Smile, Leyla!

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.