All will end soon

by Galina Rymbu
translated by Anna Halberstadt

* * *

All will end soon.  summer will end.  time is suspended
on the tip of the sleeping wild animal’s tail.  We’ll enter the
woods and come back
empty-handed.
We don’t need anything from the woods.

in the evening
you’ll bring a package with cheap food and a rainbow of
vegetables from the grocery store,
put it down on icy dew in the garden.  I will chop up plenty of
onions for supper.

We’ll smoke in the bathroom (it’s already chilly on the terrace)
And watch: everyone’s posting photos of their summer.
it’s not ours.
But in the end of the summer it seems closer.
you say: the river of my glance has dried out for you,
and I say, I decided to re-read Gilgamesh and Dante:
love finds its way.

summer is almost over.  screens have gone dark.
A wood-goblin has gotten into our old garden
and he caresses himself in the crooked summer-house of vines,
and warm evening wind on your face
is more polyamorous, as ever.
I will get up to drink and will stare for a while
on how coffee stains on the table have changed.

August has moved ahead abruptly, and stamped its foot on the
rusty Cola can.
Our son will soon build Milky Way from rotting apples.
August has closed our eyes with its wide palm, and its girlfriend,
young, like my mom, stands at the head of the bed in an old
nightgown,
and her hands smell of chamomile cream,
and her hair shines quietly on her shoulders.
Somewhere our friends are popping pills
and watch a soap opera on a video panel,
in Zelenograd Lena drinks tea and reads the news on ovd.info}
site,
and the tram without a driver cuts through the red body of
Moscow,
the hunter-August in the black lava of frozen helmet,
peels its skin, and nearby a fawn with a student pass
runs around, covered in droplets of blood.

summer is the swarm of time, fall — hyperventilation
in internal phone booths: imagine how Carpathian villages
smoke and cling to the feet of the mountains,
how in the heavy rotting mounds of leaves
a new language delicately swarms.

summer will end. not a metaphor: but a drilling dance of last
bees.
heat licks the screen of the icebox, like a child licks a fruit
popsicle.
It will end, and all I have to do, is to
read a new message in the dark and mentally walk you to the
nearby Polyanka metro stop.