And your transparent profile - how it sways
through carriage windows! Why does memory insist?
Angel or bird - we argued which you were.
The poet said you were his girl of straw.
Through the black lashes of your Georgian eyes
affection flowed on everyone around.
o
shadow! Forgive me, but the clement weather,
Flaubert, insomnia, the smell of lilacs
have turned my thoughts to you, as if that day
could bloom again, cloudless and languishing . . .
your day, beauty of the year '13.
But
I
am troubled by such memories,
o
shadow!
IV
I
know, if anyone does,
the trails and cliffs of insomnia,
but what
I
did not expect was this cavalry charge
to the blast of a wild trumpet.
Whose are these doors
I
open?
Somebody's fled from
his
nest.
How still! How still! Through the mirrors
of strangers white shadows swim.
And that thing shaping there is Denmark-no,
it's Normandy. Or is that ghost myself,
returned to myoId haunt,
and this a new edition
of my buried life?
v
But
I
warn you:
this is my last existence.
Not as swallow, not as maple,
not as reed, or evening-star,
not as water from a spring,
not as bells in a tower,
will
I
return to vex you,
or walk through strangers' dreams
with stanchless groans.
Translated by Stanley K unitz (with M ax Hayward). From
Poems of Akhmatova
to be published by Atlantic-Little Brown.
