The thought of you is receding like a chamber maid given notice.
No! like a railway platform, with block-lettered DVINSK or TATRAS.
But odd faces loom in, shivering and enormous,
also terrains, only yesterday entered into the atlas,
thus filling up the vacuum. None of us was well suited
for the status of statues. Probably our blood vessels
lacked in hardening lime. “Our family,” you'd have put it,
“gave the world no generals, or—count our blessings—
great philosophers.” Just as well, though: the Neva’s surface
can't afford yet another reflection, brimming with mediogres.
What can remain of a mother with all her saucepans
in the perspective daily extended by her son's progress?
That's why the snow, this poor man's marble, devoid of muscle power,
melts, blaming empty brain cells for their not so clever 
locks, for their failure to keep the fashion in which you, by putting powder
on your cheek, had meant to look forever.
What is left is to shield the skull, with raised arms, against idle glances,
and the throat, with the lips nonstop “She has died, she has died,” while  
                                                                                                               endless
cities rip the retinal sacs with lances 
clanging loud like return empties.