I must confess to you that the death problem
made us sweat:
Our old school teacher,
Miss Barnovski,
whom we used to call the Duchess,
set us two enigmas — you and I.
She wrote on the blackboard — it was a splendid autumn
afternoon —
the radical of you plus the radical of I
is zero, and got out of the classroom
leaving us alone with our queerest thoughts.

Nichita Danilov, from *It might take me years