A Taste for the Seaside

by Shamshad Abdullaev
translated by Alex Cigale

A single season: and we arrive here
returning far too late to the north
from the south.  Beyond the window gate
smoke spurts, and the stone house
is occupied, like a straw-colored mirage, on the populous square,
by an honored
lull on the auspicious days.  Seen from the outer wall,
the bazar bric-a-brac consists of fewer coals than eyes,
swirling across the piles out of the Sunday throng,
where the ripening ears of Garm Sir wheat billow in the amber
air.
What flowed past, not a river
but that which was reflected in it without interruption,
and the hours and the clouds drifted against the direction of the
stream,
as if you were to set off toward the broad waters
among the park swarming with wasps and women, when
the bilious bristling of the grasses bowed to the bazar
conflagration, toward your
unchaste fatherly shadow.  The landscape
flooded back, into the thick
of the stilled emulsion.  Wind and waves