What did we have in common?
It’s hard to say now.
Perhaps, there was just nowhere else to go.
It was July and asphalt on our street was melting.
When I was leaving
I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye.

Who was he: a school friend, a drinking buddy, a rival?
I remember us standing by some painted
mustard-brown community club.
Dusty wind was blowing off beer froth
from our cracked and blistered lips.

Where is he now, the guest of my bad dreams?
Sometimes by dawn my anxiety cools down.
There was also she: the only, inevitable, playing piano,
alive, smiling (when I close my eyes),
and still—never mine.

We used to say: there were three of us! Our paths
were streaming away like streets from the school.
News about me was lost somewhere in the middle
of the road, and both of them vanished
in the renamed cities of the dissolved Soviet Union.

I look through my closed eyelids and beg: please, go to sleep!
Only there we can meet again at the sunrise,
when a police siren hangs in my dream
on the branch of a lilac tree, standing on guard all night.