A cнeг пoвaлитcя, пoвaлитcя (Yevgeny Yevtushenko)

But the snow will begin again, falling, falling, and I shall sit gazing out of the window into the empty night, across the dark wastes where scentless mayweed and scrags of buddleja clutch at the pounded soil for the remains of life discarded by the departed, the houses they once lived in flattened, flattened.

Gazing over the waste, turning slowly white, three streets away, unblocked by the buildings that once stood there, and up to the lonely third floor window, where a woman I do not know brings her breasts to me each morning, from afar, like stars in an awakening sky, framed by the cross of her mouldering window-frame, an erotic gesture across three streets, too far away to reach.

And I lift my eyes a little, not too much, in my stillness, and peer over her rooftop, past god’s house where his monstrous voice still echoes, though he is long deceased. Then I find my gaze directed just too high to see the river, dragging its infinite tonnage of water from me to you, around the world, and back again, back again. But I can hear the groan of the freighter’s siren calling over all the land, towards the sea, like some lone, lost goose sadly crying for its flock, making its own arrow in the sky under the softly falling snow, softly falling snow. With the eerie ring of the horn muffled in the swaddled silence, I listen for what remains, the shiver of the freezing birds on telephone wires; the distant bark of the free dog, forced to wander the streets at night in a neverending search for scraps; the cries of lovers, loving or fighting.

Yet I hear nothing under the velvet paw of the snow, nothing but the ceaseless ticking of the clock, the click of the convector heater cooling, while I sit wound into a blanket so tightly I can barely feel, barely feel.

And again I search out through the window, over the rooftops, over the river, over all the land and sea between us, through the snowflakes falling gently, and you are not there. You are not there in this winter landscape, with its siren call of ships on cold, grey seas. You are not there placing your footprints in the rubble-strewn wilderness that is my home.You are not there in the dark recess of that window opposite, you are not that stranger offering her breasts up to me, three streets away. You are long gone, lost in your own world, where the green hills and the summer sun are fenced in on pain of death, and I can only wave at you from here.

You cannot see me either. I am lost to you in another time that cowers behind its own fence. I feel the pain of death, and am dying here, am dying here.