Transitions №7

Author: Evgenia Rits

Translated by Mark Wingrave

***

He shoots a dream, there’s camera shake,
He screens a dream, with covered eyes,
Smearing ooze round the borders,
Much like a ford in the wake of water.
Round the back he steps into the dream,
It’s the outskirts, this is commonplace,
Where counter dreams scream: “Step aside!”
And tramlines shift to the sidelines.
He steps through shadow dream-filled aspens
Some vague patch-uprooted greenery
Had grown over there through the azure
Of eyes not blue, yet more greyer grey.
He looks in and out of them, and
I melt beneath his gaze and merging closer,
Exposed camera and the outskirts both
Affect and vex me with their borders.

                                                 2001

***

The pale sun shrinks to the shade —
Better have some water, catch your breath,
Bald pate, raw silk coat,
A long held memory in another’s eye.
Into a thousand streams the last drop breaks,
A temple wiped leaves nothing save none.
Everything is forgotten, still it grates,
Everything is far from everyone.

                                               2013

***

I'm yours forever and ever,
Like spirits of the woods,
Running to the cities,
Like the djin from the wastelands to the wires,
Like fish from the sea berthing at the wharves,
And fish from the rivers, and stone cold lacklustre tea.

It’s not for us to grieve old age in the nick of time,
Oh, how it’s deceived us, how untimely soon,
You’re my brother
And a basket of apples, and woeful work,
And lorn-worn crap covered in cobwebs.

                                                  2017