СТИХОТВОРЕНИЯ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ, НЕ ВОШЕДШИЕ В ПРИЖИЗНЕННЫЕ СБОРНИКИ

429. REMEMBRANCE{*}

Like silent ships we two in darkness met,    And when some day the poet's careless fame    Shall breathe to you a half-forgotten name — Soul of my song, I want you to regret. For you had Love. Out of my life you tore    One shining page. I want, if we must part,    Remembrance pale to quiver in your heart Like moonlit foam upon a windy shore. <Ноябрь 1920>

430. HOME{*}

Music of windy woods, an endless song Rippling in gleaming glades of Long Ago, You follow me on tiptoe, swift and slow, Through many a dreary year.... Ah, it was wrong To wound those gentle trees! I dream and roam O'er sun-tormented plains, from brook to brook, And thence by stone grey thundering cities. Home, My home magnificent is but a word On a withered page in an old, dusty book. Oh, wistful birch trees! I remember days Of beauty: ferns; a green and golden mare; A toadstool like a giant lady bird; A fairy path; bells, tinkling bells, and sighs; Whimsical orioles; white-rimmed butterflies Fanning their velvet wings on velvet silver stems.... All is dead. Who cares, who understands? Not even God.... I saw mysterious lands And sailed to nowhere with blue-winged waves Whirling around me. I have roved and raved In southern harbours among drunken knaves, And passed by narrow streets, scented and paved With moonlight pale. There have I called and kissed Veiled women swaying in a rhythmic mist, But lonesome was my soul, and cold the night.... And if sometimes, when in the fading light Chance friends would chatter, suddenly I grew Restless and then quite still, — Ah, it was Music of you, windy woods! <Ноябрь 1920>

431. THE RUSSIAN SONG{*}

I dream of simple tender things: a moonlit road and tinkling bells. Ah, drearly the coachboy sings, but sadness into beauty swells; swells, and is lost in moonlight dim… the singer sighs, and then the moon full gently passes back to him the quivering, unfinished tune. In distant lands, on hill and plain, thus do I dream, when nights are long, — and memory gives back again the whisper of that long-lost song. <1923>

432. SOFTEST OF TONGUES{*}

To many things I've said the word that cheats the lips and leaves them parted (thus: prash-chai which means «good-bye») — to furnished flats, to streets, to milk-white letters melting in the sky; to drab designs that habit seldom sees, to novels interrupted by the din of tunnels, annotated by quick trees, abandoned with a squashed banana skin; to a dim waiter in a dimmer town, to cuts that healed and to a thumbless glove; also to things of lyrical renown perhaps more universal, such as love. Thus life has been an endless line of land receding endlessly.... And so that's that, you say under your breath, and wave your hand, and then your handkerchief, and then your hat. To all these things I've said the fatal word, using a tongue I had so tuned and tamed that — like some ancient sonneteer — I heard its echoes by posterity acclaimed. But now thou too must go; just here we part, softest of tongues, my true one, all my own.... And I am left to grope for heart and art and start anew with clumsy tools of stone. <21 октября 1941>; Уэлсли, Macc.

433. EXILE{*}

He happens to be a French poet, that thin, book-carrying man with a bristly gray chin;         you meet him wherever you go across the bright campus, past ivy-clad walls. The wind which is driving him mad (this recalls         a rather good line in Hugo), keeps making blue holes in the waterproof gloss of college-bred poplars that rustle and toss         their slippery shadows at pied young beauties, all legs, as they bicycle through his shoulder, his armpit, his heart, and the two         big books that are hurting his side. Verlaine had been also a teacher. Somewhere in England. And what about great Baudelaire,         alone in his Belgian hell? This ivy resembles the eyes of the deaf. Come, leaf, name a country beginning with «f»;         for instance, «forget» or «farewell». Thus dimly he muses and dreamily heeds his eavesdropping self as his body recedes,         dissolving in sun-shattered shade. L'Envoi: Those poor chairs in the Bois, one of which legs up, stuck half-drowned in the slime of a ditch         while others were grouped in a glade. <13 сентября> 1942 вернутьсявернутьсявернутьсявернутьсявернуться