My age still years away from patriarchal

by Sergei Gandlevsky
translated by Philip Nikolayev

My age still years away from patriarchal,
It isn’t time yet, when visiting friends,
To scare their teenagers with a fake basso voce:
“Remember when I carried you in my arms?”
Nevertheless, the overall trajectory
That takes its origin within the doors
Of Moscow’s Grauerman Maternity Home,
Continuing down an enfilade of other
Premises that I stumble on in the dark,
Hand always groping for the secret switch,
So as to illuminate at night my wares,
Is now becoming clear.
Here’s my childhood waiving
A folder of sheet music, over there
My adolescence plays ping-pong, my early
Adulthood, which I love as much as my childhood,
Is full of words and has lost all count of
Fleet-foot kilometers of wondrous journeys.
Then come the years lived out in the four walls
Of an average Muscovite alcoholism.
We sat around, we drank, we sang in chorus
Of rivers, of parting, of the black earth our mother.
But suddenly you yawn: “This song’s refrain
Is kind of boring, no?”—Boring?  But why?
It isn’t boring: it is pure tradition.
Along some warehouses of the railway station,
With a happy-go-lucky puppy on a leash
And one umbrella, in coats of the rainy season,
Walking unhurriedly, at last we reach
The Moskva River.  Here, in this abandoned
Six window professorial dacha, we
Must squat awhile.  A flitting nymphalid
Zigzags capriciously through the balcony.
Tomorrow, at the water well, the water,
Having turned stiff and glossy overnight,
Will slide out of the pail, a pale-blue cylinder
Precariously collapsing at our feet.
The day after tomorrow, rain will come and
Shade in in graphite and haste the terrace space,
Firewood and fence.  The grass under the washstand
Glows, stained with bright toothpaste.
From time to time, the blue, too, shows its face,
While the song never ends.  In the refrain
We strain and hurry through the diving rain
Toward a heavy crossing, windy as a drill ground.
Loud seagulls soar up from the new-bared land,
As human speech screeches on scratched LPs,
Slowly dissolving.  The pup perks up his ears:
His master’s voice!
The grief not worth our tears,
We’ll sit around, smoking and drinking tea.
OK, it’s time for bed.  I know I’ll dream
Of a long endless stream, one that may seem
To be among the greatest rivers out there, maybe.