Michael Gerard's Observatory a translation by Alfred Corn from the Russian of Marina Temkina
In the beginning he made it, the grave
weightiness of light,
charcoal's corrosive bleakness diagramming his sculpture.
The fleshy character of metal will preserve
tender imperfections created
by hands that never actually touched the work,
the master craftsman who conceived it
toiling, with cushioned palm and back of his hand,
at an intimate remove.Like earth's firstborn at the first day's close,
we look at the sky and setting sun
across the surface of an ocean overlaid with fog
as white as arctic snows.
The sun's bald head rides low beside us
above a plain of mist
so as to leave wisps of down
at your temples -- just as that divided gaze
tries to encompass both north and south poles
and the thoughts in our two separate languages.A dragonfly airplane inches across the sky
with the rumble (tame, compared to a spaceship's)
of an engine steamer
from the prewar turn of the century.
The days of the black- and redsmith, hammer and sickle,
are gone, as well as the era of Hephaestus's
misshapen appeal. Ours isn't the age of homelessness -- no,
instead, of exile, an exile fixed at the line
where sky and earth intersect.
As though launched from two points of origin
separated by incalculable distances,
love found room in a single heart.We are a new people among other people,
a nation wandering at will all over the world,
this, in a day when nomadic culture are pronounced
defunct in schoolbooks telling old stories
we came to disbelieve, you in French,
I, in Russian. A People
who must somehow manage without homesickness,
who feel nostalgic not for a place
but for the comfort of being at one
with a time outside mortal limits.Remember that sensation of not being able
to read either the face or hands of the clock?
And, later, when we had learned, how time changed,
breaking out of the dial--which then dragged us in
like objects, one more cog or wheel or spring,
under its glass cover.
Every moment proved to be measurable,
all the way, we saw, to the end of our lives.
Isn't this why you keep gazing into the face
of constellations spilled out like sand from an hourglass,
hoping that they, at least, are everlasting?Obeying an invisible rheostat,
our globe darkens,
and the universal planetarium lights up for us.
What dreams it sees, it wills into reality:
the threshold of the twenty-first century,
where we won't spend very many years. We won't,
but the stones will, iron ores now hidden
deep in the earth. Up from those dark mines,
his lantern bright as a full moon, comes the chimney-sweep,
who closes the door after whisking out the stove;
by morning it had cooled down again.
...................... 
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