Bella Akhmadullina

The Garden

I went out to the garden - but in garden,
the word, lies lush luxuriance.
As geogeous as a full blown rose,
it enriches sound and scent and glance.
The word is wider than what surrounds me:
inside it all is well and free;
its rich black soil makes sons and daughters
of orphaned and transplanted seeds.
Seeding of dark innovations,
O garden, word, you are gardener,
who to the clipper's gleam and clutter
increase and spread the fruits you bear.
Set within your free-and easy
space are an old estate and the fate
of a family long gone, and the faded
whiteness of their garden bench.
You are more fertile than the earth:
you feed the roots of other's crowns.
From oak to oakwood, Oakboy, you are
heart's mail, and word's - the love, the blood.
Your shady grove is always darkened,
but why did a lovelorn parasol
of lace look down in embarrassment
in the face of hot weather coming on?
Perhaps I, who guest for a limp hand,
redden my own knees on the stones?
a casual and impowerished gardener,
what do I seek? Where do I tend?
If I had gone out, where would I really
have gone? It's May - and solid mud.
I went out to a ruined wasteland
and it read that life was dead.
Dead! Gone! Where had it hurried to ?
It merely tasted the dried up agony
of speachless lips and then reported:
all things forever; only a moment for me.
For a moment in which I could not manage
to either self or garden clearly.
"I went out to the garden" was what I wrote.
I did? Well, then, there must be
something to it? There is - and amazing
how going to the garden takes no move.
I did not go out at all. I simply wrote the
way I usually do,
"I went out to the garden..."