***
Muddy, gold and swan-less
they get in Autumn –
the Volga river
and my hometown.
The more I think of it now,
the sadder the canvas unfolds.
The greatest effort
has always something sad about it.
I throw my pen aside –
the pen is too small to capture the
grandiosity
of melancholy and time.
My father would say:
‘Don’t panic, get calm!”
How not to panic,
when I see
the greatest river in a scarf,
when the strong Volga steam-ships
are wearing the gloves
of mist,
when the wine is suddenly responsible
to make the full moon warm.
I am standing on the hill,
above the city of Nizhny,
the city
of frost and passion
of people praising Pushkin and Gorky,
of swans leaving to the south
without any regret.
The city where the snow starts in November
and continues till March,
or sometimes even till April or May.
Months and months –
gold, muddy, swan-less,
then – white,
before summer
falls
with stars
into the confluence of those two great rivers,
the Volga and the Oka –
once a nest of mine
and 2 more million people-
the muddy, golden, swan-less city of Nizhny –
the safe heaven
of a perpetual autumn.
