Where the widowed willow bowed
Her headdress over the ravine,
Like old Nightingale the Robber,
He whistled in the seven oaks.
What calamity, what ladylove
Was this ardor destined for?
At whom did he fire off his load
Of grapeshot in the thickset wood?
A demon, he seemed, about to step
From the camp of fugitives from hard labor
And go to meet the local posts
Of partisans, mounted or on foot.
Earth and sky, forest and field
Tried to snare this rarest sound,
These measured shares of madness, pain,
Happiness, and suffering.
6
Life has come back as causelessly
As once it was strangely broken off.
I am here on the same old street
As then, that summer day and hour.
The same people and the cares the same,
And the fire of sunset not yet cooled,
As when death’s evening hastily
Nailed it to the wall of the Manege.
Women in cheap workday clothes
In the same way wear out their shoes at night.
And later the garrets crucify them
In the same way on the iron roofs.
Here one with a weary gait
Slowly emerges on the threshold
And, climbing up from the half basement,
Goes diagonally across the yard.
I again ready my excuses,
And again it’s all the same to me.
And the neighbor woman skirts the backyard,
Leaving the two of us alone.
———
Don’t cry, don’t pucker your swollen lips,
Don’t gather them in wrinkles.
You’ll reopen the dried-up scab
Of your spring fever sore.
Take your palm off of my breast,
We are high-tension wires,
Watch out, or by accident we may be
Thrown together again.
Years will pass, you will get married,
And forget all this disorder.
To be a woman is a giant step,
To drive men mad—heroic.
While at the miracle of a woman’s arms,
Shoulders, and back, and neck,
I’ve stood in reverence all my life
Like a devoted servant.
But howsoever night may bind me
With its anguished coil,
Strongest of all is the pull away,
The passion for a clean break.
7
Talk in half whispers,
And with fervent haste
She gathers her hair up
In a shock from the nape.
A woman in a helmet
Looks from under the big comb,
Tossing back her head
With its braids and all.
But the night outside is hot
And promises bad weather,
And, shuffling as they pass,
Pedestrians head for home.
Abrupt thunder comes
With sharp reverberations,
And the wind flutters
The curtains of the windows.
A hushed stillness follows,
But it’s sultry as before,
And lightning as before
Rummages in the sky.
And when the intense, radiant
Morning heat dries up
The puddles on the boulevards
After the night’s downpour,
The still-flowering lindens,
Fragrant, centuries old,
Look gloweringly around them,
Having had too little sleep.
8
I’m no more, but you’re still alive,
And the wind, complaining, weeping,
Sways the forest and the dacha,
Not each pine tree separately,
But all in their entirety,
With all the boundless distances,
Like the hulls of sailing ships
On the smooth surface of a harbor.
And it’s not out of mere bravado,
Nor out of pointless fury, but
So as in anguish to find words
To make for you a lullaby.
9
Under a willow twined with ivy
We seek shelter from the rain.
Our shoulders are covered by a raincoat,
And my arms are twined about you.
I was wrong. These thick bushes
Are wound not with ivy, but with hops.
Better, then, let’s take this raincoat
And spread it out wide under us.
10
The currant leaf is coarse as canvas,
There’s laughter in the house and the clink of glass,
There’s chopping there, and pickling, and peppering,
And cloves are put into the marinade.
The forest, like a scoffer, flings this noise
As far away as the precipitous slope
Where the hazel grove burnt by the sun
Looks as if a bonfire’s heat had scorched it.
Here the road descends into a gully,
Here you feel pity for the dry old snags
And for the poor ragpicker, Mistress Autumn,
Who sweeps it
