Better this way: it’s you with nothing to hold on to,
Only you (in a taxicab, in darkness), only you.
Quick, like poison running through water, distorting out of tenderness
The undefined features of a face.
O don’t wait there clotted up over my soul or behind my back,
Order up some oblivion, some sleepwalking paradise.
I’ll launch the little ship and the tiny gold fish through my veins,
In search of sweet daydreams, of manmade heaven, of
the seven seas.
Like it or not, my heart will stay in one piece.
Vodka shines its dry light like a gypsy.
How blinding it all is: the winter solstice,
These unimaginable, inhuman words,
This other fate, the triumph of verse.
Translated by Stephanie Sandler