by Elmira Oktayevna Elvazova
There is a wide green distance
that leads me to you.
It’s another day in spring.
Light stuns the field.
I am trying to forget myself.
You are helping.
The prairie chicken hustles—
Feathers any way she wants.
She cannot know how beautiful she is
And invaluable. Say that she did:
How would it change
the nature of the landscape?
I think it would make
the greatest difference we have known.
What am I to do
if this is the air I breathe?
And know it.
And not with timidity.
With a certain exultation
that sings.
Standing in the open field—
My voice travels distances.
Nobody knows where it stops.
This is to say if I come home to you
I will rebound again like a certain band of light.
To want not to know where I land
is an echo, or a function of myself.
I am inclined to keep it.
