Ivan Dobnik - Vilenica

288 · Agron Tufa
* * *
Do you remember that other sky – so fathomless and foreign,
The shifting crowds in the streets, the cars,
And the snow swirling down upon us, covering
Like a glittering veil all the noise, visions, seasons – but
Above all – the shiver-white naked bodies
Of desperate loves.
Whatever happened to them? Where is the enigma
That dissolved in the purple of their fleshy lips?
Inevitably then, like a maimed carousel, the lame fragments
Falter frozen in landscapes and interiors,
Daubs of phrases, vows in the dark… Suddenly and forever
The perspective is severed,
As if some retina had burst behind the canvas -
From the inhuman glare at the tunnel’s end.
Out
(Vienna, September 2005)
You get up in the morning
And remember you don’t know where you left your eyes.
One, you forget you left at home,
The other dripped from a tap in silence.
Then you remember that you are only awake
And everything happened devoid of eyelids.
The conditions ripen
And respect flows like a cataract over that one-time skull.
You seem to have been harvesting
Lucerne forever and
A gentle sacrifice full of the smell of chlorophyll
Ploughs your farm-boy illusions.
A lucid childhood,
Lived normally and without regret,
Like all useful things, without which
There would be no ellipses or metaphysics,
No flights and crashes, no losses
Of Liburnian galleys
In the limp and practical body of man...
Present neglect and past oblivion,
How well they suit one another.