Your face is getting distant
Voice tones
The way you laugh
Is like a phantom.
The memory doesn’t belong to you anymore
Decades go by.
Before were years-
You’ll never be thirty
You’ll never be twenty.
Always young
Always happy
Smiling at something into clouds of mystery
Grainy, black and white,
Beautiful.
You’ll never know the decline of life
You haven’t seen these new constructions
I know you didn’t agonize for long
( didn’t agonize at all?)
Your large dark eyes
Absorbed grey spring sky.
When the people bent over you
The ambulance doctors bent over you
Your eyes were grey
You melted in that spring
In that damp grey world
In the grey pavement of Taganka…
You didn’t visit my concerts
(Vlad Listyev outlived you)
You didn’t see my wedding.
You don’t know about my children.
The youth was ours.
You perceived the mystery of death.
Most of your friends will find out the mystery being old.
Somewhere on the shelves a dusty Black Flag cassette is lying
And I’ll never return it to you.
Nobody listens to cassettes nowadays.
When the Earth belonged to you
Nobody was listening to CDs.
We were sixteen – we met,
We were seventeen – we broke up.
You left the house to break up –
To melt into the grey sky and grey pavement.
Hundreds of people saw that
In broad day-light
So what are your black and white opaque eyes always smiling about?
About the fountain of youth?
About our walks, trips, about your awkward sister from Ufa?
About life you never lived?
About children you never gave birth to?
Your chattering
Your childish maiden wisdom
Your laughter
Your mascaraed dark eyes
It was all left there –
In the city which almost doesn’t exist anymore.
If I were religious
I would believe you are in Paradise now
(I wonder of you’d make friends with Kurt Cobain?)
You avoided sophisticated issues
You liked Buddhists and Krishnaites.
It was funny to watch you looking in the mirror before leaving –
Ridiculous superstition passed along from your mother…
I don’t think of you much
I find it stupid to talk to gravestones
And paper photos…
I’m gazing at your photo again and again
Eternal smile
(the smile of eternity?)
Eternal Leila
Memory eternal.
I don’t think of you much.
Once in the springtime 7 years ago
I was walking across that yard.
The house is built there.
Part of your land, Leila, is now under it.
On the dirty playground where we drank beer
(By the way Zheka died of overdosing in 1997).
You never saw St.Petersburg
You never flied in a plane
You never heard tanks firing in Moscow
I didn’t send you cards from Yugoslavia
I didn’t bring you CBGB T-shirt from New York.
I’ve never been to your tomb.
I didn’t even attend your funeral.
Smile, Leila!
Smile!
You are a bridge of my youth.
Smile, Leyla!
Smile!
We will all become like you.
Smile, Leyla!
Smile!
In color and in black-and-white,
Smile, Leyla!
Smile!
On glossy and opaque,
Smile, Leyla!
Smile!
On the hard drive and in photo albums,
Smile, Leyla!
Smile!
Let’s melt in the pavement, in the hung ceilings,
In border lights, in enemies’ eyes.
What are you thinking of, baby?
Always young
Always happy.
Smiling from the past
As if you’ve never been here…
2008.
