a person who will never be flesh and blood to me,
yet sometimes she sings through my dreams.
The ghost friend gave me a new poet.
-Gave me Vera Pavlova and in the way that mortals
cling to poets even while their dreams carbonize,
I trace letters onto the white veins of an
African Violet petal and image that she speaks
in all of her impermanence to me.
photo credit"Who will winter my immortality
with me? Who will thaw with me?
Come what may, I shall never trade
the earthly love for the subterranean.
I still have time to turn
into flowers, claw, white-eyed memory...
but while we are mortal, my love, to you
nothing will be denied.
Vera Pavlova
Translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour
"
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