and there are certain customary twins in Russian as in other tongues. For instance, love automatically rhymes with blood, nature with liberty, sadness with distance, humane with everlasting, prince with mud, moon with a multitude of words, but sun and song and wind and life and death with none. Beyond the seas where I have lost a scepter, I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns, soft participles coming down the steps, treading on leaves, trailing their rustling gowns, and liquid verbs in ahla and in ili, Aonian grottoes, nights in the Altai, black pools of sound with «l» s for water lilies. The empty glass I touched is tinkling still, but now 'tis covered by a hand and dies. «Trees? Animals? Your favorite precious stone?» The birch tree, Cynthia, the fir tree, Joan. Like a small caterpillar on its thread, my heart keeps dangling from a leaf long dead but hanging still, and still I see the slender white birch that stands on tiptoe in the wind, and firs beginning where the garden ends, the evening ember glowing through their cinders. Among the animals that haunt our verse, that bird of bards, regale of night, comes first: scores of locutions mimicking its throat render its every whistling, bubbling, bursting, flutelike or cuckoolike or ghostlike note. But lapidary epithets are few; we do not deal in universal rubies. The angle and the glitter are subdued; our riches lie concealed. We never liked the jeweler's window in the rainy night. My back is Argus-eyed. I live in danger. False shadows turn to track me as I pass and, wearing beards, disguised as secret agents, creep in to blot the freshly written page and read the blotter in the looking glass. And in the dark, under my bedroom window, until, with a chill whirr and shiver, day presses its starter, warily they linger or silently approach the door and ring the bell of memory and run away. Let me allude, before the spell is broken, to Pushkin, rocking in his coach on long and lonely roads: he dozed, then he awoke, undid the collar of his traveling cloak, and yawned, and listened to the driver's song. Amorphous sallow bushes called rakeety, enormous clouds above an endless plain, songline and skyline endlessly repeated, the smell of grass and leather in the rain. And then the sob, the syncope (Nekrasov!), the panting syllables that climb and climb, obsessively repetitive and rasping, dearer to some than any other rhyme. And lovers meeting in a tangled garden, dreaming of mankind, of untrammeled life, mingling their longings in the moonlit garden, where trees and hearts are larger than in life. This passion for expansion you may follow throughout our poetry. We want the mole to be a lynx or turn into a swallow by some sublime mutation of the soul. But to unneeded symbols consecrated, escorted by a vaguely infantile path for bare feet, our roads were always fated to lead into the silence of exile. Had I more time tonight I would unfold the whole amazing story — neighuklu?zhe, nevynossi?mo — but I have to go. What did I say under my breath? I spoke to a blind songbird hidden in a hat, safe from my thumbs and from the eggs I broke into the gibus brimming with their yolk. An now I must remind you in conclusion, that I am followed everywhere and that space is collapsible, although the bounty of memory is often incomplete: once in a dusty place in Mora county
