madman of Sasun, my twirling top and protean satan, firing furnace and mini-oven, audacious eternal flame, my creaker and little cricket, my teensy-weensy sweety, little hider of your heartlet,
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valiant child and mountaineer, my red-tootsied baby quail, my quail-let, my wrap-arounder...
this was when my mother rang and said, my baby, she said, what’d you come back from America for, you could have hung on a little longer, no, and landed a green card? at least you had a job, you were sending back money and all, we were getting by somehow, baba chun. But now there’s the electricity and the water and god knows how we’re going to come up with the money, what’d they make us put that damn water-meter in for? and your brother doesn’t jimmy things the way the locals do, jam a magnet in there or whatever, the damn counter runs and runs like it was a wild animal, my god and it’s winter already, where are we going to dig up the money to pay the gas bill with, huh? and all the rest besides, baba chun... the day we turned our backs on Teheran and came to this dump was the day we ran out of luck for good, I didn’t want to come, it was that cricky-cracky, your grandma, who was in such a rush she couldn’t get her drawers up past her ankles, and she slept out in front of the embassy door at night so she could bring our family to its knees and our house to wrack and ruin, and Serop slipped the ambassador ten thousand tuman, help for the motherland, it was supposed to be, and then we came here and found out that that’s what they call a bribe, baba chun. .. Remember our Persian neighbor agha Mehrzat, the one whose son Zami’s hand you bit so hard you came away with a mouthful of flesh? he used to say, agha Khachig, khanum Ani, shoma kar eshtebahi mikonin be Shoravi mirin, gozashle, nemitune keshvare khubi bashe, baba chun... but who are you telling that to, agha Khachig and his cricky-cracky mama were bonkers, me, I didn’t want to come, I used to be a khanum, I came here and turned into a “comrade,” a “sister,” first time somebody called me that I turned red, good thing they don’t know Persian1... Zhuzhu — that’s what we called you when you were little, remember? — I want to tell you something, but don’t go and get mad now, Elmira came by and said davai, city hall’s giffing out bones wid a little fat on dem for poor people and eenvaleeds to make borsch with, so, Zhuzhu, I said, I’m an invalid and your father’s an invalid, let me go ask for help, as for you, you’ve gone stone blind sitting in front of that computer, you’re not bring¬ing in money again, baba chun,21 feel sorry for you, we’re a burden on you, aren’t we...? I screamed and threw the receiver at the wall’.
...my eensy-weensy sweetie, little hider of your heartlet, valiant child and mountaineer, my quail-let, my wrap-arounder... my chubby little brooder country almond and baby plum... No, no go, I’m not in the mood any more, adboy, that’s it, finito, tamam, finis... -G.M. Goshgarian
LOVE
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Here is the body surrendered to love, here is the blood running through brazen veins, rejoice, it’s a holiday! Tonight is a celebration, my body’s Sunday I have spread my womanhood that I saved for a precious guest, for my lover. Go ahead, take it, enjoy it already. see, my darling, how my father’s daughter treats you. Kiss me and... you’ll never grow old, kiss me and... you’ll never get sick, kiss me and... you’ll never die. The love-bed cures everything, doesn’t it? It makes the blind see the writhing of passion, it makes the mute speak with the drum of his heart, the lame rises and walks through the body’s valleys, and a kiss will raise the beauty from her sleep. Kiss me and... I’ll never die. See how the moths and rust have gnawed away at the piles of my hidden treasures, my lovely clothes, my sparkling jewellery, my erudite books. And the thieves have broken in through the wall and stolen my money. But your kiss will never get rusty, your kiss will break through the Chinese wall of my anguish. I’ll bring my mouth close to yours, I’ll cover you with my lips, And my inquisitive tongue will search your entire body in order to seek, find, and savor the beehive honey. Oh, how luscious and sensual are the lips of my love! The tongue, with a mind ot its own, plays a tune on my teeth adroitly, like on a piano’s white keys. Mother, what should I do? Should I surrender to love’s only inner promise? Should I fondle it with my warm fingertips? Should I tickle it with the moist roughness of my tongue? Should I stroke and caress the rigid stalk and allow it into my love camp? I got it for free and give it for free, this body of mine that fell to my lot, that I won in an earthly lottery. Unlock my property with your middle finger, strip the words of their weightless clothes, enter my boat with a naked heart, and drop your anchor in the bay of my body... I will rinse you with my inner waters And bless you with the chrism of my hot womb, I’ve already baptized you into my following. The foxes always have burrows, all the birds of the sky — their nests, my body and I are your burrow and nest come live inside me, my love, your body weighs light and sweet on me.
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Climb on my bed, and, as if from a lectern, orate with body syllables, body conjugations, body words, body lang recite the saga of love and passion’s campaigns, ask, and you will receive knock, and it will open; the door may be narrow, the road may be hard but, lo, the voice calls from the bed, I’ve prepared this road for you and smoothed out the paths... So, drive your muscle-made carriage, govern me, with a thin, leathern, thin, fine, thin strap guide the untamed course of our passion, brand my hips with your stamp, plant your flag in me. I am a wild river, I am a tight cluster, I am fragile air Enter my stream hide there inside me, and inhale and exhale me, and inhale and exhale me, and inhale and exhale me, and deeply inhale me, ah, now exhale, ah, exhale... How sweet it is to take you inside me, my love coach, my brazen pillowmate, nobody better has ever been bom of a woman... Blessed is my belly that has shivered from the touch of your tongue, blessed are my nipples that have hardened from the touch of your tongue blessed am I, the servant of the Lord, for I was blessed among women. Mom, don’t be angry, see how healthy I am, see how fit I’ve become from the workout of love, see, happy is my heart and jubilant my tongue, my body lives with hope, for I now dwell in the valley of love. Whoever has eyes, let them see this enchanting picture — two intertwined bodies, prostrate on a sheet, a woven bouquet, a lily in bloom, an opening seashell, a sea-saw in swing. Merry wind, my happy companion, rock my boat, my fearless sailor, my reckless adventurer, rock my boat, rock me, until I expire entirely, until I finally run out on my own, until I stop on my own, rock me until I reach there — the NO PLACE Oh, what ecstasy! Guide me through the labyrinths of my body like this, step by step, word by word, detail by detail, pause by pause, kisses and kisses, movement by movement, kisses and kisses, sound by sound, and kisses and kisses. Take me and lead me over the threshold of my body, take me to the house of rapture... Like this, one more step, like this, one more movement, on a snow-white
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sheet, like snow-white paper, the lines of two bodies spelling three words: “And it’s done!” b.
Here is the body surrendered to death. Here is the blood that has faltered and stopped forever. Oh, what a desolate feast, what festive mourning, and our hearts are aching inside. We cry, because this is a wedding, but the bridegroom’s no longer with us, because this is a wedding, but the guests are unworthy. and we rejoice, for although the kernel has died, it will sprout into millions of plants. He took on our illnesses, expunged all our pains, this Son of Man, he raised us from the dead, ... but he contracted death through a human kiss. Oh, carpenter’s child, oh, Mary’s son, you thought yourself a catcher of humans, but see how the humans have ensnared you in death. Oh, see how the humans have ensnared you in death! Until you ran yourself out, Until you stopped yourself, And now our hearts are burning within us. We know that whoever does the will of your heavenly father is your brother and sister and mother. And we weep here like mothers, mourn you like sisters, we bow our heads to our sorrows, like brothers. woe is your mother, for she saw your head hanging low on your chest, woe is your sister, for she saw you tortured and beaten, woe is your brother, for he saw you mocked. But we also mourn for ourselves. We mourn and wail for our sons: blessed are the barren mothers and wombs that have never conceived, woe to those pregnant and nursing, smash us, tall cliffs, green hills, cover us, although, like you, we’ve tamed the wild winds and high seas, although, like you, we’ve walked on water, cured the blind, made the lame walk, and although we create human beings in our image, in our likeness, we give them the breath of life our hearts still don’t rejoice, our tongues don’t exult, our bodies don’t fill with hope, because we dwell in the valley of death, and we are deprived of the joy of your presence... No, we don’t look for you, the most living, among the dead, but how can we not mourn you and shed tears over the body in which we have seen you and loved you?
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How can we comfort ourselves? Many have touched and soothed us with a virtual kiss, but it is not the same as the comfort you offered; Many have caressed and pitied us with a virtual hand, but it is not the same as the sympathy you gave us. Oh, if you could only return in flesh, as our relative and as our friend, to touch and trust our bodies, to touch our open wounds, and kiss away the pain... So how can we not mourn you and shed tears over your body? For you were the Savior! oh, this head that was once anointed with the ointment of nard is now caked with dried blood, these hands that once fed us fish and bread and humbly washed our feet, are pierced with nails, And those eyes that once brought comfort to our hearts, and filled us with joy, Are blankly staring out there— into the NO PLACE... The shackles of death have chained you to the prison of your cold body — for a three-day repose... But soon you’ll rise up out of your ribcage, you’ll break free, while we remain here, condemned to our bodies, to end with our bodies. Though death may be our cheapest toy — a two-penny blade, a seven-foot rope, though we have temporarily frozen death, stored the preserve of life in the fridge, though we’re free to choose death, we remain imprisoned forever within the prisons of our bodies, with loathsome worms as our mattress and plump vermin as our blanket. And when we see the cheap blade approaching, we stammer, we pale, we shiver, and inside us, our hearts sink, and inside us, our thoughts get blurry and inside us, our stomachs turn, and inside us, our mouths go dry. We run to our room, lock the doors, hide inside ourselves... Before the blade we are barefoot and naked, our asses are bare and our necks are bowed. It’ll knot us into a knot, make a knot of us, and toss us, like balls, over there — the NO PLACE... But you — step by step, but you — word by word, detail by detail, pause by pause, unflinchingly walked towards death, stepped over the threshold and entered the kingdom of your beloved father. Our Savior! Caress us like a mother, give us hope like a sister, and lead us by our hand,
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like a brother, step-step, move by move, step-step, sound by sound, step-step, quickly, pull us out of the dark NO PLACE, take us over that threshold, get us to our father’s safe haven... Like this, one more step, like this, one more movement. The last breath of air in the last spasm thrust through the lips into the eternal embrace: “And it’s done!” -Margarit Tadevosyan-Ordukhanyan
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ARMEN "VON" GEVORGYAN 1963-
IN MEMORIAM ARMEN GEVORGYAN
he was still-born but he was alive he was nothing but they raised him they spoiled him with poetry poetry tolled the bell for him from a corpse he turned into a corpse trying to clean up his tracks he was go-getting in clearing his footpath so no one paid his dues so he started gnawing at himself he looked inside himself and wanted to puke
frightened from his own self he saved himself from human assaults faking universal salvation as the only condolence, as the only path, as the meaning of life, and the only truth he died thinking he was saved actually saving others, but this kind of consideration was futile and worthless exclusively aimed at his own justification and humiliation he dies without any reason although he was convinced, to his very last breath, that thoughts or spoken words were the product of his own misery; listening winking groping blurting even sipping and ingesting were just acts of self-discovery and slavery lasting one meaningless day or an absurd jiffy he died and he was stinking -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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KHACHIK MANUKYAN 1964-
ME AND MY FATE
We walked through the world, Me and my Fate; I didn’t know if I Was early or late.
I slept like a log, She didn’t sleep a wink; If there was misfortune, She wouldn’t blink.
She wouldn’t let me miss Anything I’d lost; Of all my yearnings She knew the cost.
No, I said, I cannot Live with her, let’s see If in a pub she can Get drunk with me.
I left her in the street Till she woke at last; The next day (thank God) She was past.
But the skies right off Did fall on me— Almighty’s cups, as far As I could see.
And now I am so lonesome, Wretched is my life; I lost my women, friends, And even a wife.
Hey! I told my Fate, “Come knock at my door: God knows I’ll never Leave you anymore.”
But she never came back:
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She simply went away. And I’m a lonely traveler Up to this day. -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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SYLVA DAKESSIAN 1964-
LISTEN
Flowers in my ears blooming, blooming so I can't hear a damn thing. I pluck them out as fast as I can but they come so fast and soft I decide to be a vase.
SAMOVAR
I want to tell you about all the tea I have been drinking lately—it is good with cream and honey. You will say I am spoiled, yet you know nothing of water, of tea leaves, of cows or bees. They come to me with their lives and I put them together. It is against loneliness and it warms my belly. breasts like green pears hard against your tongue wind rustling the leaves
UNTITLED
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TIGRAN PASKEVICHYAN -Samvel Mkrtchyan
1965-
HANGOVER
Lend me a hand, my dears and nears, I have run out of my wine in the cup of my three and thirty years.
I get sober from the morning bolls; lend me a hand.
Does the wind blow late, or Won’t your hand find me anymore?
I depart unhurriedly in a slow pace, of course. Catch up with me, if you want to make me yours,
My body avoids warmness, Burn it, if your faith is growing dim.
Don’t resent the locomotive hooter, but disappoint from the sadness of the waves.
I am your secret dream. "To be nothing." I am your life’s presence in a bird.
Carry that cross—from your dear brothers and sisters. Remember them with pleasure at leisure.
If it’s not late (it’s never late) recall a piece of chalk draw a deep blue sky one the wallpaper of the world—and go for a walk. I built my house on the foothill The mountain gave way And I am homeless, now.
I built my house on a peaceful seashore, There was a tempest, and I am homeless, now
NOWHERE
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I built my house by a virgin forest There was a fire, and I am homeless, now.
I built my house in an abundant steppe The land quivered, and I am homeless, now.
I am homeless, now. Homeless am I, now.
I have a home, though my home is nowhere now.
THE SEVENTH DAY
The rest is silence—ever, if death’s conceived whenever, each next step doesn’t sever from the former life whatever.
Each existing’s not life–never, but it has to be lived over, drunk from a cup of poison as deep as the horizon.
And if there’s nothing in it, the rest is the same as ever, dope’s silence at this minute conceived, as the pace, in a fever
of the one who lives—never...
To write about love is equal to paying for the chill and the dark, the famine, as well as friends who have died with us in the bed of stamina during three months
AN OVERLY PERSONAL SONG
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of an ephemeral winter of nineteen hundred and ninety two and nineteen hundred of ninety three.
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To write about love is equal to re-writing about an excessive attenuation of the poetized burgeoning of the wind, spring, cloud, flower, bird, light, autumn, and the color of leaves. To write about love is equal to not writing a terrific article on the country’s political social economic deviations of everyday route— full of abbreviations and favorably rewarded and paid.
To write about love is equal to noticing all the particulars of the plummet of the SELF— to put then down for the sake of generations to come.
To write about love is equal to not being the TOMORROW of presaging and swashbuckling time. To write about love is equal to sketching a teapot, another teapot, smaller, still a smaller one— a teapot dreamed by an off-the-wall artist.
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HERMINÉ NAVASARDYAN 1967-
We grow of ices; snow nourishes our buds.
FLOCK For Emily Dickinson
Our roots through snowflakes reach the earth or hang to the air.
Only the sun’s rays touch our petals any alpinist reaches here our cliffs.
Our eyes are straight opened to the heaven, with our fragrance clouds and air breathe.
The springs from our hearts flow down through stones, water runs out as ice near headwaters at nights.
Our white procession Stretches from earth to heavens although no one either climbs or descends.
THEY SEE WITHOUT SEEING, THEY HEAR WITHOUT HEARING
I read poems to the fish, but they neither speak nor hear.
I kept reading because water baptizes the soul-born ones.
People don’t listen to poets but orators Who lead them to unoccupied lands.
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MYSTERY
Love’s mystery exhausts my soul, reality, even more; thirty-silver love is enough for all.
My breath was filled with desert air, now all the pillars and the walls are short of breath.
The view that would stretch along the depth of bottomless eyes seals in a single drop.
When fish narrate me the unutterable, a nameless bliss is embracing me, but waters wreck my heart.
The all-inclusive solitude is too big for the borders of duality.
One should have enough reality (to the point of killing Diana) to comprehend the edges Translated by the author
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ARMENUHI SISYAN *** The Great Absence is here again– within me, without me. Lord of Mercy, lead me to the place where I’m always away.
*** On the shore, a little boy was throwing stones into the water. That’s when I witnessed my doubts stoning my faith.
*** What’s wrong with me? Indeed, one day I was killed by my unwritten lines.
*** Blissful Job, dearest ancestor, next of kin– otherwise where do I get this startling endurance?
*** You are trying to identify me with every one yoy know, But see how hard God has worked on each grain of sand.
1968-
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*** Sometimes the angels are dying to see something that’s not theirs– they get punished: their wings get burnt. The morale is curiosity kills the angel, sometimes.
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*** I’m walking on you leaving traces– copies of my thoughts sowing love. Some day (promise) you’ll cover me with affection, earth.
*** Between my yesterday and tomorrow today is terrorizing me behind the mask of affliction. Between my enter and exit the scene is petrifying me with airless space.
*** Ripeness makes things sweet– Don’t taste the early fruit; leave it to time. It leaves the fruit alone to become fully grown. -Samvel Mkrtchyan
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NANCY KRICORIAN 1968-
MY ARMENIA
Armenia is a country where someone is always crying. Women punch in and out on the clock, grieving in shifts. 1895, 1915, 1921, the thirties, 1988, 1992, 1993, 1994... White handkerchiefs flutter in their careworn hands.
The Armenian orphans have oversized heads and eyes the color of bitter chocolate. They don't complain about the harshest winter. They are grateful for the same dull food. In their faded uniforms, they sing off-key for visitors.
Cher, who was born Cherilyn Sarkisian, travelled to Armenia where she wore a scarf and kept the tattoos covered. She visited the orphans, and brought them Barbie dolls. She said she would star in Forty Days of Musa Dagh.
I want to direct a bio-pic of Commander Avo, Cher's distant cousin, who died a "freedom fighter" in Karabagh. How did Monte Melkonian of Visalia, California come to join the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia?
The camera, the handkerchief, the rifle, the massacres, Monte dead in Artsakh, a shrapnel wound to the head. Plum blossoms, apricots, we will make a picnic under the trees, fresh bread, madzoon, cheese, garden greens.
Children will race through the grass, and when the sun goes down the field will be lit by the moon and a thousand fireflies. The men drink raki , and sing: A person dies only once, but fortunate is the one who dies for the freedom of his people.
Are there fireflies in Armenia? Do the women edge their handkerchiefs with lace? Armenia is a country in my body, the right side only because I'm half-Armenian. I choose it -my imaginary homeland, my handkerchief, my name. In this dream you walk past the school's sheared facade; from their desks the children call and wave. A teacher points at a map of Armenia.
THE SURVIVOR
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The ceilings drop like eyelids.
You wake to another dream of soot-stained faces around a fire fueled by broken chairs. You wish the earth would swallow the rows of coffins in the playing field. The living
search for what they want not to find; their eyes catch like hooks at your skin. You should have been the hand God reaching into the school -- the children
could have climbed onto your palm that would hover was still. But instead they line up to write their names in the book at heaven's door.
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CHRISTOPHER ATAMIAN 1969-
BABEL
Beirutine roses dot Islamic arches Peacock curves and serpentine roads Medieval monastery and orange baked church tops Smog fuming strong from exhaust pipes escaping Over mile-long lighted bridge Named after a President long gone.
Orthodox men with smart doe-eyed women Weave past garish blue modernist bus depot Dominican muscles strain under tight cotton mesh The smell of arroz con pollo, shaved ice mango and street vendor incense
An Armenian church, parishioners long-gone, stands guard on West 187th Street. Chinese and Iranian medical students, books in hand Ghosts that you can barely detect anymore Whisper secrets nonetheless.
Biblical Babel rose to the skies, punishment from God But here babble is like a paradise lost Singing its sweet immigrant songs: a promise.
I
INTO THE WOODS for N.S.
Into the woods I go Ever faster ever slow As green gives way to red I walk along the riverbed Some trees become fairies Others soar in lofty aeries Great armies doing battle Young lovers kissing, prattle A history of my world Told daily, how it unfurl’d In the morning and late at night Like a martyr I go into the light.
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Into the woods I go Contrite that I do not know How to save my people How to pray in a steeple From Cilicia and Mt. Lebanon They came Refugees all the same. On Riverside Drive I think of them As a young Orthodox maiden rips her hem.
III
Into the woods I go Full of hope, full of dope. I will not fast I will not slow Just as I want I go. I do not know many things As I pull lightly on my silver ringsVincennes is what?--3000 miles away And yet and yet I think of Sarafian Night and day.
Into the woods I go And now blissful it begins to snow.
MIxOBARBARIANS
Mixobarbarians at the gate Carrying take-out fusion Diasporan specials, hold the curry More kim chi please Divided souls, fifth columnists Guilt-ridden BMW stick shifters One eye eastward the other West. Long gone are the days Of Pledge Allegiancc to the FlagNow Jansenists at heart Questioning everything Accepting nothing Globalized skeptics.
HANA SPILLS THE MILK for Gregory Djanikian
It is nineteen eighty something And Hana Mandlikova has Chris Evert by the throat
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Up five games to zero in the third as I watch nervously (How I wish to be truly American and blond like she Every fiber of my body aches and wants to kiss the very ground she walks on)
“Well anyone’s better than that dyke what’s her name? Pfuh” my father spits.” “Martina I answer and my heart sinks. Martina is a sister Gay as a picnic basket, pink as a rubyfruit jungle.
And slowly Chrissie comes back Apple pie, Chevrolet, one game, now two Ice Maiden, Queen of Cool, (a thinking man’s sex pot) Now three games and four, that’s what she does best
And as she finally takes the lead, it all comes out: The Marxist-Chrissie-hating-American-bashing. The shame of it almost makes me scream (because Hana is Czech and the Czechs are behind the iron curtain and so are Armenians so we must love her over Chrissie even after the tanks have rolled into Prague. And their names are hard to pronounce too so we must feel kinship, empathize.) At five games to six, my father can barely contain himself. He jumps out of his seat As if he were at a World Cup final Knocking over his madzoon and plate of pilaf.
“Aggh my son! My son! Look, Hana is going to spill the milk!” I nod dutifully and smile with inner glee. Apple pie and Chevrolet is about to win the Open again Sputnik and the commies can go to Hades.
And before leaving the house, I cannot help but correct him: “It’s spill the beans, dad, and cry over spilled milk.” Pause for effect, look straight into his Anatolian eyes. “All she did was choke-plain and simple. No metaphors or fancy turns-of-phrases required.” And my father looks up and stares at his long-haired American son, befuddled. BEING
Հայը այն է որ կը տագնապի իտէալ հայ չ՛ըլլալուն համար: Վահէ Օշական The Armenian is he who suffers from not being an ideal Armenian. Vahe Oshagan
We try to hold in our minds
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The inability to understand What it is that we are searching for. East and West, Old and New Opposites stripped of meaning Grasping for a past that constantly eludes us. A prophet from Edessa, a giant from Moush Nomads sprung from desert and rock, Traveling backwards through Cilician time Mourning for memories We try to suppress. And always the yearning For something we cannot ever reach.
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TINA DEMIRDJIAN 1970-
IN THE KITCHEN
It was always a fiasco to put away the dishes to stack the amber glasses one on top of the other toss the miss-matched silverware in the drawer stolen from the airlines or the Fountainbleau Hotel during my parent’s honeymoon.
We always like to steal a little memory dad said with a smile and so we had a collection of stolen things in my childhood the memory of them coming back to me at the oddest moments sticking to me like the humid nights in New Jersey
the way you stuck to me that day in the kitchen the third time we kissed when your hands went beneath my peach sweater to touch my breasts I think I’m falling in love with you, you said and I kept silent in the kitchen
thinking I heard the jerking of those amber glasses being stacked on top of one another and the clanging of silverware tossed inside the drawer
like I tossed my peach sweater in the closet after we kissed:
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you stole a little of me that afternoon and inside my sweater I stole a bit of your smell.
They’re planting trees in dusty fields where their mothers and fathers once soiled their feet
IN BARREN LANDS
two women wear flowered scarves on their heads
bend and dig with their hands:
fleshy shovels holding the earth, tilling the soil,
digging passages like human veins: calling their ancestors beneath the ground to send us prayers, to chant the ancient songs.
THE LITTLE RED DOG
I When you forget that the red dog in your hands was playing with you yesterday it doesn’t bother you sitting on your lap it’s feet folded in your hands
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looking at you with small black eyes you don’t remember doing this before
II it’s as if you never remembered rain something that happened throughout your life when you wore your galoshes sifting through streets in New York
III so many years in the cream-colored house so many people walking past the two red maple trees
IV memories seeped into the pink-flowered wallpaper in your bedroom the touch of his hands only a memory of the wind now and his kisses maybe the saliva from your lips dripping
V just like my little baby girl who doesn’t even remember when I give her the same red dog again and again she smiles at me bursting with laughter and I burst back into her a kiss kiss kiss on the cheek and then again
VI I could play this game forever but for you whose memory has trailed back as if the world lived in reverse and rain could go back up to the sky memory lost in you is different than new memory gained by a child VII we live in between those two worlds watching the world lose watching the world gain life in ourselves.
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I peered at them one by one their wings disintegrating into the afternoon light: their huge black eyes staring back at me, motionless, and without a sound: wispy skeletons that had grown silent on the leaves of my red-flowered cactus and my purple geranium. How silent we can become.
TWO DYING BEES
WORM BIOLOGY
In the school science book, two earthworms nestled together, so their clitella
were touching–closer to one another than I had been to anyone,
at 16, I was like an inside out shirt, squirmy in my seat,
my eyes stared at the attachment of two worms like a human suction cup,
the teacher’s words fell through the cracks in the floor: reproduction, ovulation, anticipation,
and my head turned to look at my classmate who listened, too, her pregnant belly
at the edge of the desk: how she had known all of this too soon.
*
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MONIQUE AVAKIAN 1970-
LEAVE THE MACHINE
and what of the white heat between us?
you feel it everytime I look at you I hear it everytime you dream of me
that alive and glowing place between us
pure in intent and potentially destructive
a living warmth more silver than gold ancient and evolving an unmistakable sureness
handshakes and snakes land mines and quakes these are easy to glorify
but what of the will of the fledgling sprout… the patient trust of the dying star…
a treasure can not always be held
what is it exactly that we’re looking for?
something beyond incredible to behold something elusive in its measure to unfold something so far, untold
Be peace. Be bold. Our hearts know enough of the cold.
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SAGO ARIAN 1972-
ExILE
You choose exile; Exile is not a fruit that grows old And falls from a sad yellow tree. Exile is not a manna that falls from the sky... No matter how much it wears out, You feel that it is renewed in you and you feel it sowing seeds in your eyes. ...
Exile opens new roads, New untidy chambers, Rooms filled with dirty plates, And badly ironed shirts, An empty can of caviar! And a cursing neighbourExile has no cafes, where good old friends are lost Especially literary friends! And those who write Do so for their own satisfaction...
They.... Sonya with her old pains, Sevan and his green hopes, Koorken with his poetic nostalgia, Manoyan and his doubts. ...
Exile Where Ishkhan Jinbashian writes but only About his daily silence! Vahe is busy most of the time And never writes about your exile ... His answers are short Only one line. And the old poets who took your address And promised to answer in your exile! Friends far from me. Some of them in old exiled towns; I think of them now I think of Taner Akcham I think of his exile.
....
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Exile Where my students Are near me. A deep endless exile Which leads you to a new perfection Where you can wash your dirty plates Your green nostalgia Exile
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MHER ARSHAKYAN 1972-
ECCE HOMO
This guy he slapped me first. You're dead! I tell him. You're finished! I tell him, You're dead, remember this. Then he slaps me again. Then, another smack. Look here, I tell him, you're dead. I had ogled his chick but you see maybe that's the way I look at the world. You're dead, I tell him, Another time You'll look for me, bro, and won't find me. He doesn't take breath to hear me. Hey bro, don't look in my eyes! I was squawking, man. I’ll cut off the hand that hits me. Still on my feet. He was kicking me by now. Poor sucker. His aiding brigade arrives. Now they're hitting me from all sides. Guys! I'm yelling, it's just unfair, One against so many. You're dead! I terrorize them with a couple of clear-cut phrases. It's not me, actually, it's ... Still striking their sweaty sticky blows In a kind of anguish. They're going to kill me. No doubt. Jesus Christ! No imagination! And I started crying over them. -Samvel Mkrtchyan
*
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HARVART
(HAROUT VARTANIAN) 1973-
LEGEND OF THE FUTURE One of those rose days You should sail past all the cosmic oceans Like a good dolphin Diffusing devotion Using your heart as a compass Your brain as an astrolabe One of those rose days. One of those silence-perfumed nights Horse-star comets from all the cosmic oceans Shall sail past your sextant eyes Shall bring you a bottle of good hope A bottle of a treasure map... Array of light Leading to a salmon's mother spring One of those silence-perfumed nights. HAGHARTSIN A wild cat gives birth to a name: Haghartsin A monk in black is baking the daily prayer. Noah's apostles descend From a space ark Down to an ageless wi-fi spot A monastery spreading incandescent Sermons for tormented poetic souls. Cross-stone reliefs resist algae symbiosis Some trees will always resist being Autumned: Clinging to green apostolic persistence, Because wild Haghartsin is mewing rebirth. Parallel to chimney prayer smoke The Messianic forest Will puff its misty cigars up: To God.
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ODE
Any short-lived longing? A bud—needless of pruning? A stand-up comedian might sit down as well as Rodin's The Thinker did. Someone will soon inquire into your heart. Back from pasture, a sheep—lost from your herd. How to sweeten daybreak without perfume of twilight? In no time the gardener will prune a bud. But no, no short-lived longing! Sporting a head wreath, the one will approach you soon.
*
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DAVID NORIAN 1974-
SPACES
Silence for just more than a second. Then a sound from there. But more from the left there. Oh, yes these are cars. Then more sound from both sides.
I once sat here all night. Enjoying really respecting the quiet.
Count— wait count. 1, 2. The spaces between cars. 1. They are there. 1, 2, 3!
SIPPING
At parts when the rhythm can match the paced sipping of nothing or very little. It can be— is learned in theatres.
With soda with soda Sipping soda to the movie.
AN EASY LIFE
Thoughts about how long my heart and all those other parts will work/play are easily put aside for eating and clinchers like the fact that I have no control and that it’s really not my decision. DEVICE
There must be a million people out there
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more than that. So make it worthwhile. Use it well.
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I had that machine “device” for the same reason as you. Same as everybody. But I’m not in that business anymore no way.
Yes it’s all there and more, I’m repeating. It’s just a little more. It takes a little more than what I had.
And I’m repeating.
I had energy. Everybody doin’ it with that energy.
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YEVA ADALYAN 1974-
KING-SIZE BED
My pain is bearable today I need the smell of incense now I’m so aware of time these days Garcia Lorca’s on his death row Bernarda Alba accompanying him as his biblical Mary Kronos violin is the LA Times of my soul today The text inverted – white letters on black
... and I pose the questions my pain suggests
Is he in sorrow? Is he alive? Is he aware I’m his biographer... and does that scare him? Does his bed chamber remind him of coffins or a king-size bed without a kingdom ? I have two mirrors in my room Both show his portrait when I look.
My morning was either lonesome or patronizing Until I met the Spanish curls in a long pony tail. Flamenco guitarist with a young heart Gazing at me from the cafe fence.
I lured his feet into the cafe. His youth very refreshing, passion of speech very Latino Great expectations from life unknown Talking non-stop Playing guitar Quoting the masters Praising the dancers Offering his self to my musical ears Drinking his coffee with lots of noise Bringing a smile to my rainy face. My female puppets are dancing to Segovia My Spanish shawl wrapped around their waists...
Three knocks on my red door. His king-size bed is being delivered. It has no mattress, no linens, no pillows, It’s in my head – I shut the door.
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Five-dollar bill under my sleeve Can’t find a homeless to give it to.
“Open embrace” – my teacher yells Tango is smooth, tango is lonely It takes two to tango – no matter what A small embellishment with your left leg Just wouldn’t hurt. Please feel the floor Caress the floor Make love to it Don’t hesitate it bears your weight.
I hear the same three knocks again On my red door once more tonight I won’t deceive myself this time I’ll look into the little hole The bed is there until I open Its color vanished just as I opened This time the shadow stays instead Pushing its presence into my room.
I sit on it We chat a bit I speak up first– I’m shopoholic, I do confess I buy too much And still don’t quench My greedy thirst...
Too many books CDs and candles Too many shoes Head-bands and pants Too many human lives I buy... I don’t know which to wear tonight to go to Conrad’s.
Which eyes to put on my pale face Which eyes to put on my pale face Which nose to breathe the air with Which ears to use for freeway noise Which breasts to have the lovers touch
Which feet to use, and for which shoes Which hands to put on your dark skin Which tears to use for nightly cries Which pair of lips to utter words with That would unchain your weaknesses Which tongue to use when I am stuck
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Which pants to wear before undressing.
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His king-size bed is falling asleep Must be the voice of my m o n o t o n y
I drop my eyes, proceed to dreams. They’re black and white. They have no shape, no sound, no recollection.
I find my seat among the audience And watch my dream on the wide screen. ...last time I saw this dream was years ago...
Tune your voice to match my heart beat The volume of your melancholy is overpowering my radio Your childhood complexes drop shadow on NPR news Your morning waking adds too much sugar to my espresso Your malice towards mediocrity stops the manufacturing of stolen goods Your infinite charm brings the ten commandments to their knees Your self-destructive ego makes the soldiers lose their places on the chess board Your fractured warmth makes the female stars of blockbuster movies get out of their characters on the cinema screens and get back into them with tearful eyes. The scar on your right lung makes me drop my habit of flossing teeth Your hidden humbleness makes my absence less and less meaningful.
Three knocks on my red door again...
Can’t bear to open...
Good night my day...
Clumsy is the color of her soul...
CLUMSY To Zara
Half a pair of dirty socks tucked under her rouge by Christian Dior
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In case they’re needed for semi-barefoot morning walks
Half a banana rotting for 13 days inside the package of her tampax pads Waiting for one last bite from her never-exasperating perspired non-stop mouth Gold Gucci compact mirror covered with remnants of sweet dough Of last night’s Marie Calendar’s apple pie
Another pair of nylon socks, a stolen lemon, A hot-pink G-string, a yellow mouthwash...
All this inside her classy leather purse
She carries the purse’s weight hiding its mess with the brand name tag, Aloof and proud walking habits, laughing small laughs every so often, Looking so innocent, so clean, so corporate Inside feeling sorry that she is nobody, except “I’m a banker, a banker, a banker.”
I have this huge hole inside my emptied soul Can’t seem to find the truth to fill its hollowness I’ll drink this hot cognac and smoke cuban cigars Thinking of my duality, constant duality...
Two moons I see Two men I chase Two phones I have Two dreams I witness Two husbands I have Two women crawl within m y s e l f Too much I want, still not enough Finish your story fast and quick, I have my own stories to tell... He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not...
Clumsy is the color of her mirror...
Is there another wrinkle coming up the stairs towards my marble skin Can’t bear to look at it, I’m still so charming and so chic Are there more cellulites attached to my snob flesh? Do all the men adore me, or are there some that don’t? Am I discovering, am I a proper girl?
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Clumsy is the color of her tongue...
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WEDDING FUNERALS
Bleak, bleak remembrance of his sketched steps Approaching the entrance to the bruised room of secret affairs. Draw my yellow portrait with dried cheekbones Strained lips Navy blue school girl’s skirt White shirt Two thick braids under my ears Black fishnet stockings Totalitarian red flag in my hand And most importantly... White wedding veil covering my deteriorating red face. Charge your beheaded batteries And put them inside my starving tummy
Tantalizing is the feeling she has With him pressing his fingers inside her sweater holes
What is your name you proud prince of retrospection? Oh yes, right there, right there is the g-spot of my spinal monologues
She shall be the prey of your next verbal masturbation Emancipated is the tailored membrane of his diarrhea To carry most prominent conversations with plastic beauties, Beauties buried ten feet under my mother’s walk-in closet,
Closet full of silk dresses for all occasions– Christening of future credit card fraud professionals Weddings with pineapple center-pieces, Plastic carnations and gold-wrapped almond candies, Birthdays of successfully nose-jobbed priests. And the secret devirginizations solemnly performed by them, the priests.
Goose bump is the center-piece of my funeral table...
Funerals... I drown in the juices of glorious faces of the mourning attendees, Soon to be attending their o w n Lonely funerals Where they’ll be the only ones listening to their own eulogy...
I’ve lived a decent and fair life Loved all my girlfriends equally Gave diamond rings to all my wives
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A few back stabbings here and there But overall – a decent life Funerals... accompanied by dying violins and their torn strings.
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RONALD L DZERIGIAN 1976-
In the summer Fresno is an open flame beneath our feet,
makes our mouths sensitive to stolen loquats We see canals explode
with cliff swallows, all curves and arrows. The dust in our rooms
settles at family reunions on the pond with a few leaves
floating clouds above the tangerine Koi in the backyard.
JULY
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ALAN SEMERDJIAN 1977-
LETTERS after Saroyan
The War Department is a bucket of rain we left out on the porch. Each day the water gradually disappears like family members after holiday dinners; one by one the sleep takes over them until the bucket is emptied, the soldiers all returned to Ithaca. This, of course, can only happen in summer when the heat simmers all memories dry. But oh the winters, heading to and returning from, the bucket seems forever filled, heavier from the weight of it all. CRUSH
I once had a crush on the word reconciliation how it moved in and out of my life its slippery cil rounding corners and rubbing up against the hard con how I misused the word on more than one occasion meaning almost clear at once here and never here there but never somewhere. And though the past may sound a lot like history it was about love, and it’s always about love, this forever balance of stretching and returning this push and pull like some sad scavenger hunt or tug of war for the soldier never quite back and the object of his affection like a word broken at the syllable the need for more space her always here, her never left. This is how it goes.
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Time ends up making a postcard from him to her and two rooms on either side of the world his boots heavy with memory’s lead in one bed, her need to reconcile in the other, and me still in love with a word, with an idea all of us are so desperately trying to understand.
TWO TOWERS
Bending around the highway slicing the horizontal still: two towers. The sun between verticals then later blinding two towers. Radio spitting fire, the correspondents still for two towers. History and historians, two towers in and out of focus. Birds circumnavigating clouds above two towers. Not sure if maybe on a clear day but two towers. A flag for two towers; a pin approaching a balloon. The idea of two sinking then rising – the towers out of the sink, the sink rising up from the towers. Two dogs, off leash, proud down avenue C: both towers. Two memories swaying, window open revealing towers. On the way, photoshopping covers with towers, a plane to catch. Two lovers shouting their heads off: two towers. Two apartments, blocks, trains, miles to go from two towers. To build or not, to cry or always cry for towers. Forgetting two towers, then one, then another, then none.
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GRANDCHILDREN OF GENOCIDE
We think of bombfields and big when we think of genocide. We think of mass cleansing. We think in holes. We think the whole page. We think what’s under it, what they’ve been covering up. We think there might have been people in those whole pages.
We think of chambers when we think of genocide. We think of people crying. We think of people climbing. We think of people climbing and crying, crying and climbing. We think of both people climbing and people crying. We think in chambers. We think in those horrible chambers when we think of genocide. Those horrible 20th century chambers.
When we think of genocide, we don’t think of mountains and deserts. We don’t think of bazaars. When we do think of them, we don’t think of young democratic people and pomegranates. We don’t think of young democratic people with pomegranates at bazaars when we think of genocide. We don’t think of them next to our grandfathers. We don’t think of next to them.
Then there are young democratic people who don’t eat pomegranates and don’t think of genocide. We don’t think of them either. We don’t think of them when we think of genocide, but we do think of moustaches. We don’t think of long and lovely moustaches, but we think of moustaches when we think of genocide.
We don’t think of grandfathers plural or generations of grandfathers before that when we think of genocide. But we do think of mothers. And mothers before that. But we do think of mothers, but we don’t think of women. We don’t think of women dancing. We don’t hear the music when we think of genocide. These things we think about and not hear when we think about genocide.
And we don’t think of civil war as genocide. We hear about it. We don’t call in enough with such information. We think about reconciliation, but we don’t think about reconciliation when we think about genocide. We don’t study the memorials, we don’t explain the play in papers, we don’t shake hands and make up. When we think of genocide, we do other things with our hands.
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NARINÉ AVETYAN -Samvel Mkrtchyan
1977-
TRYING TO STATE MYSELF
I passed through hotels, kitchens, but they would not suffice— I entered bedrooms, and when the sheets were moistened from my feverish curves, I was a poet if you please, I could write verse on love, nature and the native land to make them ring out from podiums— I could be guaranteed a little piece of ground at the Pantheon as insurance. I preferred, instead, to end up my sad career in bathrooms. Still, I didn’t have enough, and I threw out my body— I am a heavy rain man— how light the air is, long live my legs, they’re still tight, marching in ditches and elsewhere, how flexible the wind is, my right dancing partner— how we scavenge on garbage cans! what garbage cans! True poetry! And fare thee well. See you at the Pantheon.
SERENADE
Far from the beginning Far from all dating places Far from our childhood and the favorite ice cream Far from infant pneumonia Far from my faked indifference Far from your self-important ventures Far from the pompous honesty of others Far from the National Assembly Far from the big criminal world Far from the volunteer soldiers Far from the mother commissioners Far from the middle-aged paederasts Far from this hostel crossroads
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Beyond this very paper this spot Beyond National TV Not against but indifferently far from the army of all sorts of mother-fuckers Far from (however difficult it is for me) my childhood my body Irrevocably far from spiritual and erogenous zones et cetera THE RAIN
The rain hasn’t stopped. Good evening. I’m not the one you didn’t expect to see. I give my word upon my body— All that I have And all I’m scared to lose—why not. You can touch me, stroke me, As long as it’s raining. Late August, warm like a teardrop.
Yesterday, being loved was snug in bachelor-gartens. Today, compassion has filled the place of my dreams. Tomorrow I shall not have a single reverie. I won’t give you to anybody now. Tomorrow, when you’re strong, I’ll leave.
The rain hasn’t stopped. Where is the dare-devil who will be the first to steal me from the street? I’ll accost him like never before.
How easy this street was. How long it took. You can’t digest an egotist’s smile.
Believe me, defeat is but one: A girl’s body is so sad after the rain.
The rain hasn’t stopped. Late in the evening, I’ll take out all my toys from beneath my bed— My stylish dolls, my flabby bright puppies, lions and monkeys.
It’s raining, still. It’s Ash Wednesday. I am a virgin more than ever; more believing than ever. I carry my body to penitence before midnight. Ciao… Ciao… Ciao…
*
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ARA SHIRINYAN 1977-
YOUR COUNTRY IS GREAT Excerpts
Afghanistan is Great Afghanistan is great, but much smaller than previously assumed.
the need for education in Afghanistan is great and must be met quickly,
need for food in Afghanistan is great, well-acquainted with unique problems facing Afghanistan.
The need for tough, dependable, locally repairable wheelchairs in Afghanistan is great.
A mountain. An airplane. Aviation in Afghanistan is great fun.
Pipeline via Afghanistan is great.
There is no question that Allah’s knowledge and love of Afghanistan is great even as he regrets the limits of his understanding.
Burma Is Great Burma is great for private parties. Burma is great. Difficult to find a working internet connection though, so I will be scarce on news and emails for another 2 weeks. the demand for credit in rural Burma is great. For what might be termed ‘productive’. purposes, the agriculturalist in Burma needs capital to plant
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Cuba Is Great Cuba is great even if the ministries act as filters.
Cuba is great Cycling country, with limited traffic and beautiful towns I hear Cuba is great! Cuba is great! Wish i was going!
Cuba is great!! If it had backpacker-prices I would have stayed there at least three months.
Yeah, Cuba is great! That's why people are throwing themselves in rubber rafts and desperately trying to get across vast ocean spaces to escape
nightlife in Cuba is great fun, and lasts till very late!!
Cuba is great destination also for the beginner ! Why ? Because there is a lot of fish, not much fishing pressure
Cuba is great, castro and his regime are bad. cuba is great. castro is a self appointed tyran who killed many of his people and blames others for it. What there is in Cuba, is great.
Djibouti Is Great And operating out of tiny,
The Anthology of Armenian Poets | Volume II
primitive bases like Djibouti is great for special operations and coastal operations -- exactly what the French and the US are doing in the Horn of Africa region but not useful in any large scale military action.
Again, the problem is simply that France is investing in weapon systems but creating a domestic-only force
Estonia Is Great The reality is living in Estonia is great for expats who can understand the larger context and Estonia has a bright future, except for the approaching dark Estonia is great, though. Their language is the only language that is very similar to Finnish. They have words like 'nahkhiir', which means 'bat' in English
For those wanting to chill, Estonia is great for pampering spa breaks. Dotted about the countryside are a splendid mix of country cottages, Guesthouses
Estonia is great, we have four seasons:). Estonia was one of the countries that got the Independence after the fall of Soviet Union and were are building up
Falkland Islands Is Great Falkland Islands is great,
but since it's progressing so fast,
maybe not yet.
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TONDRAK
(SMBAT HOVHANNISYAN) -Samvel Mkrtchyan
1977-
[from] A SECOND NAVIGATION
A flower grown out of time left from the dripping veins of a suicide god.
Now you know you can't enclose the sky with words.
***
To disrobe beyond the sky without lust--
To surmount the word with laughter behind the back if Infinity.
***
The Voice has no space yet it measures the space where the gods have strolled.
***
Hearts birds of passage--
the Body is no longer a road nor is the Sky a parking lot.
It is impossible, now, to measure the bed or to sleep with an angel.
***
It is impossible, now, to approach the sea for another voyage.
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In the street, you will come across Gulliver scurrying to a store. O corpulent Madness!
***
Like a Sower, the Raven will surely return one day with the images of the dove, the olive branch, and the Flood hanging from its beak.
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ELENA MASEHIAN -Samvel Mkrtchyan
(1978-)
For H. G.
I thought you had come to stay for good to weave word-like angels with your fingertips. When you left songs didn’t revive anymore as far as here no one wept with me for orphaned poetry no one noticed how the words, still unborn, were buried—with you— in your pockets. I say aren’t you fed up of dying all along? *** Whenever I call on you you shake your head draining millions of brain cells to make sure—or persuade— that this is the last New Year of my wild life that it’s high time to grow up to be woman mother— that next year we’ll be of the same age to recall the nine months when we lived concurrently in our mothers’ wombs. Sometimes you try to follow your own tracks but you have to admit you don’t get up enough nerve and your ears turn deaf from the sound of breaking (hence your recent dizziness) You must admit I have a special gift
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in finding outstanding friends and losing them overnight— you are well aware why I write to you now for you’ve heard a couple of minutes ago the sound of my breaking in your dream.
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KAREN KARSLYAN Translated by the author
All people except Poets Are insane
1979-
LOVE AT EVERY SIGHT
The oppressive majority of all people are insane So their insanity appears sane
And when I revolt against this all-consuming insanity They think me insane
All Poets Are insane
Miracles exist Without a doubt And I am so sure of this As I am that had your nose been slightly more hooked The whole face of the earth would have been changed You are a feast
I wrote my first poem With my steps When as a student struck down by my mad infatuation I roamed the streets and alleys of my city Writing the long name of my beloved with the trajectory of my steps I wore out entire neighborhoods under my feet memorizing the sequence of the gigantic letters EVELINA Within a few weeks I managed to cover The floor plan of an entire huge metropolis With a handwriting Rather a foot-writing That would send me straight to a psychiatric ward With a never before seen diagnosis: LINA
I longed to tickle her all over her body I longed to rape each one of her pores I longed to stand with her face to face And tie her long hair into one knot with mine With the sun pouring in through hair-thin cracks I longed to show her the world in my eyes
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I longed to see her just once past midnight And instead of the lunar phases I saw the flying half-moons of her nail clippings I longed to comb my hair with her fingers To use her paint-covered palms for painting my car I longed to rip out her long hair And replace with them the strings of my electric guitar I longed to become her three-dimensional geometric shape of choice I longed to drive my teeth through her tits And dangle from her nipple panting in rhythm with all of her knickknacks I longed to be at her house I longed to find her behind every opening door I longed to pull her vagina over me instead of underwear I longed to be her passwords I longed to look at the world through the earring holes in her ears I longed to become her achievable but unfading dream I longed to have her blow me behind the wheel of a speeding car I longed to be crucified on her body And in this way mix our bloods together for eternity I longed to watch her Meticulously brush my teeth with her long eyelashes And I was becoming a Poet
Baby I’m offering you a beautiful guy who creates beauty What more can you want? Or does my beauty-creational pursuit Indicate insufficiency of your consummate beauty?
She loved another A cliché story As trite as two and two is four
Everyone has abandoned you except yourself.
How I worshipped the hieroglyphics of her body movements
She was crazy about the moon She was barely nineteen And although she wasn’t one of those sentimental dreamy saps At night she liked to look at the moon for a long-long time Then it donned on me that I should become an astronaut And go to the moon to get my fill of her glances directed at “me” But I was destined to become An air traveler at best And instead of the moon I flew to America Following in Columbus’s air-tracks
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I cabbed from New York to New Jersey Then Georgia To earn some dough for the first time in my life Menial labor Sleepless nights Depression Guns to my head and shooting some whiskey Exhaustion Hard overtime work Smoking joints Busting my ass The owner paid me each buck as generously As the prostate gland yields a drop of piss Fucking capitalists A few months later we rented a ride Loaded up on beer Shoved all that shit in the ass of the old Toyota And zoomed to the Atlantic To elevate the sea level with our hardened bodies Beach entertainment Beach volleyball with beautiful chicks playing like crap Shielding our eyes with colorful beach bikinis worn on our faces Chasing the shrieking chicks looking for their bikinis The summer sun tanning on Sizzling beach asses
Out of the ocean washing up the shores of the sand-covered town of Savanna The tide would throw us Wet to the bone With familiar unfamiliar girls and guys Into nightclubs We’d shake off the water The exclamation points of our toxic trips We moved mercilessly distorting da Vinci’s “Proportions of the Human Body” Hung out danced went nuts fucked but I kissed with the knowledge that I was spitting into those mouths At the club Mad Poseidon
I barely made it out of this bedlam of dancing and the crazy rhythms of the drum&bass I was shit-faced and at three in the morning I stood by myself on a very long bridge Shaky and unsteady like me And dreamed of how Lina unable to endure our separation would ask Amazon.com to caringly ship me into her arms
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NO PEDESTRIANS My feet took me against the wind away from the illuminated city into the remote darkness I knew that waiting for me on the other side of the bridge was South Carolina I could sense Lina moving on the other hemisphere Of the globe which was only a circus ball Rolling under her feet In the opposite direction of her careless steps I’d decided to take a solitary swim off a nearby Carolinian beach From time to time huge trucks rushed by The darkness ahead was frightening indeed And there was mysteriousness in this darkness So I left the drunken buzz behind I used to walk from one side of my city to the other To Love Street Where my beauty lived Pressing the walls of her house to my ears Deaf to the world I searched for her voice the domestic hustle and bustle At least a cough at least a burp at least the intestinal winds Now I walked alone in the dark on the other side of the world Over some shaky bridge My reason long ago knocked out by the powerful jabs of my heart It silently quivered like a beheaded white dove Look into its eyes Then I’d go visit one of my friends Bang on the door until somebody answered I’d drag him sleepy outside And amidst the winter frost passionately describe my emotional state Pouring nonsensical ideas into the steam coming off my lips From afar this bitter spectacle resembled an amusing comic strip A seagull flew up from underneath the bridge I would head unrelentingly into the Endless Night To get to South Carolina To the Mecca of my insatiable love That carried the cherished name KAROLINA The title of my first poem Composed of the syllables of our first names
When I stepped onto Carolinian soil I was startled Here I found distorted scenes from my poem “Karolina” “She and He in a convertible, a sleepy serpent’s leading them … straight to the devil’s den” In front of my eyes To the left of the road sign that read Welcome to South Carolina!
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Lay a huge snake run over by a car In a puddle of dried blood half the length of its body A little farther down the road Covered with years of dust a convertible car With flat tires I looked on for a while In cold sweat My blurred vision of a fervent atheist Revealed the emerging contours of God And I was becoming a Poet
I left walking backwards part of the way The scene was shrinking like burning paper And like a kitten that sees its own shadow for the first time I was meeting myself anew
I used to think that for me Poetry was only a way to express love But after this I clearly realized that For me Love was nothing more than one of the thousand ways to express Poetry And I was becoming a Poet Shouting to the world at the top of my lungs
Poetry is the only precious human quality All the others are nonsense
Love is the mother of philanthropy
I love you
East and West kept playing volleyball They exchanged a few dozen serves of the sun As I made my way homeward from America Tired and worn out To distill Poetry from her indifference Like medicine from snake venom -Margarit Tadevosyan in collaboration with the author
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LORY BEDIKIAN 1980-
BEYOND THE MOUTH
On the back of every tongue in my family there is a dove that lives and dies.
At night when my aunts and uncles sleep the birds comb their feathers, sharpen beaks.
They are carriers, not only of the olive branch, but the rest of our histories too.
As from the ark, we came in twos with tired eyes from Lebanon, Syria,
the outskirts of Armenia and anywhere where safety said its final prayers and died.
Like every simile ever written, the doves or our tongues are tired and misread.
Dinners begin with mounds of bread, piled dialogues between the older men. Near our dark throats, the quiet birds lurk to watch meals descend,
take phrases that didn’t reach the truth and spin them into nests.
Now and then, we spit them out in shapes of seeds, olive pits, or spines of fish.
The men never watch what enters past the teeth, what leaves their moving lips,
and the doves know this. The women shut their mouths when they don’t approve
of the squawking laughs. There is a saying (or at least there should be) that if one doesn’t
believe what is said or true, they can ask the dove on the back of the tongue
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and it will chirp the ugliness or the pitted truth, of how we choke on what we hide.
NIGHT IN LEBANON
The youngest boy, with his ulcer, sleeps. His lower lip pulsates, a small fish breathing. A bed of torn pillows, cradles four of them, two brothers, two sisters— curved, quiet on the living room floor. Buzzing, the open window has its mouth full of street lights, mosquitoes, those who stay awake. Peeled paint on the ceiling, the door
sheds the skin it wore through a drawn-out, twenty-year civil war. The parents sleep in a room full of faith hammered to the walls. Posing, a copper cross, its inscription in Armenian asks for blessings of God upon this home. Through the mother’s sleeping lips a prayer slips, rises, drifts and hovers above the boy
who dreams: he’s a grown man spinning yarn around their home until it’s as thick as a bombshell. Then, cane in hand, walking through a cedar grove, he drops a string of worry beads into a well. Cracking a pumpkin seed open with his teeth, he tastes childhood in each closed casing.
In the morning, a thin scroll of bread filled with tomato paste, oil, mint will start the hurried day. But now, he sleeps as he did the day he was born. Stillness enters his lip, his mouth finally rests, breathing as he will when his is older than this war whose finger has carved a scar in him, the size of an eye that will not close.
ARMENIAN DESCENDANT AS AMERICAN POET
On any road trip, no coastal fog rolling in brings me the sea gull or sandpiper shifting
from water to sky, but the common Armenian crane who has trekked acoss the Atlantic,
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breaking through California clouds, haunting the laurels, the eucalyptus,
a message somewhere in its beak. Underneath any riff strummed, streaked
across midwestern guitars, I can hear the duduk hounding me with its drone
of apricot wood, piping a monotone dirge, driven like the rolling tumbleweed.
In New Mexico, each flute player’s eye turns into the pomegranate seed,
so I head to New England only to find the sediment of riverbeds bending into Gorky’s brush strokes. Strange to think I can’t get away from them,
the ancestral shapes floating west from Ellis Island, crosses tattooed
on their forearms, worry beads pebbled in their grip. Even as I watch the world series, I see a fly ball turning back into the crane.
THE BOOK OF LAMENTING
Begins on edges of highways Where the sun raises its swollen belly, grasses outgrow themselves, vineyards wither their nerves. The sun cracks the dashboard, slithers between rows of eucalyptus, juniper rolls along the wheels of trucks. Past crows that caw, pod atop railroad crossings, the engine cranks its monotonous pulse, distracts me from posted signs, the yellow snake that guides me along. This is where I find reasons to question the living, my father’s face held in his hands, his brows etched in the stained glass of the missions, my mother’s sacrifice dwelling in deserted turnpikes, her eyes gazing from overgrown orchards. Trees disappear. Dried brush crumbles
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into camel’s fur. In the distance, no horizon, but tumbleweed large as sheep. This is where I am when the world has closed its ears, alongside rusted tractors, abandoned fruit stands, roaming for hours, nothing but barbed-wire fences, nothing but the smells of harvest and gasoline. The road matters more than the earth, more than those on the road, it turns into a spine, ladder of teeth and bone. In the passenger seat, my grandmother’s ghost holds a palm full of seeds, scatters them skyward for the crows to eat. All of it behind us now. She tells me not to tangle my nerves, not to stop the creed of the open road – nothing that runs can stay the same.
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ANNA DAVTYAN 1983-
HE WILL TELL ME
He will tell me: “You are lavishness, and your attention is from the stars–rare, in vain. I will gently set the timber cage of doubt to glide towards you along mild waters, you get inside and sail! Free!” He will tell me: “You in doubt– like in an emerald jewel box you made yourself–do not remain! Membrane-winged creatures swarm inside caves and outside, fight against them for us to measure your strength and to know”. He will tell me: “I’ll stir you like the sea, so that your clearness does not precipitate lazily, like continents making mountains, and I’ll cool the rage of your lava with an insuperable maze”. He will tell me: “You make journeys and call guests from everywhere; you set kind-hearted tables from cities to cities and along village roads. I will come to your feast of bread, and will talk about the mockery of the world – an everyday talk – as I don’t have faith in harvest, nor in the size of a grain seed. I will give my love wholly, but what I give will be a debt”. He will tell me a tousand-volume tale, woven inside, with no nightingale, no hyacinth city; I’ll peacefully fill with much gold, call bird-fishes, free people to dwell, spread flowery meadows, put gracious guards, flood happiness in currents, make an enourmous land, and give it back to him. He will tell me: It’s vain, like doing good. My following heart will burst from heaviness.
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ALINA GREGORIAN 19861918
I remember when seagulls blasted through the ceiling in search of video cameras. And when the war ended you tipped your helmet in farewell and forfeited a golden ribbon. The eleventh signer of the Treaty of Grenada had a spectacular smile. It was 1918 and dust was forming in our ears. I remember when eighteen soldiers carried backpacks up shaky mountains. A second republic was declared in the Maldives: Henry IV carved his name in all the pews in England. You signed for the Mayflower then pinned the constitution to my lapel. I remember when we ate macaroons under the dying light of the computer screen. The Midwest was still brand new. You continued to serve eggplant while Warren G. Harding played the bugle. You said: "It was cold in the Ukraine when my grandmother was born." I agreed and we feasted in Flanders because St. Martin cut his cloak in two. LOOK AT THE TURNIPS
“Look at the turnips,” you said. We are miles away from the farm that sells turnips by the bushel and your eyebrows are growing tired from squinting at the road. “Look at the way you tremble when I hold you up to the light of the television and compare you to a basket of folding chairs.”
GOOD CITIZEN
I am not your nation's capital. I am not fiscally responsible. Nor am I delighted to meet you. But I'd like to start flossing. I'd like to throw arrows at Utah. I'd like to sign my name here.
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I'd like to tell an ant colony to pack up and go home. I'd like to sew your mouth shut. I'd like to wave a flag on some mountain overlooking some sea. Here's what's going to happen: I'm filling my car with gasoline just to drive over these stones.
BOISE
This machine fixes your dreams. If you want to see a globe you are surrounded by bricks. As you wander around the bathysphere you count the falling stars. When you hear the radio you dream about marshmallows. This is the way your emotions are whittled down to wheat stalks. This is the way you don’t wake up with your hand on your forehead. I want to place a bucket of affection on your doorstep. I want to walk around the galaxy twelve times.
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HASMIK SIMONYAN 1987-
1.
2 EPISTLES TO MY DAUGHTER
my bloodless daughter frolicking in my capillaries all along stop playing stop drying up so pompously either when i water you to grow
close your face with the rain when i comb your hair when i make up your eyes and lips then dandle you to sleep telling you aaaah
i’m your doll, OK? i’m your pillow, OK? i don’t exist — you’re yelling like a black cloud flooding my house, sticking out your tongue and walking away despondently you don’t exist, girl, because my heart was generous and naïve and i kept all the snakes in my bosom when it was cold they fed on my body and when there was nothing left from me they spat in my empty shadow licked their lips, content, and left to find a warm corner
leaning on my dead table i’m tasting my tears with my tongue — they’re never the same nor is the amount of the tide the year is rainy, my daughter i don’t want hails so that when i water you, you might grow i’ll thrust my fingers into the ground, tickle your roots so that you’ll bloom
send me elderly men, my daughter skilled gardeners who will soften my tough heart in the cracking sun
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2.
my daughter, i washed my hair, dressed tinted my nails — your favorite crimson— now that i am so good-looking, my daughter, give me the sway to wait for you to wait for our daddy and not to be cheated by these sirmaids that sing from behind seven mountains and seven seas about castles with tons of stars, planets of gold which they will send to our moms as a love price for giving birth to us
i’m scared, my daughter, so scared that our ship’s helm might turn its direction and enchanted with the grandeur of a hollow voice she might hit the reefs leaving our daddy an orphan to say nothing of me and you — forever unborn -Ann Voskanian
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MANÉ GRIGORYAN 1989-
THE SUN HAS COVERED YOUR TWILIGHT BODY
the sun has covered your twilight body the wind is streaming slowly through your veins your blood cells resolving across the sky in the morning—the news arrived about your death
I did not rush out to you, slowly, I was drinking water which was not from a stream that would drive me away— my body towards you
I am slowly pecking at your body in my room specifically, I love your eyes, your beard— moving on to meet my body like a gentle breeze hot like the morning sun quiet like an evening god
my man, dying in the garden, was reading books he was beautiful like Zeus in Hera’s arms— O how wondrously he was dying
slowly, with a blissful smile on my face, I am pecking at your body— blood flowing slowly
how beautiful it is to see autumn in your own blood— buttery burgundy oozing down your loved one’s hair about his feet upon his hands— the autumn jammed in his nostrils and ears I am holding your shoulders— how peaceful you are
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beneath this dying cherry-tree, how close you are to God. -Nairi Avanessian
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MEDRIK MINNASSIAN
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1991-
I KILLED MY FRIEND
I killed a friend, And the whole world smiled at me. I killed a friend And denied my emotions. I killed a friend And all the feelings I had. No one wept, Neither did I. No one felt the grief, But me.
What was so great in their smiles? A summit conquered on time, Or an arrow hit the center of the foe. Was that what they longed to see? Was it a conspiracy?
It took a long time to tie this rope And the twinkling of an eye to tear it. Into the ashes of life has everything vanished? Into the memories this story stands full of credit.
I stand alone on this tomb. I stand undone on this stone. I feel betrayed by my own trust. I feel stabbed by my own dagger. I killed a friend. No one wept, Neither did I. No one felt the loss, But me.
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Index of poets in alphabetical order (Volumes I and II) Adalyan, Yeva Aharonian, Avetis Alekyan, Bagrat Alexanyan, Varlen Alishan, Ghevond Alishan, Leonardo Assatour, Zabel Arian, Sako Aristakes Lastiverttsi Armani, Nora Armen, Vahé Atamian, Christopher Avagyan, Arevshat Avakian, Monique Avdalyan, Ashot Avetyan, Nariné Balakian, Peter Baloian, James Baliozian, Ara Bekyan, Zaven Beledian, Krikor Bedikian, Lory Beyleryan, Hrachya Bond, Harold Charents Yeghishé Cheraz, Tigran Chiloyan, Slavik Chopanian, Arshak Dakessian, Sylva Dasnabedian, Shoushig Davoyan, Razmik Davtak Kertogh Davtyan, Anna Davtyan, Vahagn Demirdjian, Tina Demirjibashian, Yeghia Der Hovanessian, Diana Djanikian, Gregory Dourian, Petros Duryan, Ludwig Dzerigian, Ronald L Edoyan, Henrik Emin, Gevorg Frik Gevorgyan, Armen “Von” Ghazaryan, Artashes Grigoris Aghtamartsi
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Grigor Narekatsi Grigor Magistros Pahlavuni Grigor Tgha Grigor Marashetsi Gregorian, Alina Grigoryan, ManĂŠ Grigoryan, Violet Grigoryan, Hovhannes Gorky, Arshile Ghiragossian, Alicia Gyanjyan, Kamo Hakhverdyan, Edward Hamalian, Leo Hamastegh Harvart Hoveyan, Hovik Hovhan Mandakuni Hovhannes, Davit Hovhannes Karnetsi Hovhannes Sarkavag Imastaser Hovhannes Tlkurantsi Hovhannes Yerezenkatsi Pluz Hovhannessian, Hovhanness Hovhannisyan, Hrachya Hovhannisyan, Sevak Hovhannisyan, Tanya HripsimĂŠ Intra Isahakyan, Avetik Ishkhan, Moushegh Kaputikyan, Silva Karslyan, Karen Kazandjian, Zoulal Khatchadourian, Haig Kherdian, David Khrakhuni, Zareh Kilikyan, Gagik Komitas Kostandin Yerzenkatsi Kosyan, Samvel Kouchak, Nahapet Kurghinyan, Shoushanik Magorian, James Mahari, Gourgen Mamyan, Ignat Manukyan, Khachik Masehian, Elena Matgaryan, Maro Martirosyan, Armen
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Merjian, Hagob Missak Mesrobian, Manian Mesrop Mashtots Metaksé Metsarents, Misak Mgrdichian, Ara Michaelian, William Militonyan, Edward Minassian, Michael Minnassian, Medrik Mirzayan, Zorayr Mkrtich Naghash Mkrtchyan, Samvel Mkrtchyan, Shant Movses Khorenatsi Movses, Hakob Muradyan, Suren Naghashyan, Anoush Najikian, Brenda Nalbandian, Mikael Navasardyan, Herminé Nerses Mokatsi Nerses Shnorhali Norian, David Oshagan, Vahé Paghdassar Dpir Paskevichyan, Tigran Patkanian, Paphael Peshiktashlian, Mkrtich Petrosyan, Marine Pilibosian, Helene Raffi Sahak Partev Sahakdoukht Syunetsi Sahian, Hamo Sarafian, Nigoghos Sardaryan, Romik Saroukhan, Hrachya Saroyan, Aram Saroyan, William Sayat-Nova Semerdjian, Alan Setian, Ralph Sevak, Paruyr Sevak, Ruben Shahaziz, Smbat Shekoyan, Armen Shems, Hmayak Shen Mah
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Shirinian, Ara Shirinian, Lorne Siamanto Simonyan, Hasmik Sirunyan, Ghukas Sisyan, Armenuhi Sona Van Srabian Herald, Leon Srvantstian, Garegin Taghiadian, Mesrop Tamrazyan, Hrachya Tekeyan, Vahan Tekyan, Vehanoush Teryan, Vahan Tondrak Topalian, Buzand Toumanian, Hovhannes Tsatourian, Alexander Vanatour, Vardan Vardan Anetsi Vardan Haikazn Vardanyan, Vahan Varoujan, Daniel Vivian Kurkjian Whitehorn, Alan Zahrad Zarian, Kostan Zarifian, Mattheos Zuloyan, Samvel