Читать книгу In Praise of Poetry - Ольга Седакова - Страница 56

SECOND INTRODUCTION

Where someone walks, someone looks

and thinks about him.

This look is open like a hollow

where a candle burns and waters flow

over a home that stands within.

Yet whoever decides that he’s alone

in truth knows nothing at all,

he’s not his own lord and master,

we’ll speak of him no more.

But it is strange how a deed

sinks into the depths below

and there it lives like Lancelot

watching time pass overhead—

a wave rolling low.

I know not who has confused me,

or whose guilt I carry within,

but life is short, but life, my friend,

is a gift of glass that falls from the hand,

and death is long, like everything now,

and death is long, so long.

Ahead of it lies only water

and I am sorry a thousand times

that death must keep going on and on,

as though it weren’t the horizon.

And joy comes up to its waist

and sorrow is ankle-high.

And when I fall asleep it is

my own voice that I hear:

“a single candle in your hand,

beloved, hold it near.”

A single candle in her hand,

and downward it is turned,

as if both had raised their gaze

and passed without a word.