"Лондонский маленький призрак"

by Sonya Taaffe

You were a ghost a lifetime before I got near you,
Velimir's apparition of London past
in a clerk's coat and pinstripes,
an actor or a time traveler
dropped in for a Brighton weekend in Petersburg.
Now, with more than a century
lying between us like cards from a devil's hand,
I catch you moving in the art of others—
bold as a linocut, misleading as a collage,
the bright-eyed jackdaw of all trades.
I talk too much sense to see you clearly, Alyosha,
from your flamboyant company
I thought you died young.
You were an old man in Moscow,
a seller of secondhand futures
the last year before men left footprints on the moon.
Before you were thirty, you threw down the sun.

May 22nd, 2016