The city as though laid out in my palm
And I passed through all my old haunts
I took off easily in youth
Thoughts hung in a beat of easy doubt
Like shades of Aladdin's would-be uncle
Run in four directions
Like spectral American werewolves
Your ice floe roof is splitting
And when you pull the lever of the fire alarm
The elevator will descend releasing
Into the ranks of your Chaldean armies
Into our full-dress Vietnam
No person, no pillar of light, the undead
Just a kiss fixation's victuals
Fishbitch or valor, heart beats faster
Leaving the imprint of one shoe
The stifling incense smell, carnations on the table
The reeking of the freshly drowned man
To the ragdoll string contraption
Add on her sculptural visage
She bears him to the foreign ministry
And in the bullet of the private car
And barefoot Artemis in black-eyed Cypripedium
Will trample scentless gillyflower
And in the colorless aircraft capsule
He'll gulp down sky-sky ripened fumes
And dance the dance of drunken skeletumes
His foot not finding the earth.
Translation from the Russian
By Kevin M. F. Platt, Maya Vinokour,
Eugene Ostashevsky, and Viktor Ivaniv
