AUTUMN ODE

To Arkady and Lyalya Kotler

I’ll praise Тhee, Shepherd, I’ll foretell
From chromosomes of Thy lamb humble
By Thee depastured, all Thy ample
Cosmogony, behold as well
The spheres’ temptation, and the ways
Of atoms crashed and kerns’ austere,
While Jupiter , aloft grape’s cluster,
In Venus gardens still bewails.
When the aestival royal cope
Turns black in the pavana’s tempest
With leaves recumbence upon endless
Life‘s crimson fruit will never drop.

Thee, Shepherd, Thee! Thy universe
Thy nimble world, one wouldn’t count on,
Which had unfolded as a wound
To Greeks or Persians, came across
For those three hundreds at the chine
Who had stopped Xerxes, with a vision
That а heart’s chalice sacrificial
Tristan would fill with notes divine.
Scrawled over are villatic tiles
With chirp of fowls of the air,
And heavy cuirass of jongleur
Guards not him writing with light style.
On each of rune , on every whorl
Despair glistens as an omen.
Though tenderness is much more solemn.
Though truth is definitely sole.

A bond consensual ascends -
It was the gift to me from Verses
Which following the night–flies’ courses
In tulip tree twining so tense.
And I’ll forget the air filled up
With bitterness, smell from the gully,
When sooty hordes of vermin bully
To desolate New York, the crap
In which one daily cuts in vain
His throat with plastic scarcely vital
Behind quick living suicidal
Not feeling drops of slanting rain.
And then the ocean – mason once
Will open wide the lodge’s entry -
And I would not perturb Thee gently,
Thy, sweetest tears, if I‘ll get chance.

                                             

Translated by Alexander Sitnitsky