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Inna Lisnianskaya

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Triptych of Reflection

     1
Your whole life is a parallelogram
without bisectors.
A superannuated schoolboy
brought you daffodils,

and spring-flower reveries
revived in you.
You smoke, not changing position
in an official armchair.

The lime-tree breathes its bribe of honey
into existence through a hotel window
like the venom of fame
– or a life without limits.

      2
I am the reflection of every mirrorlike,
living and unliving,
animate and inanimate thing:
brooks and basin-taps,
paradisal wings and infernal
polished relics.

I reflect like the lid of a grand piano,
like a negative,
and my universal sorrows
scarcely belong to me.
They are only a reflected myth.

In this there would be no drama
if I could crawl out
of the annular iambic pit
where there are no reverses
or angles, and amalgams of Spring
blur the surface of the glass.

     3
How can one know
who is reflected into the world
and if this reflects well or badly
into your heart.

Try hard not to look
at anything that shines:
not foil nor tin nor copper,
not even into the mirror

hanging here, where life
exists like a heart grown quiet,
where all my verses
Come now to die.

Translated by Ruth Fainlight

Page(s) 118-119

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