Fourth month of the year, but it feels like the first,

piercingly bold, the wind especially freezing

and the side street coffee joints not far from the lake offer refuge

among tattooed young poets writing poetry over coffee and pastries.

This calendar spring, this cold global consequence,

this season of polished and measured rhymes dueling like spent artillery shells,

this Evanston, so alike and yet so different from the one I knew

four decades ago: She was the unlikely amalgam of Turkish and Greek,

a fireball in a frozen spring, constantly shedding clothes,

leaving only her jeans on and lighting a cigarette by the dorm-room window.

She wrote such intense prose that reading poetry to her was useless.

That one singular sought-after word always comes late and yet

I found it, virtually with no effort, that long-ago April day, as a freshman.

She and I slaughtered the night and aced our Poly Sci final without even trying.

Then went walking along Lake Michigan, college novices, both born elsewhere

but finding who we are here. Except she could go home to Cyprus anytime

and I could not go to Kyiv. My parents were refugees and left the city of my birth forever,

or so it seemed until the Soviet colossus, tottered and fell, seemingly overnight.

Decades later I was staying in the Ukrainian capital, being a lawyer and writing poems,

when I saw her new novel in an old-town bookstore window.

It did not feel surreal because what we learned together way back, was not so much

political science, as the alchemy of April days when the fog rolls into Evanston

and the clothes and pretenses are off, days when all that remains

is the belief that sometimes the thing most you want to happen

actually does. Not right away, it makes you wait, and after the waiting— there is magic.

And so, as I am back, where Evanston blends into Chicago, among these tattooed talents,

my mind racing as I flip through the Vagantes verses, still seeking

that coveted meaning as April rolls on, its warmth is eventually inevitable.
 

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Четвёртый по счёту

Четвёртый по счёту, в начале – январен,

пронзительно дерзок, морозен и колок,

спасенье в прибрежном миру кофеварен,

в среде поэтесс, утончённых от боли наколок…

Весне календарной претят пунктуальность

и строки изысканной рифмы в размере,

дуэль – канонада на точность и дальность

не здешних и вовсе забытых уже артиллерий.

Ей выпал удел – быть предвидящей беды гречанкой,

особенно в эти нелепые дни, когда зябко и сыро,

срезают ли где-то пехоту эфирной молчанкой,

и незавершённым теряется след у предместий Каира.

Всегда неожиданно, вдруг, возникает то самое слово,

искрится напитком, таким неуместным в начале апреля,

во всех начинаньях сквозит её прихоть дрожащей основой,

когда на задворках ещё умирают январские ели…

Желание верить случается в дни мичиганских туманов,

да так не напрасно, что даже не нужно иных вариантов,

она предсказала всю тщетность строения длительных планов

за стынущим кофе, с усталой улыбкой листая Вагантов