Ivan Dobnik - Vilenica

Whether among the lights?
Whether among algae,
or among rotundities, forms, faces,
whether among the dead, prematurely born, forgotten
too soon, or among those unrecognized, unacknowledged,
or among the jungle trees, in the night of bird eyes’ chatter,
Ivan Dobnik · 99
whether among the thoroughly demolished, with no shelter or food
or hope, or among the horror-struck animals on their way to the slaughter-pen,
under the axes, under the thunderbolts, or among the blossoms of domestic
apples, with no sentimental memories, or during the downpours of autumn rains
that return the natural to nature, or among fish, or among moles,
among nooses, knots, and embraces that hurt always but in dreams,
or among the passionate herbs that bloom only one time, or among
the lights that already passed, yesterday, among our touches
and caresses that we can no longer find for ourselves, or during summers
that shan’t return to us, us naked, or between the lips
that whisper, dried out, wishes never completely told, or between the hooves
of a white horse that still gallops across the pastures of childhood, or between
the forgotten books, no longer touched by anyone
as life in them had withered away, or between the poisoned continents, among
metropolises, wiped out fern, or between the black and the white days
in which you cry hidden in yourself and ever more lonely, ever more forgotten,
isolated, ever more lost, or in between one and another
of countless illusions that unexpectedly visit you,
open you, dazzle you, or during walks through the autumn forests,
through picturesque and sunny lights of dream sailers, harshly tender?
Or in between one and another shore in memory, shores that have gone,
in a memory that irrepressibly alters, all the time, transforming into air?
Or in the grass in the garden of Eden, in the heart of your countryside, full of birds?
Or in an impalpable night when you dream about dreams in which
you are writing a fragrant book for her eyes? Or at Pont des Arts, in August,
when everything glows from joy of the innocents and the Seine is a seine on which
I lay your body a thousand times a day in a language of words spoken
for the first time? Or when I collapse, shattered by the beauty of your flanks,
dead and white, stretched along the letters drawn long before on the no-man’s
land, or during the song of rain, in the blossom of snow, in the bay of shivering skin