«No one has taken away anything. / I savour our separateness. / I kiss you across the hundreds / Of disuniting versts. I know our gifts are not even. / My voice is calm, for the first time. / What good to you, young Derzhavin, / Are my undisciplined rhymes? For your fearsome flight I ch...»
«From 'Poem of the End' 3 And — the embankment. Still I embrace / The water like a solid thickness. / The gardens of Semiramis, / The hanging ones: your likeness. I hug the water's steely bar, / The colour of corpses, ashen, / Like singers hugging a music score / Or blind men graspin...»
«Herewith, having warned you beforehand / That between us is many miles' space, / That I am one of the riff-raff, / And in life have an honest place: Under the wheels of all excesses, / Host to hunchback and cripple, queer fish... / Herewith I shout from the rooftops, / Declare it — I ...»
«Hereafter, having warned in advance, / That there are miles between us! / That I rank myself one of the rabble, / That my place in the world is honest: Beneath the wheels of all excesses: / A table of monsters, cripples, hunchbacks... / And hereafter, from the roof of a bell tower / I p...»