Читать книгу Way of All the Earth - Anna Akhmatova - Страница 8

from Evening

The pillow hot

On both sides,

The second candle

Dying, the ravens

Crying. Haven’t

Slept all night, too late

To dream of sleep . . .

How unbearably white

The blind on the white window.

Good morning, morning!

1909

Reading Hamlet

A dusty waste-plot by the cemetery,

Behind it, a river flashing blue.

You said to me: ‘Go get thee to a nunnery,

Or get a fool to marry you . . .’

Well, princes are good at such speeches,

As a girl is quick to tears,—

But may those words stream like an ermine mantle

Behind him for ten thousand years.

1909, Kiev

Evening Room

I speak in those words suddenly

That rise once in the soul. So sharply comes

The musty odour of an old sachet,

A bee hums on a white chrysanthemum.

And the room, where the light strikes through slits,

Cherishes love, for here it is still new.

A bed, with a French inscription over it,

Reading: ‘Seigneur, ayez pitié de nous.’

Of such a lived-through legend the sad strokes

You must not touch, my soul, nor seek to do . . .

Of Sèvres statuettes the brilliant cloaks

I see are darkening and wearing through.

Yellow and heavy, one last ray has poured

Into a fresh bouquet of dahlias

And hardened there. And I hear viols play

And of a clavecin the rare accord.

I have written down the words

I have long not dared to speak.

Dully the head beats,

This body is not my own.

The call of the horn has died.

The heart has the same puzzles.

Snowflakes,—light—autumnal,

Lie on the croquet lawn.

Let the last leaves rustle!

Let the last thoughts languish!

I don’t want to trouble

People used to being happy.

Because your lips are yours

I forgive their cruel joke . . .

O, tomorrow you will come

On the first sledge-ride of winter.

The drawing-room candles will glow

More tenderly in the day.

I will bring from the conservatory

A whole bouquet of roses.

1910, Tsarskoye Selo

Memory of sun seeps from the heart.

Grass grows yellower.

Faintly if at all the early snowflakes

Hover, hover.

Water becoming ice is slowing in

The narrow channels.

Nothing at all will happen here again,

Will ever happen.

Against the sky the willow spreads a fan

The silk’s torn off.

Maybe it’s better I did not become

Your wife.

Memory of sun seeps from the heart.

What is it?—Dark?

Perhaps! Winter will have occupied us

In the night.

1911, Kiev

Song of the Last Meeting

My breast grew cold and numb,

But my feet were light.

On to my right hand I fumbled

The glove to my left hand.

It seemed that there were many steps

—I knew there were only three.

An autumn whisper between the maples

Kept urging: ‘Die with me.

Change has made me weary,

Fate has cheated me of everything.’

I answered: ‘My dear, my dear!

I’ll die with you. I too am suffering.’

It was a song of the last meeting.

Only bedroom-candles burnt

When I looked into the dark house,

And they were yellow and indifferent.

1911, Tsarskoye Selo

He loved three things alone:

White peacocks, evensong,

Old maps of America.

He hated children crying,

And raspberry jam with his tea,

And womanish hysteria.

. . . And he had married me.

1911

Imitation of Annensky

And with you, my first vagary,

I parted. In the east it turned blue.

You said simply: ‘I won’t forget you.’

I didn’t know at first what you could mean.

Rise and set, the other faces,

Dear today, and tomorrow gone.

Why is it that at this page

Alone the corner is turned down?

And eternally the book opens

Here, as if it’s the only part

I must know. From the parting moment

The unreturning years haven’t departed.

O, the heart is not made of stone

As I said, it’s made of flame . . .

I’ll never understand it, are you close

To me, or did you simply love me?

I came here in idleness.

It’s all the same where to be bored!

A small mill on a low hilltop.

The years can be silent here.

Softly the bee swims

Over dry convolvulus.

At the pond I call the mermaid

But the mermaid is dead.

The wide pond has grown shallow

And clogged with a rusty slime.

Over the trembling aspen

A light moon shines.

I notice everything freshly.

The poplars smell of wetness.

I am silent. Without words

I am ready to become you again, earth.

1911, Tsarskoye Selo

White Night

I haven’t locked the door,

Nor lit the candles,

You don’t know, don’t care,

That tired I haven’t the strength

To decide to go to bed.

Seeing the fields fade in

The sunset murk of pine-needles,

And to know all is lost,

That life is a cursed hell:

I’ve got drunk

On your voice in the doorway.

I was sure you’d come back.

1911, Tsarskoye Selo

Legend on an Unfinished Portrait

There’s nothing to be sad about.

Sadness is a crime, a prison.

A strange impression, I have risen

From the grey canvas like a sheet.

Up-flying arms, with a bad break,

Tormented smile—I and the sitter

Had to become thus through the bitter

Hours of profligate give and take.

He willed it that it should be so,

With words that were sinister and dead.

Fear drove into my lips the red,

And into my cheeks it piled the snow.

No sin in him. I was his fee.

He went, and arranged other limbs,

And other draperies. Void of dreams,