A garden alley with statues of hardened mud,
akin to gnarled, stunted tree trunks.
Some of them I knew personally; the rest
I see for the first time ever. Presumably they are gods
of local woods and streams, guardians of silence.
As for the feminine shapes—nymphs and so forth—they look
thought-like, i.e., unfinished;
each one strives to keep, even here,
in the future that came, her vagrant’s status.
A chipmunk won’t pop up and cross the path.
No birdsong is audible, nor, moreover, a motor.
The future is a panacea
against anything prone to repetition.
And in the sky there are scattered, like a bachelor’s
clothes, clouds, turned inside out
or pressed. It smells of conifer—
this prickly substance of not so familiar places.
Sculptures loom in the twilight, darkening
thanks to their proximity to each other, thanks
to the indifference of the surrounding landscape.
Should any one of them speak, you would
sigh rather than gasp or shudder
upon hearing well-known voices, hearing
something like “The child wasn’t yours” or “True,
I testified against him, but out of fear,
not jealousy”—petty, twenty-
odd-year-old secrets of purblind hearts
obsessed with a silly quest for power
over their likes. The best ones among them were
at once the executioners and the victims.
It’s good that someone else’s memories
interfere with your own. It’s good that some
of these figures, to you, appear
alien. Their presence hints
at different events, at a different sort of fate—
perhaps not a better one, yet clearly
the one that you missed. This unshackles
memory more than imagination—
not forever, of course, but for a while. To learn
that you’ve been deceived, that you’ve been completely
forgotten, or, the other way around,
that you are still being hated
is extremely unpleasant, but to regard yourself
as the hub of even a negligible universe,
unbearable and indecent.
A rare,
perhaps the only, visitor to these parts,
I have, I suppose, a right
to describe the observed. Here it is, our little
Valhalla, our long overgrown estate
in time, with a handful of mortgaged souls,
with its meadows where a sharpened sickle
won’t roam, in all likelihood, with abandon,
and where snowflakes float in the air as a good example
of poise in a vacuum.
1986
Translated by the author