Spun in drafts

Damp white imprints dog the feet;
snowbound trolley, snowbound street.
Her tip of glove to lip and cheek,
“Goodbye.” Go.

Deathly, into soaring snow
and stillness, as expected, go.
A turn: the plunge to the metro.
A blare of lights. A melting hat.


I stand, am spun in drafts, see black
take the tunnel, train, and track,
sit and wait as others sat,
touch cold marble, chill my hand
and, heavy-hearted, understand
that nothing ever really happened,
ever would, ever can.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Anthony Kahn, from Stolen Apples (Doubleday, 1971)

From here.

Colours

When your face

Appeared over my crumpled life

At first I understood

Only the poverty of what I have

Then its particular light

On woods, on rivers, on the sea

Became my beginning in the coloured world,

In which I had not yet had my beginning

I am so frightened, I am so frightened

Of the unexpected sunrise finishing

Of revelations

And tears and the excitement finishing

I don’t fight it, my love is this fear,

I nourish it who can nourish nothing,

Love’s slipshod watchman

Fear hems me in.

I am conscious that these minutes are short

And that the colours in my eyes will vanish

When your face sets.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Memento

Like a reminder of this life
of trams, sun, sparrows,
and the flighty uncontrolledness
of streams leaping like thermometers,

and because ducks are quacking somewhere
above the crackling of the last, paper-thin ice,
and because children are crying bitterly
(remember children's lives are so sweet!)

and because in the drunken, shimmering starlight
the new moon whoops it up,
and a stocking crackles a bit at the knee,
gold in itself and tinged by the sun,

like a reminder of life,
and because there is resin on tree trunks,
and because I was madly mistaken
in thinking that my life was over,

like a reminder of my life -
you entered into me on stockinged feet.

You entered - neither too late nor too early
-at exactly the right time, as my very own,
and with a smile, uprooted me
from memories, as from a grave.

And I, once again whirling among
the painted horses, gladly exchange,
for one reminder of life,
all its memories.

1974
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Translated by Arthur Boyars amd Simon Franklin