1.
Kachurin, your advice I’ve accepted
and here I am, living for the third day
in a museumist setup: a blue
drawing room with a view on the Neva.
As an American clergyman
your poor friend is disguised,
and to all the Daghestan valleys
I send envious greetings.
Because of the cold, and the palpitations
of a false passport, I cannot sleep.
To wallpaper investigators
lianas and lilies I send.
But he sleeps (curled up on a canapé,
knees snugly pressed to the wall,
in a plaid rug wrapped up to the waist)
—the interpreter I’ve been assigned.
2.
When last Sunday,
after the lapse of almost
thirty years of eclipse, I managed
to get up and walk as far as the window;
when I saw, in the mist
of spring and of the young day
and of muted outlines,
all that had been in my keeping.
for so long—as a sort of too bright
picture postcard minus one corner
(cut off for the sake of the stamp
which had been in that corner);
when it all reappeared
so close to my soul,
my soul, emitting a sigh,
stopped like a train in the stillness of fields.
And I yearned to go off to the country:
with the languor of youth once more
my body dreamily ached
and I began to consider
how I’d sit in a railway carriage,
how I’d prevail upon him—
but here with slow smacks of lips he woke up
and reached for his dictionary.
3.
On this I can’t rest my case,
here explained is one’s entire life
that has stopped like a train
in the rough-textured stillness of fields.
I imagine the twitter
at a distance of fifty
miles from the city,
from the house where, shut in, I stutter.
And the station, the slanting rain
seen against a dark background, and then
the petticoat toss of the station lilacs
already coarsening under the rain.
Next: the tarantass with its leathern lap cover
crossed by trembling trickles; and all
the details of the birch trees; and the red
barn to the left of the highway.
Yes, all the details, Kachurin,
all the poor little ones, such as
edge of dove-gray cloud, lozenge of azure,
stipple of tree trunk through ripple of leaves.
But how shall I take the local train,
wearing this coat, wearing these glasses
(and in point of fact completely translucent
with a novel of Sirin in my hands)?
4.
I’m frightened. Neither the rostral column,
nor the steps that lead, under the moon,
down to the spiral reflections of lights,
to the compact quicksilver wave
can mask—Anyway at our next meeting
I shall tell you everything
about the new, the broadshouldered
provincial and slave.
I want to go home. I’ve had enough.
Kachurin, may I go home?
To the pampas of my free youth,
to the Texas I once discovered.
I’m asking you: Isn’t it time
to return to the theme of the bowstring,
or to what is enchantingly called “chaparral”
in The Headless Horseman,
so as to fall asleep in Matagordo Gorge,
on the fiery-hot boulders there
with the skin of one’s face parched by aquarelle paint,
and a crow’s feather stuck in one’s hair?