BOOKS WE’VE NEVER READ

Books we’ve never read are opening for us.

Towns shimmer in the night air.

Cold dawns. Warm autumn train stations.

The roads turn like pages. Eyes reddened by wind.

Nothing now but the bookmark of a horizon.

You hold my little finger tightly.

Dew prints ellipses on our path;

Later, coppery shadows line the grass.

The day’s reborn. I yearn for longer books.

The Lord plays his music on the wind’s viola.

We are as pure and strange as Sanskrit words.

We greet the sun, whom we resemble.

Translated by Askold Melnyczuk