Once upon a time,

There lived a poor knight….

               –Alexander Pushkin

A life ago, in a dark room

Of the State House of Publishing,

A poet gave me this volume.

The spine’s now cracked and broken,

Its author no longer living.

 

They said that he resembled

A kind of ancient bird

That flew above the Nile—

They saw his beggared

Greatness, his taut honor.

 

How he feared the expanse

Of corridors, the constancy

Of creditors.  He, like a gift,

Accepted his award

In a fit of affected glee.

 

Just like the old clown

Who crawls across the movie screen

In cap and bows, as if stoned,

And, as if sober, hides the wound

Beneath his vest and overcoat.

 

Feathered by couplets, his feat

Over the calendar is complete.

Farewell—may all your roads

Be smooth.  Greetings, paid

Holiday, black and white loaf.

 

He played with curved words,

Smiled with the beak of a bird,

Locked arms with anyone,

Feared being alone,

Read poems to strangers.

 

That’s how a poet should be.

I roam the globe,

Afraid of being alone.

For the hundredth time, lonely,

I read his book again.

 

So few landscapes in his poems—

Only the confusion of train stations,

The commotion of a theater,

Only people seen at random,

The marketplace, a queue, prison.

 

Life chatted through him, with him,

And his own fate would mutter.

translated from Russian by Philip Metres & Dmitri Psurtsev