Стихотворения

(half town, half desert, dump mound and mesquite)
and once in West Virginia (a muddy
red road between an orchard and a veil
of tepid rain) it came, that sudden shudder,
a Russian something that I could inhale
but could nor see. Some rapid words were uttered —
and then the child slept on, the door was uttered —
and then the child slept on, the door was shut.

The conjurer collects his poor belongings —
the colored handkerchief, the magic rope,
the double-bottomed rhymes, the cage, the song.
You tell him of the passes you detected.
The mystery remains intact. The check
comes forward in its smiling envelope.

«How would you say „delightful talk“ in Russian?»
«How would you say „good night“?»

                        Oh, that would be:

Besso?nnitza, tvoy vzor oony?l i stra?shen;
lubo?v moya?, otsto?opnika proste?e.

(Insomnia, your stare is dull and ashen,
my love, forgive me this apostasy.)

<2 декабря 1944>; Кембридж, Масс.

420. THE ROOM{*}

The room a dying poet took
at nightfall in a dead hotel
had both directories — the Book
of Heaven and the Book of Bell.

It had a mirror and a chair,
it had a window and a bed,
its ribs let in the darkness where
rain glistened and a shopsign bled.

Not tears, not terror, but a blend
of anonymity and doom,
it seemed, that room, to condescend
to imitate a normal room.

Whenever some automobile
subliminally slit the night,
the walls and ceiling would reveal
a wheeling skeleton of light.

Soon afterwards the room was mine.
A similar striped cageling, I
groped for the lamp and found the line
«Alone, unknown, unloved, I die»

in pencil, just above the bed.
It had a false quotation air.
Was it a she, wild-eyed, well-read,
or a fat man with thinning hair?

I asked a gentle Negro maid,
I asked a captain and his crew,
I asked the night clerk. Undismayed,
I asked a drunk. Nobody knew.

Perhaps when he had found the switch
he saw the picture on the wall
and cursed the red eruption which
tried to be maples in the fall?

Artistically in the style
of Mr. Churchill at his best,
those maples marched in double file
from Glen Lake to Restricted Rest.

Perhaps my text is incomplete.
A poet's death is, after all,
a question of technique, a neat
enjambment, a melodic fall.