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1
Kachurin, I've taken your
advice
and here I three long days persever
in museologic digs, a nice
blue room that looks out on the Neva.
As an American clergyman
disguised is your poor little friend,
and to the vales of Daghestan
I envious salutations send.
For chilliness, for
palpitations
of a false passport, I cannot rest:
unto wallpaper investigations
I do lianas and lilies bequest.
He sleeps on a canapé,
knees pressed up against the wall,
plaid rug wrapping him halfway,
the interpreter I put up withal.
2
When upon the Sunday last,
after the elapse of not quite
thirty years of eclipse I passed
across the room to the windowlight;
when I saw, in all the haze
of spring and of the youthful day
and outlined vaguely to my gaze,
all that had been mine in a way
so long, as an overbright
postcard with one corner off
(cut to save the stamp that might
have been there as the corner of);
when again it all appeared
nighmost my immortal soul,
it, sighing, like a train in weird
meads of silence ceased to roll.
And I yearned for the
countryside:
languorous as a boy again
my body ached on every side
and I began to wonder then,
how in a railroad coach I'd
repose,
how I'd catch him all unwary—
but slowly smacking his lips he rose
and reached out for his dictionary.
3
I cannot rest my case upon this,
here is one's entire life
halted train-like in the stillness
of these meadows rough and rife.
I imagine all the ditty
fifty miles or so distant
from the great cosmopolitan city,
the house I stammer in, persistent,
the station, the rain's slant
striation
on a dark ground, and again
the farthingale lilacs of the station,
coarsening now in all the rain,
next: leather-lapped a
tarantass
traversed by tremulous trickles, and
each detail of the birch trees, as
well as a barn on my left hand.
Yes, each detail, dear
Kachurin,
each little one, as for example
dove-gray cloud-edge, rhomb azurine,
stippled tree trunk through leaf sample.
But how shall I take the
local train
wearing this coat, these glasses wearing
(and in fact completely plain,
holding a fictional work by Sirin)?
4
I'm afraid. Nor the rostral
column,
nor the moonlit steps descending
to spiraling reflections solemn,
the compact silver wave distending,
could cover up... when we
next meet
I, anyway, shall tell you all
about the new broadshouldered neat
slavey and provincial.
I want to go home. Enough, in
truth.
Kachurin, may I now go home?
To the pampas of my free youth,
the Texas I found once on a roam.
I ask you, isn't it time
withal
to return unto the theme of the bow,
to what's charmingly hight "chaparral"
in The Headless Horseman, you well know,
to sleep in Matagordo Gorge
on the fiery boulders you find there,
with a face that watercolors forge,
and a feather in one's hair?
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