Where can I hide in this January?
Wide-open city with a mad death-grip...
Can I be drunk from sealed doors? —
I want to bellow from locks and knots...
And the socks of barking back roads,
and the hovels on twisted streets —
and deadbeats hurry into corners
and hurriedly dart back out again...
And into the pit, into the warty dark
I slide, into waterworks of ice,
and I stumble, I eat dead air,
and fevered crows exploding everywhere —
But I cry after them, shouting at
some wickerwork of frozen wood:
A reader! A councillor! A doctor!
A conversation on the spiny stair!
Куда мне деться в этом январе?
Открытый город сумасбродно цепок...
От замкнутых я, что ли, пьян дверей? —
И хочется мычать от всех замков и скрепок.
И переулков лающих чулки,
И улиц перекошенных чуланы —
И прячутся поспешно в уголки
И выбегают из углов угланы...
И в яму, в бородавчатую темь
Скольжу к обледенелой водокачке
И, спотыкаясь, мертвый воздух ем,
И разлетаются грачи в горячке —
А я за ними ахаю, крича
В какой-то мерзлый деревянный короб:
— Читателя! советчика! врача!
На лестнице колючей разговора б!
«The alarming roll of a drum / Stirs the mist of an early morn, / Joan of Arc on a galloping horse / To besieged Orleans is borne. To the clinking of wine glasses, / To the strains of an old minuet, / In the Petit Trianon* passes / Care-free life of Marie Antoinette... A small lamp ligh...»
«Beside their big fire they had laid themselves down, / Their powerless bodies prostrate. / A bullet had gone through the temple of one / To home in the head of his mate. The hands of the two had locked in a vice / The now dead machine gun they’d manned, / And neither the storm nor the s...»
«I’ve never been even once in a bar-room, / I’ve never drunk whisky neat with sailors, / I’ll never, I guess, on a horse go charging / Across the desert steppes of Arabia. I'm not cut out for hauling in canvas, / For waving an oar, braving stormy weather. / She loves a young salt, do...»
«Times aren’t what they were like, people feel dislocated, / And the ground underfoot’s not the same, don’t you doubt it. / Was a time with their God people cooperated, / Then they had second thoughts-they would manage without Him. Granny dearest, you haven’t a body to talk to. / In ...»