Boris Pasternak
To Marina Tsvetaeva

You have a right, turning out your pockets,
To say: rummage, grope, search.
To me clearer than finding cheese
In a daze, is the fact — morning in March.

Trees with fleecy peasant coats
Stand in the half-exposed soil.
Outside the close room, the weight
On the branches seems unbearable.

Dew shivers along the limbs
And streams down like spun wool.
Dew wobbles down the boughs
Like a hedgehog headed for the hay pile.

To me clearer than catching wisps,
Afloat from nowhere, of conversation,
Is the fact — a light haze enwraps
The entire courtyard in spring.

To me clearer than the form
My reason has strived to attain,
Is the fact that, swept up in a dream,
Is a poet, her face blotched from sun.

Starting in a semblance of light smoke,
Like a wreath around branches’ sleeves,
It rips through our cancerous epoch
Into another’s impenetrable impasse.

Out of the rupture our destinies break
To crush the babble of our times,
And what a child says is peat bog smoke:
Is an entire epoch up in flames.

Translated by Don Mager