The steady hum of wasps gets louder,
as if someone demonstrates the International Prototype of hum
made of platinum and iridium,
exhibited under the glass dome of the summer noon.
The watch on your wrist was a tadpole in amber,
showing the girlish time, toy time.
Here’s the country house, ivy-clad,
a green poodle rearing on its hunches,
holding a balcony in its teeth.
The puppy’s tongue of the curtain
glows red in the dust.
And further, a church spire
is stuck like a fishbone in the darkening larynx
of the mauve sky. Peachy dreams.
A dragon bone in the throat of destiny.
How can I find you, my girl?
As a token, you gave me your farewell stare –
you wanted to jump into my eyes,
like into a slowly and heavily departing train,
but all the doors were already closed.
Welded shut from the inside. The gray-blue metal.
Like the last dawn when we were together,
where we are still intimately interwoven with
the greenish-lilac bodies,
velvet roots of scents,
with the transparent snakes of our souls, of consciousnesses.
An unsteady scar in the glowing summer that gives at the seams.

Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, Poetry Magazine, Five Points, Los Angeles Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades and many others. This poem was translated from the Ukrainian language.