Anna Akhmatova
This house has the good smell...

This house has the good smell
of living flowers and fine old wood;
in the garden, vine vegetables loll,
colorful, on the black earth.

Sometimes the wind still flows cold,
but it’s summer enough that they’ve unwrapped
the burlap from the sensitive plants
in the greenhouse. There’s a little pond too,
the kind of still pond that algae overspreads
with its green and gold brocade.

A little boy tells me, in a scared excited whisper,
that a giant carp lives at the bottom of that pond
with his giant
carp
wife!

Translated by Seraphina Powell