Saturday and Sunday burn like stars

by Maria Stepanova
translated by Dmitri Manin

Saturday and Sunday burn like stars.
Elder trees foam and fizz.
By the railroad crossing’s striped bars
A communal wall hovers.
Past it are slabs, like canvases, dank in the dark,
And the moon cherry
And tiny tightly-packed crosses, a darned
Sock or a cross-stitch embroidery.
Yellow dogs pass here at an easy trot,
And grandmas come to comb sand,
Giant women grind their temples into the rock
Wailing and thrashing to no end.
But these are times, indistinguishable like stumps,
Like my pair of knees:
At the sun one stares, in the shade the other one slumps,
Both are dust and ashes
But these are nights when the nettle-folk stands guard
Among the pickets here,
And the gentle May enters his peaceful orchard
Raining a tear.
And between hand and hand, between day and night
There is unpersonal, brightly burning, eternal
Quiet.