‘The Thought of You Is Going Away…’

Abstract

The thought of you is going away like a maid-servant who has been dismissed, / no! like a railway platform with the signboards Vyritsa or Tartu. / But persons are approaching, who do not know each other, / places, as if they were only yesterday put on the map, / and fill up the vacuum. Apparently, for none of us / will be erected a statue. Apparently, in our veins / is not enough lime. ‘In our family’, you would have said, in agitation, / ‘their have neither been military people, / nor great thinkers/ Right: for the streams of the Neva / the reflection of still another thing is unbearable. / Where is there a place for a mother with her pans / to remain whole in the perspective, made longer by her son’s life! / That is why snow, that marble for poor people, because it has no body, / melts, hinting at the incapacity of brain cells - / that is to say windings! - to remember how you wanted, / powdering your cheeks, to look forever. / What only remains is, burying your head in your hands, / to mutter on the way ‘she has died, she has died’, whereas / the cities tear up the humid retina made of course fabric, /clanging, like utensils being returned.