More About the Same
Translated from Russian by Alex Cigale
In old age (so think thirty year olds) there is beauty.
Crystals of sugar melting – the city
lights are extinguished. Resignation,
the road slows down departing into the muggy flourlike fog
as though the heart’s busted.
Where is your point of perspective? Old age,
whose skeletal three-fingered hand
is frozen lovingly through the clumped dust
on a dog’s back, resting confidently among the summer languor
upon an animated boulder of familiar comfort. This picture
I am prepared to contemplate over and over again.
It flatters, like an honest and handsome aide,
the empty but sorrowing for the invisible light-shadow eyes.
You fall upon the traces of the evident objects
hiding from us daily in the dear and modest obviousness. Above
the shining window the dark sliver of the brick corner creeps down.
The earth flares up humidity. Dripping from sweat,
a youth rushes through the deserted street
pressing to his chest the crumpled mummy of a bird with wilted feathers,
like a fury of jaundiced silence. Old age
observes the unpeopled landscape at the outskirts. Also this:
the sun beats beckoningly into the pupil’s brown pigment,
as though from a distance a somewhat dimmed knife blade
for a cock sacrifice glitters.
