A moon gate in my wall: собрание стихотворений

You swerved from the road and you went away. I said goodbye to you,
but that was for now;
We will meet again, though we do not know yet where or how.

Perhaps in this room where I write. You will open the door

— oh you won't need to knock, you can hurry in as you have before
because I will always wait.

Or on some roseate bridge as I cross a golden strait

at sunset when over the bar
the white fog enters warily into the bay
you will ride in the other direction and I will see
a sudden glimpse of your face rushing toward me
expected and unexpected, as in a dream…

Or perhaps very far

in the hill of Manchuria covered with cedars and grapes on the lower
slopes,
where the tiger lilies (remember those tiger lilies?)
grow thick on the valley floor
you will wade toward me across the shallow mountain stream
— as before?

We shall meet again. You will see.

Someday our lives will find
a pattern familiar to us, a pattern so designed
as to bring us close somewhere in this vast world — oh, yes, vast still
though almost all discovered and charted, brook, tree and hill.

You and I

will catch up with one another walking perhaps outside
Shanghai
in a field near the Temple of Horrors where the purple idols stare
with bulging eyes…

And it may be too

as I turn the corner off Corraterie around the fountain where
geraniums flame
that you
will be doing the same
and you and I will meet
where the old watchmaker keeps his crack-in-the-wall on that cobblestone
street.

For every wall has a door. I shan't despair.

In Viipuri at Christmas I don't yet know what year

(or even century if we're still living here)
as I watch the skaters circle the pond blue frozen
when the stars begin to ring from the frost at some hour chosen
you will appear
somehow somewhere
in what shape? — even that is not given me to know.

Over the globe bright miniature flags pinned, saying

that we have stood, lived, walked together long ago
at each pricked point. We will meet again
because 1 know that you, not only I,
visit them often nor ever will cease to fly
to all these places or cross the sea by ship or earth by train
and even jog by donkey on covered cart over the parched and unpaved
China plain…

And someday under one such miniature marker grown to be

a banner swaying
in the blue wind across the entire sky
you will meet with me
and then… after th at… only then we will say
goodbye.

7 June 1963

539. «My dear, my dear…»