Arseny Tarkovsky
The Steppe

The land swallows itself whole
and nuzzles the heavens,
patches up its memory’s holes
with grasses and a man.

The grass is under horse’s hoofs,
the soul in a box of bones,
and only the word, the word alone,
looms under the full moon.

Like Nineveh, the steppe stretches,
and boulders on burial mounds
drowse like ancient kings on watch,
drunk on lunar pewter.

Words will be the last to die.
but still the sky will move,
as long as water drills through
the hard sheet of earth.

A burdock eyelash will flutter,
the grasshopper’s saddle, glimmer,
and a steppe bird will comb
its sleepy wing’s rainbow.

In blue-grey milk up to his neck
Adam will walk from the garden
into the steppe and return
the gift of speech to birds and stones alike.

The soul of souls, he’ll breathe
a lover’s fever of self-awareness
into the roots of grasses,
having remade their names in his sleep.

Translated by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev