2
As I love to
kiss hands, and
to name everything, I
love to open
doors!
Wide — into the night!
Pressing my head
as I listen to some
heavy step grow softer
or the wind shaking
the sleepy and sleepless
woods.
Ah, night
small rivers of water rise
and bend towards — sleep.
(I am nearly sleeping.)
Somewhere in the night a
human being is drowning.
2
Руки люблю
Целовать, и люблю
Имена раздавать,
И ещё — раскрывать
Двери!
— Настежь — в тёмную ночь!
Голову сжав,
Слушать, как тяжкий шаг
Где-то легчает,
Как ветер качает
Сонный, бессонный
Лес.
Ах, ночь!
Где-то бегут ключи,
Ко сну — клонит.
Сплю почти.
Где-то в ночи
Человек тонет.
«A capricious, avaricious kind — / Like fire, the Russian mind is dire: / Irrepressible, lucidity for hire, / So gay — and gloom will always find. Like an undeviating needle, / It sees the pole in ripples and murky still; / From abstract daydreams in life’s cradle / It shows the co...»
«In my dreams I was catching the vanishing shadows, / All the vanishing shadows of fast-waning day, / I was mounting a tower, the stairs were atremble, / All the stairs were atremble as I went on my way. And the higher I mounted, the clearer I saw them, / All the clearer I saw them, the outl...»
«I don’t know the wisdom others seem to need, / Only little transient things I pour in my verse. / Everything that’s transient contains whole worlds for me, / Full of rainbow colors, shifting, playing, free. Wise men, do not curse me. What am I to you? / See, I’m nothing but a cloud, a...»
«The wind gathers storm clouds / above the sea’s gray plain. / Like black lightning the Stormy Petrel / flits between sea and cloud. / Now touching a wave with his wing, now shooting / like an arrow up into the clouds, he screams, / and the storm clouds hear joy / in the bird’s impe...»