Eventually, a man arrives to replace the dead
car battery—and to lecture me on my luck: 

having traveled so far on a refurbished one.
I nod, though I don’t feel lucky today

after trying to start the engine and hearing
only a quiet click, like a pen tapped on a desk

during a long classroom silence. The man inquires  
about my reading habits as though they’ll reveal

something about how I drive. He asks about Kafka
and Tolstoy. During the pandemic summer

I read War and Peace, wanting to sink my mind
into something long; but it wasn’t an escape—

too many reminders of the damage one Napoleon’s
ego can do. Russia’s poets are more hopeful,

or at least more able to be angry, though they tend
to be killed off for criticizing the state. He pauses

his work. I’m briefly unsure of his accent and politics, 
but then he smiles and asks if poems can really be 

translated. I say no, though I think one can write,
alongside the first poem, a new one that bears

some resonance and mirrors the old. He argues:
some of the meaning or music must be lost,

much of the energy. I nod. The battery drops
like evidence into the back of his truck. 

Then he tells me (he who repairs the engines
that replaced horses) about different words

in Russian for the number of horses pulling
a carriage: a word for one horse, a word for two

side-by-side, a word for three, for four horses, six. 
All separate and specific words lost in conversion;

he misses them, he tells me, closing the hood of my car, 
misses their precision. I hand over my credit and attempt

to predict which words we might relinquish on the way 
through this century, which ones I’ll miss. Meanwhile, 

he assures me this battery will last three years at least.