may those words stream like an ermine mantle
Behind him for ten thousand years.
1909, Kiev
Evening Room
I speak in those words suddenly
That rise once in the soul. So sharply comes
The musty odour of an old sachet,
A bee hums on a white chrysanthemum.
And the room, where the light strikes through slits,
Cherishes love, for here it is still new.
A bed, with a French inscription over it,
Reading: ‘Seigneur, ayez pitié de nous.’
Of such a lived-through legend the sad strokes
You must not touch, my soul, nor seek to do . . .
Of Sèvres statuettes the brilliant cloaks
I see are darkening and wearing through.
Yellow and heavy, one last ray has poured
Into a fresh bouquet of dahlias
And hardened there. And I hear viols play
And of a clavecin the rare accord.
. . .
I have written down the words
I have long not dared to speak.
Dully the head beats,
This body is not my own.
The call of the horn has died.
The heart has the same puzzles.
Snowflakes,—light—autumnal,
Lie on the croquet lawn.
Let the last leaves rustle!
Let the last thoughts languish!
I don’t want to trouble
People used to being happy.
Because your lips are yours
I forgive their cruel joke . . .
O, tomorrow you will come
On the first sledge-ride of winter.
The drawing-room candles will glow
More tenderly in the day.
I will bring from the conservatory
A whole bouquet of roses.
1910, Tsarskoye Selo
Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
Grass grows yellower.
Faintly if at all the early snowflakes
Hover, hover.
Water becoming ice is slowing in
The narrow channels.
Nothing at all will happen here again,
Will ever happen.
Against the sky the willow spreads a fan
The silk’s torn off.
Maybe it’s better I did not become
Your wife.
Memory of sun seeps from the heart.
What is it?—Dark?
Perhaps! Winter will have occupied us
In the night.
1911, Kiev
Song of the Last Meeting
My breast grew cold and numb,
But my feet were light.
On to my right hand I fumbled
The glove to my left hand.
It seemed that there were many steps
—I knew there were only three.
An autumn whisper between the maples
Kept urging: ‘Die with me.
Change has made me weary,
Fate has cheated me of everything.’
I answered: ‘My dear, my dear!
I’ll die with you. I too, am suffering.’
It was a song of the last meeting.
Only bedroom-candles burnt
When I looked into the dark house,
And they were yellow and indifferent.
1911, Tsarskoye Selo
He loved three things alone:
White peacocks, evensong,
Old maps of America.
He hated children crying,
And raspberry jam with his tea,
And womanish hysteria.
. . . And he had married me.
1911
Imitation of Annensky
And with you, my first vagary,
I parted. In the east it turned blue.
You said simply: ‘I won’t forget you.’
I didn’t know at first what you could mean.
Rise and set, the other faces,
Dear today, and tomorrow gone.
Why is it that at this page
Alone the corner is turned down?
And eternally the book opens
Here, as if it’s the only part
I must know. From the parting moment
The unreturning years haven’t departed.
