Poem: Everything As In a Good Old-Fashioned Novel — Andrey Dementyev
Everything As In a Good Old-Fashioned Novel
— Andrey Dementyev
To Maya Lugovskaya
Translated by Simon Franklin
Everything as in a good old-fashioned novel.
Colonnaded house, light from a window.
Black limes in blue haze.
Elegaic quietude.
Rustle of crows in drenched clumps of trees.
Leaves float quietly in a pond.
What the hell; I am a complete outsider
In this yellow, forgotten garden.
But, imagine.
Under the leafy canopy
I wander for hours along the fence,
Like an aristocrat, concealing his provenance,
Remembering something.
What is there for me in these columns, these niches!
And I am here as if for the first time,
And my father not one of the has-beens,
But one of those who both were and are.
But with a kind of clinging sadness
The dampness of the columns infiltrates my soul,
And so, in his cultivated backwoods,
Forgotten by people, does Apollo.
