1.
“Lead them off, only do not discard them!
They are human. Their Moscow they rue.
Give some thought to the needs of that scoundrel:
He was once an angel like you.
And extend a wing to Nicander,
Abram, Vladimir, and Leo, too;
to the slave, prince, traitor, bandit:
ils furent des anges comme vous.
The whole crew—at an alien fireside
(those ghastly necks of old men):
masters, my azure masters,
for my sake have pity on them!
2.
From those wandering, those idly straying,
I now crawl away, and now rise,
and I’m flying at last-and ‘dissolving’
has no rhyme in my new paradise.
That is how by rank I’m entitled
with loud clangor to enter your hall.
Very well. I’m aware of the reason—
but they must be rescued all!
You at least might reflect, you at least might
condescend to glance briefly—Meanwhile
I remain your specterful (signature
illegible. Night. Cloudy sky).”
3.
Thus he thought without willing, it, weightless,
while into himself, like an heir, he flew.
The night breathed. The window drape billowed
with clouds paying clouds their due.
Chair. He on the chair. Bed. Upon it
he again. Mirror. He in its gulf.
He in the corner. He in the floor. At the finish.
In himself, in himself. Safe!
4.
And now we begin. There dwelt in Paris,
number five on rue Pierre Loti,
one Vulf, a red-haired, lanky
civil engineer aged fifty-three.
And under him lived my hero, the author
whom I’ve written about more than once.
My pal, my employer.
5.
Having looked at his watch and glimpsed
through the hour its pebble-strewn bottom,
he dressed and went out. He and I
dubbed that bottom: “Ovidius
crammed with carmina.” Mist
and clods in the head after hideous
verse-making labor. A slight
drizzle outside, and above the black street
not the faintest star in the marron mist.
But there will be no poem: We’ve nowhere
to go. At night he would ramble.
He did not like visiting people
and did not know any nice animal.
6.
To be one with this stone which is one with the night,
to drink this red wine, which the cabby drinks.
And the whores, they walk as the wagtails walk,
And the Russian Parnassus in darkness sinks.
Dying out are the shaggy mammoths,
Barely alive is the red-eyed mouse.
Echoes of an illiterate lyre here wander,
from the slipshod to Boul’Mich you pass.
From a tongue half-Russin and half-forgotten
here you pass to a form of argot.
The pain of a severed vertebra wanders
in the black depths of Boulevard Arago.
Hasn’t the very last inkdrop of Russia
already dried up? Let’s be going then.
Yet we still attempt to scrawl our signature
with a crooked-beaked post-office pen.
7.
Wondrous at night is gaunt Paris.
Hark! Under the vaults of black arcades,
where the walls are rocklike, the urinals
gurgle behind their shields.
There is Fate and an alpine something
in that desolate splash. Any moment now,
between even and odd, between me and non-me,
that keeper of records will choke and drown.
And the bridges! That’s bliss everlasting,
the bliss of black water. Look, what a sight:
the vitrine of an incomparable pharmacy
and the globes of lamps full of orange light.
Overhead-matters there are less pretty
Without end. Without end. Just a mist.
A dead moon phantasmed in its millpool.
Can it be that I too—? Dismissed.
Death is distant yet (after tomorrow
I’ll think everything through); but now and then
one’s heart starts clamoring: Author! Author!
He is not in the house, gentlemen.
And while I looked at the crescent
as blue as a bruise, there came
from a distant suburb, the whistle
—heartrending sound!—of a train.
A huge clean sheet of paper I started
to extract from myself. The sheet
was bigger than me and frenetically
it rolled up in a funnel and creaked.
And the struggle began to seem muddled,
unresolvable: I, the black sky,
I, the lights, and the present minute—
and the present minute went by.
But who knows—perhaps, it was priceless
and perhaps I’d regret some day
having treated that sheet of paper
in such an inhuman way.
Perhaps something to me they incanted—
those stones and that whistle afar?
And on the sidewalk groping, my crumpled
scrap of paper I found in the dark.
8.
In this life, rich in patterns (a life
unrepeatable, since with a different
cast, in a different manner,
in a new theater it will be given),
no better joy would I choose than to fold
its magnificent carpet in such a fashion
as to make the design of today coincide
with the past, with a former pattern,
in order to visit again—oh, not
commonplaces of those inclinations,
not the map of Russia, and not a lot
of nostalgic equivocations—
but, by finding congruences with the remote,
to revisit my fountainhead,
to bend and discover in my own childhood
the end of the tangled-up thread.
And carefully then to unravel myself
as a gift, as a marvel unfurled,
and become once again the middle point
of the many-pathed, loud-throated world.
And by the bright din of the birds
by the jubilant window-framed lindens
by their extravagant greenery,
by the sunlight upon me and in me,
by the white colossi that rush through the blue
straight at me—as I narrow my eyes—
by all that sparkle and all that power
my present moment to recognize.