Two Poems

Sunt aliquid manes*

(from Propertius IV, 7 and after a translation into Russian by Grigory Dashevsky)

Those manes are not nothing, death does spare something:
the wan ghost-runner
outpaces the crematorium fire

I’ll tell you what I saw:
how Cynthia came and lay on my bunk
Cynthia who was cremated only a few days ago
                                            beyond the busy ring road.

I was thinking about her funeral,
I was falling asleep and
grieving the winter
that had fallen
                       over the narrow country of my berth.

The same hair she had at death
and the same eyes; her dress was singed on the seam;
the fire had touched her favourite ring of beryl
...