A Tartar cleared the table, drank up the madeira sauce
hooking it with an ancient finger:
stared at the electric fire
bemused by years by waiting in a restaurant by all these languages
by Old Believers, protopopes
Lenin Stalin Stenka Razin and now
tourists: by this electric fire.
The Obu sturgeon had become a megawatt
tourists came to view this megawatt.
The megawatt became the fire, the fire a steppe:
tall summer grass, wormwood, a crimson river. Tartar horses on the steppe
and stretching up his scrawny neck he screeched and boomed
deeper than a bittern, sang:
Thick, the white horse’s mane
Thick, thick, the white horse’s mane.
I shall make a raft on the flowing river
If my cords cannot hold the raft I must
yield up my head to servitude.
Where the salt-flowers grind under foot
the stallion and the mare stand on far-separated banks:
the tall brother and the short brother
lurk about the Voivode’s gate.