«It is midnight in Moscow, a sumptuously Buddhist summer. / With a fast rataplan, the streets part their ways in tight iron boots, / Coils of boulevards luxuriate in smallpox… / Moscow will not settle down even at night, / When peace flees from under the hooves… / You’ll say, two circ...»
«My status being still far from a patriarch’s, / Of merely semi-venerable age, / I’m still badmouthed behind my back / In the language of streetcar invective, / Mindless and senseless. So and so, / That bloody rascal. Well, I’m truly sorry, / Though deep down I neither change nor wo...»
«Parishioners, the spawn of clay, / Face boards, not icons: those display / Mere numbers written in white chalk / Of the psalms of Sebastian Bach. The differences of your day / Ring at the pub and the cathedral, / While you rejoice here like Isaiah, / Sebastian the rational! Did you ind...»
«Old times, like mountains, rose. And war / rose too. Behind it and before / boulders flew, screeching; each one bore / an aura sprouting from its core. / The sea grew black into a steamboat, / and on the trail lit by the moon / the waves clacked like a silver spoon / on a silver spoon....»