Концерт для тюленей. По мотивам Д. Хилла

Медь солнца тает в амальгаме
Экогадючных ртутных вод,
И я, поэт, пою стихами,
И море в такт стихам ревёт.
И вдруг, гляжу – тюлени всплыли
Из непонятной глубины,
И в унисон со мной завыли,
Как Пасхи идолы, темны.
От их внезапного явленья
На дёрн утеса я присел.
Сражён тюленьим удивленьем,
Я добрый час зверюгам пел.
Во тьме, бездушны, словно скалы,
Они растаяли, как дым…
И я назад пошел, усталый,
В недоумении.
Один.

"Singing to seals" by David A. Hill

Do you recall my telling how
one time I sang aloud to seals
late in an August afternoon
on that wind-chiselled, surf-scuffed isle,
when other sounds had somehow ceased
and grey sea slid to mercury
beneath a taut, wide, sun-ribbed sky?

And that suddenly there they were,
Close inside the cove’s bright heart: seals.
Busts or Easter Island statues,
stood straight in their own element,
watching, apparently intent;
a dozen of them, maybe more.

And how I sat on the sprung floor,
mattress of cliff turf, watching back,
first with desire to know their kind:
dog heads with black and liquid eyes,
smooth freckled skin of beige and grey,
treading flat water in the bay.

And then the memory, childlike
in the glittering innocence
that unexpected afternoon:
sailors say they’ll sing if sung to.
And so sang. Sang what? Why, Greensleeves.
Laying my tenor notes for them
along the salt-steeped veins of air
where wind and gull shriek once had knived,
running words, tune round and again.

They stayed, unmoving and unmoved.
I sang: Alas, my love… An hour.
And how, light lowering its head,
I left unanswered, leaving them
to their own devices, wondered
what, then, it was they must have heard.