Where does she begin and end?

***

Where does she begin and end?

She descends from above the clouds,

Seeps from the hidden glacier,

Born near the sky’s surface,

In the snow-capped triangle –

My eye weightless in stirrup,

In the shining sea of her malachite.

And with this a thought descends:

Why she is empty of memory,

Of the scars of human history?

In her infancy I feel suddenly old and sleepy:

In my short daydream it ceases to be

Sarka!

It becomes the wide, bottomless

Volga,

She chameleons its turquoise to terra-cotta –

Thick oily tears of living and dead people,

Of all fish and all fossils,

My eye slides on its curved mirror,

Slips into Tarkovskian liquids.

In this fluid daydream,

I find, to my chagrin,

That the river ends where it begins

– In a crevasse of a melting heart.