“When I was a little kid,” she said, “I mean a really little kid, I used to wonder if poems in other languages rhymed in the languages they were written in, or only rhymed when you translated them into English.” She wiped the sweat from her upper lip with a forefinger; the papers between them were dotted with drops from their foreheads, hard labor for sure.

“Yes,” he said, not listening.

“I guess I thought English words were the real names of things, and other languages were just like masks; games those people played. For fun.”

“You see here,” he said, holding a limp sheet.

“I mean how could things have two real names?”

“Let us look,” he said. He put his finger on the words she had typed.

In some worlds my torturer is but a man as I am

And his bosses are men, as well

And their bosses men like me

And the leader a man, a man I myself could be.

Weep, weep, children; mothers, run and hide;

Go, day; sink, sun, don’t look upon us.

“Is not instruction, you see,” he said. “You instruct stars to turn, day to go; my lines say only that they will.”

She shrugged one shoulder slightly.

“Rhythm, though, is right.” He looked down at it doubtfully. “Yes, right.”

In some worlds my torturer is a being not like me

And his father is a fallen angel

whose father is a heedless god

whose father is the abyss to whom the leader bows.

See not, children; mothers, blind their eyes;

Gather, clouds; fall, night, and cover us.

In some worlds he is the tongue in my own mouth

In some worlds he is the child of my body

He dies of shame in some and lies unburied

In some he never dies, outlives the sun.

“Can the lines not be four beats, as mine are? Ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum.”

His Russian rhythms were always stronger than her English ones; when she tried to duplicate them they sounded like drum-thumps.

And every world and every sun’s so near

To every other one! So near

The subtlest blade could not be passed between them

And dreamers cannot know from which to which they wake.

And I: I lift my eyes from your letter in my hands

“‘Look up from’ is better,” Kit said. “Use ‘look up from.’”

“‘Look up from,’” he said. He changed it with a yellow pencil.

And I: I look up from your letter in my hands

Because I have heard a sound in every world:

In some it is a chink of spurs upon the stair

In some a raven’s shriek that tears the night.

“Should be, yes, comma after ‘in some’? ‘In some, a little clink of spurs…’?”

“‘Chink.’” He looked doubtful again. He’d wanted “tinkle” at first, and she’d had to talk him out of it. “I don’t understand that line,” she said. “That and the next. By the way.”

“Ah. You see. Everyone knows. Those spurs come from last stanzas of Evgeny Onegin, novel in verse of Pushkin. Spór nezapnïy zvón. After Onegin has read his beloved’s letter of rejection. As he stands in her drawing room he hears her husband, the sound of the spurs on his boots, approaching. It is the last of Onegin we see.”

He opened his hands: simple.

“And the raven?”

“Yes. This was common name, usual name, for police vans. Ravens. Because both are black. Ravens arrive for arrest. Not now, long ago. Now, simply an ordinary car.” He pointed at the stanza. “So, different outcomes of a secret letter, in different worlds. In some only disappointment, trouble, an embarrassment; perhaps nothing at all. But in other worlds…other consequences.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, people don’t know that. I mean Americans.” He looked at her, so hurt and baffled that for a moment she almost laughed. “There’s an English word for a police wagon, the old kind; it was called a paddy wagon. But that’s comical. Like silent movie comedies.”

“No. Not comical.”

“There’s another name, a woman’s name, what is it.” He waited while she searched within for the term. “Black Maria!” she cried. “That’s it. How about that? Black Maria’s cry destroys the night.”

Now it was his turn to shrug, unable to know what effect this might have. “Not a bird,” he said.

“No.”

“You see.”

“Well,” she said. “You could have a footnote.”

“No! No no. You will not march all over my poems with muddy footnotes.” He pondered, lit a cigarette. “And these cars are black?”

“I guess.”

“Strange,” he said. “A bird and woman, both black.”

It had grown dark, indoors at least; the lamp he had turned on over the table where they worked no longer illuminated the whole of his little place. But in the windows the midsummer night was still alight. He stood, and then, seeming still to be absorbed in thought, he lay down full-length on the linoleum.

“Cooler,” he said.

She watched him for a while, and maybe because he smiled at her she came too, and stretched out beside him. It all looked different.

“In some worlds a black bird,” he said. “In some a black woman.”

“Are there really different worlds?” she asked. “Do you think that? Is that why you wrote that?” It seemed to diminish it as a poem if he did, and yet to make him himself huger.

He seemed to ponder. “No,” he said then. “No. There is but one world, only there are many worlds within it, for it exists in more than one way at once; and these different ways cannot be translated into one another.”

“Like poems.”

“Like poems. You cannot translate. You can only make other poems.”

The smoke of his cigarette was like a small being, a jinn folding its arms and salaaming, turning and dissipating, appearing again. “Then what’s the original?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps there is not one. Perhaps there are many translations but no original.”

“Or the original’s lost,” she said.

“Perhaps even more like poems,” he said. “Events in the world can perhaps be like rhyming words in poems: they can only, what would you say, pay off in one world, one translation, not in others. In one world people are cheering and weeping with joy, for best conclusion has been reached, secret is revealed, heroes have come home safe. In another world, say this world, same events are events of no significance; a pact has been made that will be broken just as many others have been. A man and a woman have misunderstood when they were to meet at train station and train is already gone, but there will be another.”

“Couldn’t sometimes they rhyme in both worlds?”

“Oh yes. Sometimes, not often, a rhyme can be found both in this world and in another. We call this coincidence.”

She felt the cool linoleum through her thin shirt, and she saw the undersides of the card table and the chairs, and yet she felt aloft too, rising. “How would you learn, though. That there are other worlds.”