At no age at all you've started to feel

how a life gets mired in memories,

the way each backward glance

is like a noose that tightens.

 

Across flat versts of muddled terrain

your distant city glimmers –

reduced to a few bright rooms

where you were first indulged

 

and then became accomplished.

Working through grammars

and the language of flowers,

your music opened

 

at some tricksy bagatelle.

Each week the house would echo

to the rites of the samovar,

the clack of heels on a floor...

 

But in this straggling barracks town

which you must now endure,

accepting the slavishness

of the overlooked, the weary,

 

you hear at night the cries of wolves

through birches, can sense

their luminous eyes,

their restless, circling hunger.