Bella Akhmadulina
I swear

by that summer snapshot taken
on someone else’s porch, skewed to one
side, that looks so like a gibbet, and
points a way out of the house not into it;
where you are wearing some violent sateen dress that
cramps the muscles of your throat like armour;
and are simply sitting there, with the endurance of a
tired horse after the labour of
singing out to the end all your grief and hunger.
I swear: by that photo, and your delicate pointed
elbows, which are as child-like as the smile of surprise
that death uses to lure children to itself and leaves
as a mark upon their faces for evidence.
I swear: by the painful burden of remembering
how I gulped your airless grief from the
breathless rush of your lines, and had to
keep clearing my throat until it bled.
Yes, by your own presence, which I have stolen,
burgled, taken for myself, as if forgetting that
you belong to God, who cannot get enough of you;
and by that starved emaciation which
killed you at the end with its rat tooth.
I swear: by the blesses Motherland herself, even if
she grossly abandoned you like an orphan;
and your beloved African, that great genius of
kindness, whose own end was unkind, now
as a statue watching over small children.
By those children! And the Tversky Boulevard!
And your own sad rest in Paradise, where
there is neither trade nor torment for you!
I swear: to kill that Yelabuga, your
Yelabuga, so that our grandchildren
can sleep soundly. Old women may still frighten
them at nights, not knowing the power of her
existence, thing she doesn’t exist, saying:
“Sleep little child, quietly, quietly, for
blind Yelabuga is coming to catch you.”
And with all her tangle of legs truly she will
hasten towards me crawling with horrible speed.
But I shall bring my boot down on her
tentacles without saying any more, and
put my weight on my heel, and my toe-cap into
the back of her neck, and keep it there.
Then the green juice of her young will burn
the soles of my feet with their poison, but I’ll
hurl the egg that ripens in her tail
into the earth, that bottomless earth!
And not say a word of the porch of the photograph.
I will not speak of Marina’s homeless death.
I swear it. Even while in
the dark, and in the stench of silt,
with the toads in the well about her, she
had one yellow eye fixed in my direction:
The Yelabuga
swears her own oath – to kill me!

Translated by Elaine Feinstein