Before supper, before the lamps warm the beds and the trees's foliage absorbs the dark and the night's abandoned. In the curtailed space of dusk whole seasons pass by unrecognized. Then the sky's freighted with clouds and air-currents drum at brambles and stumps. A storm shadow beats against the window panes. Water drenches the shrubs and the animals stagger over wet leaves. Pine shadows fall on the paving stones; the water's frozen -forest water. Time stays, disperses. Suddenly in the solemn quiet of the avenues, in the hollow fountains, in the pavilions lit up all night, the hospital has the blaze of a St. Petersburg winter residence.

There'll be a worse nightmare
half-closed between the leaves of the days
which will slam no door and the nails
hammered home when life began
will hardly bend.
There'll be an assassin stretched out in the gallery,
his face between the sheets, the weapon at one side.
Slowly the kitchen will open itself up
without the crash of broken glass
in the silence of a winter afternoon.
There'll be no bile or bitterness, just
- for one moment- the crockery
will loom with a marine splendour.

Then will be the time to draw near, perhaps to climb up
there where the future narrows
to a shelf packed with jars,
to the capsized air of the courtyard,
to the cramped flight of the goose
with the melancholy of a night-time skater
who knows how in that moment
the body aligns itself with the ice
so as to turn away
and go.

Translated by Jamie McKendrick