A Cheer

by Polina Barskova
translated by Anna Halberstadt

When it’s cool and it rains in June
The whole room in a pioneer camp
Develops incontinence at night.
In the morning sheets are being hanged
To shame us all
(and you say—Rothko!)
Behind the leader’s memorial.
Next to a lilac bush,
That reigns like a tsar
With every branch bitt
en and stretched out
Like a night dream
About the mean counselor
Who has not once glanced at me
For the whole three months,
Like an unsent/desperate letter to parents
Lost by the mail, that spirits use,
Entangled in the incomprehensible past,
That turned out to be entirelyfinished.

When I talk to me daughter about this,
It becomes clear, nothing’s translatable:

Not the baby Ulyanov in golden locks
Nor the words like
Time, passed through the irony sieve
Reaches the new ones like cool light: not clear, not precise.

Exactly: Victorian pictures of spirits,—
Quackery, or, maybe, a plain message, like the letter to parents:
“For God’s sake, take me away from here!”
The ghost in the picture shrinks like a branch swollen
By what’s falling from the sky.
A miracle neither acknowledged, nor denied.

• —canteen                 —a cheer