Small gray sparrows hop around on the icy roof and peck at the thin crust of ice with their hard beaks. They are thirsty, and the stream behind the street is frozen, so they quench their thirst with ice. Or maybe they are hungry and looking for food?

There are some dry bread crusts left on the small window. The student takes one, breaks it into pieces, and throws the crumbs onto the roof. The sparrows hop around on the icy tiles like gray nuts and greedily begin to peck.

“They’re hungry, the poor things,” says the student and breaks another crust.

If you look up through the window, you will see only a patch of blue sky. It is so deep on this sunny winter day that your gaze sinks into it like a bottomless abyss and you see nothing. In the distant blue of the open space, the massive buildings of the city loom. From the cell, only the top floors and roofs are visible. The streets are not visible, only the noise of trams and cars reaches us like a fading echo. The space in front of our window is blocked by the neighboring building, which completes the triangle of the prison and forms a narrow courtyard, like a deep well. We are on the fifth floor…

It is cold. The ice crusts on the roof glisten in the winter sun like broken glass. The student stands by the window and watches the gray sparrows hopping nimbly with their thin legs. They are restless, raising their little heads every hour and looking around. It seems that their lives are also uncertain… Suddenly, a black ball whizzes over them.

They disappear like arrows to the bottom of the deep courtyard. A black raven lands on the roof and looks around triumphantly. It puffs out its chest majestically and begins to peck at the crumbs left behind by the little birds. It is pleased with its own appearance, and especially with the terror with which the little sparrows scattered at its appearance.

The student smiles sarcastically and says:

“It looks like a policeman on a deserted street after a scattered demonstration…”

He waves his hand and the ugly bird disappears in an instant.

The sparrows come out of their hiding place one by one, hop back onto the roof and turn around timidly. But the enemy is gone and they hurry to peck at the crumbs.

At that moment, the door creaks sharply and opens. First, a shiny combat knife and the barrel of a rifle appear, then the head of a guard. There is something raven-like about his black face, his small black eyes, and his crooked nose. He looks at us silently and intently. Each of us wonders, “Has he come for me?”

“Come out!” he points to the student and steps back into the corridor.

The student waves his hand at the little sparrows, smoothes the long strands of his blond hair hanging over his forehead, and walks away. He pauses at the door for a moment, nods his head in farewell, and whispers with a forced smile:

“It’s not my first time…”

Two of us remain in the cell: me and the criminal.

He is a handsome young man with a delicate white face, tortured, with thin wrinkles around his mouth. His eyes, black as olives, look sad and pensive.

“They’ll probably release him,” he winks at the door, which the guard slams shut behind the student.

I remain silent.

“This morning I almost escaped,” the criminal continues with a bitter smile. “They made me throw the ashes from the boiler into the sewer. I took the wheelbarrow there myself—the guard stayed in the yard. Something stirred in me—the streets of the city are tempting, damn it… But I waved my hand and came back.

“Why didn’t you run away?” I ask.

“Where could I hide? They’ll catch me again tomorrow…”

He sits down on his coat by the wall, wraps his arms around his knees, and thinks with his head bowed. Then he suddenly twitches, listens, and asks anxiously:

“Do you hear anything?”

“No.”

“I thought I heard someone shout.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“You’re completely deaf, I see… Did you go deaf in Russia?”

“No, here.”

“Don’t they beat people there?”

“Where there?”

“Where you come from,” he said, waving his hand vaguely.

“No. If you beat someone, you’re going to jail.”

“How can you not fight back?” the criminal asks in surprise. “For example, they beat me seven times until I confessed to seven thefts. If they had beaten me one more time, I would have confessed to the eighth. But the police got tired and let me go. Besides, with seven thefts, the eighth is irrelevant. That’s how we are here… No one admits their guilt without a fight.

“If there is evidence,” I say, “the guilty party can be convicted without a confession. That’s what the law says…”

“Forget the law,” the criminal frowned. “Better tell me how they gather evidence there, if they don’t beat people up?”

“Through investigation.”

“And here, they use a stick.” He smiled bitterly, then thought for a moment and said more to himself than to me: “How can it be without a fight? Just unbelievable…”

The door burst open and the student fell to the floor like a corpse. The guard’s white teeth flashed, as did the knife on his rifle, which for a moment caught the rays of sunlight streaming through the window. The guard stood in the doorway, frowning and angry, looking fierce at us and slowly closing the door. The key clicked sharply in the lock. His hobnailed boots clattered hollowly in the corridor.

“Water!” the student moans quietly.

We hand him the jug, but he can’t take it. His hands lie lifelessly on the floor. A thin trickle of blood runs from his nose…

“This is how our police gather evidence,” whispers the detective with a sigh.

The next day at noon, the student got up and, leaning his hands against the wall, stood up by the barred window. As soon as they saw him, the little sparrows cheerfully hopped around on the roof. He threw them some crumbs, then sat down again and said:

“It’s time for us to eat too, fellas.”

“Was that you screaming yesterday?” asked the criminal.

“No.”

“We could hear screams from here. Someone was crying…”

“I never cry,” replied the student.

“You seem to be used to it,” the criminal said with a smile. Now the wrinkles around his mouth were clearly visible.

“Oh, yes,” the student confirmed. “It’s not my first time. A few months ago, they arrested me again at a student protest. They beat me up pretty badly, but I didn’t say a word. “Cry!” the police officers shouted, and they beat me. I still didn’t say a word. Then one of them sat on my head, and the other two took turns beating me. “Cry!” they shouted, but I didn’t even have the strength to groan…

The bread is hard as a rock, and we don’t let go of the jug, as if it were a cup of wine. After every dry bite, we take a sip of water. The criminal eats silently. He seems resigned to his fate, but he is not calm at all. His thoughtful eyes are sad.

“Let’s say I stole something there, in the Big Country. What will they do to me?” he asks.

“They will sentence you to corrective labor.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you will work during the day and sleep in prison at night.”

“Can’t I sleep in prison during the day?”

“No, you can’t. Prisons there are schools for re-education. And labor is the best educator of man.”

“And when I’ve served my sentence?”

“You’ll get out of prison and work like everyone else.”

“But here, when I get out of prison, I’ll have to go back to my old trade, picking people’s pockets on the trams. I have to steal to eat.

“Why don’t you earn your living by honest labor?

“Honest work?” wonders the criminal. “Where is honest work here? Unemployment is a terrible thing! And besides, who will give a job to an ex-convict? Everyone runs away from us like the plague. I’ve been in prison three times so far, and I don’t know how many more times I’ll be there. The last time, my sentence expired in the middle of winter.

The jailer came and told me to gather my belongings. I asked them to let me stay in prison until winter was over, but they refused. But I resisted and went all the way to the director. “Get out of here!” he said. “The sooner, the better for you.” “It’s not better at all,” I objected. “Let me stay here for at least another month, until the snow melts.” “I can’t,” he said. “The law doesn’t allow it.” “All right,” I said, “see you soon!” And indeed, after a week, I was back in prison. At least that’s easy.

The sun is setting. The sky turns red, then purple. The student throws crumbs to the sparrows. I go up to him and ask:

“Did they beat you badly?”

“You can see for yourself…”

“What do they want from you?”

“To reveal the organizers of the student protest. ‘Point them out to us,’ they say, ‘and we’ll release you immediately. ‘ ‘I’m not a traitor,’ I reply. They started beating me. I just groan silently, and they get angry and hit me even harder. But I know what to do. I relax my body, and the rubber whip sinks into my flesh and bounces off like a ball. Try it and you’ll see that it hurts less, he laughs. It’s all a matter of habit. Once you get used to it, you don’t feel the blows.

“Do you think they would have released you if you had betrayed your comrades?”

“Do you think I’m naive? If I point out two of them, I’ll be the third. Better to be alone, with a clear conscience.”

The student falls silent. The criminal, leaning against the wall, is silent too.

It’s getting dark, and the sparrows are still hopping on the icy roof. But suddenly the black ball flies over them again and they disappear noisily into the dark abyss of the courtyard.

“Damn raven!” the student says angrily.

“Hey, you!” someone behind us shouts.

I turn around—the black guard is standing by the door, pointing his finger at me…

When I was a child, what scared me the most was the end of the world. I was afraid of change in general. It seemed intuitive that changes would largely be for the worse—changes for the better were not likely. I was surrounded by nice things, and it was nice being among them. In the morning the sun filtered in through the bedroom windows, which faced east, and lit up the orange drapes. It was a nice sun and they were nice drapes. My nice grandfather pointed out the nice stars in the evening sky and, in the spring, the budding leaves—which were also, as you may have guessed, nice. Summers at the dacha, I would wake up in a joyfully expect­ant state of ease, and my friend Nadya would come over, an inev­itable deck of cards in her pocket. Even then it was obvious that it would be best never to grow up. “Someday you’ll understand that happiness is anticipation,” my father said once.

One of the adults I knew said that children could have a kind of complex consisting of a fear of change and the desire for every­thing to remain as it is. I certainly had that complex. And the end of the world was the manifestation of the most frightening change of all. There were also some terrible facts of a cosmic nature to consider. My grandfather had told me about entropy, and I understood that chaos increases exponentially, and the uni­verse is moving toward its death. Then, at school, we were shown a movie about the impending death of the sun. There were simu­lated shots of how the sun would become huge and red, then parts of it would start falling to Earth, then Earth would catch on fire, and then the sun would finally die. After the movie ended, just to be sure, I went to my teacher and asked: “Lyubov Mikhailovna, when will the sun die?” Lyubov Mikhailovna apparently didn’t know and asked another teacher, who said it wouldn’t be for a long time, not for millions of years, and I was somewhat calmed by this temporary reprieve.

I had another reprieve, too, though this one wasn’t as long. As a very young child I’d heard about a prophecy made by Nostradamus, according to which the end of the world would come about in 1999, brought on by a star called Nemesis, mean­ing “vengeance.” There was an exact date: August 11. So I counted the years: in 1990 I told myself, “It won’t happen for a while, a whole nine years,” in 1992, “a whole seven years,” and so on. Another time, somebody having frightened me yet again, I asked my grandfather what he thought about the prophecies of Nostradamus, and he told me that everything would be as the Lord God wills.

Another version of the end of the world was the Second Coming. Also as a very young child, I asked my mother whether there was a God, and Mama told me there wasn’t. Some time went by, and I asked Mama again whether there was a God, and she told me there was, because in the meantime she’d become a believer. During perestroika a lot of literature appeared on the shelves that hadn’t been available before; Mama started reading all kinds of esoterica and as a result of her reading came to the conclusion that God existed after all. Well, fine—if He exists, He exists. Thus I also became a believer. Once, Mama and I were taking a stroll on the avenue, walking west by the neighborhood library, and the sun was setting, the sky was flooded with brilliant crimson-gold light, and Mama said, “It looks just like Christ in His Glory is about to appear in these clouds.” So, overall, every­thing pointed to the end of the world happening any minute now. It was basically closing in on all sides.

One summer at the dacha, Sanya started teaching me and my girlfriends magic. Sanya and I had a romance going. He said that the world would end next year, the year 2000, and that the final war would happen then, too. We were going to fight in this war, all of us together: me and Sanya, Yurik, Nadya, and Nyuta. Later I’d learn that Russians have been expecting the end of the world and the final war for hundreds of years, in the most varied, wild, and ridiculous sectarian variations. So in the nineties we had this, too. The war we were going to fight in was, for some rea­son, the war in Afghanistan, which really hadn’t ended. But at the same time, it was going to be the war that marked the beginning of a new world, in which Earth would merge with another planet, its magical double, home to dragons, elves, and gnomes. And at the same time it would be the final battle of Armageddon. We were all preparing to really go to this war and to die there; Sanya had already ordered special military uniforms for us. Sanya badly wanted to join the army, but they wouldn’t take him, because he started telling the admissions committee that he did magic. They didn’t believe him and said, “Make something happen, then.” He made it so that one of the women on the committee got a headache, but they still wouldn’t believe him, and gave him a diagnosis of schizophrenia. My grandparents had no idea that I was going to go to war and die, I couldn’t tell them that, but I felt extremely sorry for them, and for all my nice, familiar, and beloved things. I began to see them as already lost forever: here they were, my nice washbasin, some nice bushes of mead­owsweet, my nice grandfather watching TV, my nice cat who’d come out to lie in the sun. Each day I lived through became, for me, my last day at home before the war.

I was thirteen, and it was a nice summer. Sanya and I went on walks in the woods and once accidentally sat on an anthill; we rode around on his old motorcycle and I burned the platforms of my boots putting my feet on the exhaust pipes; at night we sat between the roots of an ancient, enormous oak, drinking Black Monk wine; Sanya came to see me after work (during the sum­mer he worked in the village as a plumber), and hid behind my stove from some friends of his who were looking for him, Gapon and Master, about whom there was a joke going around that they’d drunk a little too much brake fluid. Jealous, he’d come along when I went to visit lanky Andrei. It was a beautiful sum­mer of waiting for the war and the end of the world.

Then I went back to the city, to school, to the eighth grade, and Sanya promised to visit me in a month and to call, but time went on and he did not appear—and by late October I found out that he had actually been in the city for a while, had apparently dumped me, and was now dating Nyuta, though by that point he had already half dumped Nyuta and was with Nata, a school friend of Nadya’s. Such was the end of my first love and that strange, unforgettable fairy tale, and also the end of my child­hood and the world.

I began taking a lot of walks by myself, skipping school, writ­ing poems, and it was astounding to me that everything in the world went on as before. Up until the very beginning of spring I waited for the war to begin. I started seeing Yurik, who was officially Nadya’s boyfriend, just to stay in the friend group, so they’d take me to war with them. Yurik told me that in our past lives we had all fought in Afghanistan and died there. I had been a military pilot and crashed my plane, Nadya was a nurse, Nyuta was a sniper, and not one of us had survived. The world I knew, my childhood world, continued to dissolve: I looked around our tiny kitchenette with its red-and-blue linoleum, where I’d sit and talk on the phone with Yurik, and at the painted roosters on the serving boards, the old Lysva electric stove, and I thought about my grandparents, who sat in the next room distressed by these calls with Yurik; I thought about my entire life up until then, perishing before my eyes, how Mama and I had gone to Sochi when I was ten, how I once had a caterpillar that I fed rose hip petals. All around me, things were terribly vulnerable, they were melting away and crying out to me for help, but I had to accept that by going to war, I would destroy them—had already destroyed them, in fact, by making the decision to go. I was in ter­rible despair, because I really had made that decision, and it had strained my soul to its limit. That fall and winter I said goodbye to everything. I wandered by frozen rivers and dark trees, rode the subway aimlessly, hung out at the train station from which we usually left to go to the dacha, walking the platforms, and went a few times to the neighborhood of high-rises by the bay where I had lived for the first three years of my life, to throw myself from the roof of one of those buildings, but it was either the case that the entrance to the roof was locked, or that I couldn’t even get into the building, or that I stopped wanting to do it. At night I lis­tened to the radio on my headphones, to rock music, and I wrote poems. There was something new hatching inside of me, tearing my heart to bits, but it couldn’t quite hatch all the way. Among the concrete fences of industrial districts I wandered in darkness, hoping that I’d be raped and murdered by some drunk. Around this time I started drinking a bottle or two of Baltika 9 beer a day.

Spring came, and nobody went to war. We said it had been rescheduled, maybe, or made up some other reason. Then Nadya broke up with Yurik, Sanya broke up with Nata, and gradually we all stopped seeing each other. Nata, whom I saw a few more times, started working as a salesgirl at the market and living with her alternating boyfriends; after ninth grade Nadya studied sewing and pattern-making, worked at a photography studio, became an accountant, got baptized, lived for a long time with a common-law husband, then married another guy and had a son; Nyuta initially shaved her head bald, dropped out of nursing school, hung out all over the city with all kinds of people, hitchhiked around the country, and managed to get diagnosed with “dromomania,” wanderlust syndrome—but then, pretty early, around eighteen, she got married and had a child, then was divorced, and now works as a surgical nurse. Yurik was divorced several times, quit drinking for his health, and now assembles furniture; Sanya, too, got married and then divorced, and also works somewhere, and God bless him, hon­estly, but I still remember how we lay in the pine forest holding hands, and there was so much that bound us together that even now, for me, it belongs in the category of things that can’t be spoken of. After all, all of us, ages thirteen to nineteen, died in the war that never came.

I’ve stopped being scared of the end of the world. I’ve begun to love it. I’ve come to know its ways: when it comes, it passes by very quickly, and all that’s left for you to do is shout something senseless in its wake, and when it doesn’t come, some people dread it while others expect it and believe that when it arrives, they’ll be able to exist within it forever, but then they find themselves in front of the TV with a bottle of beer. It comes and doesn’t come simultaneously. And you look on in astonish­ment as the whole world crumbles, but the most frightening thing about that is that everything stays the way it was. The same trees, streets, houses, people. And a child’s fear that the world will end is just a joke when you understand that there’s not going to be any more end of the world, nobody’s coming to unlock the crystal jewel box of the world in all its unbearable eternity. All my little life I tried to protect the world, to save it, to keep it from dissolv­ing like clouds and seafoam, but the world tricked me and turned out to be solid, quite solid.

My father once said, “Happiness is anticipation.” To which I might add: happiness is the anticipation of the end of the world. I know now that the end of the world is the border and the break, the fulfillment and the miracle, and its function, like the function of borders generally, is to exist and not exist at the same time; to happen, so that you give yourself over to it and perish, and never to happen, and nothing else would ever be enough. The end is not outside but at the very heart of the experience of the world, and Apocalypse is only one of its names, since the end of the world is also its beginning. I want to live at the heart of the end of the world. I continue to learn to love it. To recognize it under new and different names in the company of new people, to be on time for it, to work hard to expand it over the space of life. And no matter how oppressive the solidity of the world becomes, and how var­iously all of us, the young magicians of that summer, meet our deaths, all of us are—or at least I am—a little bored in the world, because after the floods ended, boredom came, and “the Queen, the Witch who lights her coals in the clay pot, will never want to tell us what she knows, and which we do not know.”

THE BLUE GONDOLA

Once upon a time,
          there was a street named Bregovita.
A short blind alley. It still exists.
With a different name.
With two blue cars of the shortest funicular at its end.
I’ve got it all, just come.
He had some corn flour and a small pot of fat.
Three children, the youngest only a month old.
Zagreb 1941, paperless exiles.
At night, the tram, several transfers, several numbers
unknown to the children, a hideout and a place
to warm themselves,
even if with socks on their hands.
Later, coal came to the room shared with another family,
this is how they made it through the four years.
Nobody talked about the summers.
Children shouting in the streets: Sand, white sand for sale!
The sand falling. The moments spent in the funicular alley, falling.
The tapping of the sewing machines in the blanket manufacturing company
during the day, unannounced visits at night. The sand falling through
sleepless nights pierced with children’s crying –
Mother was slowly turning into a wall.
Later still, halfway between a fairy tale and reality,
a blue gondola rises from memory’s gap.
Floating in water, in air – but never on rails.
Now the engines start up, a faraway rhythm
of sewing machines, the blue gondola drifts into the steepness.
I try to breathe through some other time,
some other life.
All of a sudden, for a split second,
I feel I can touch it. Then I let go. 

THE LA ST PHOTO TOGETHER

They share something confidential,
the four-year-old girl on the left of the bench,
in her red coat, a scarf around her head,
and the three-year old boy, with their grandpa.
They left the backyard long ago.
And the bench with the wooden slats
and the crooked cast iron legs
standing before the faded facade.
The grandpa in the photo, resembling
Jean Gabin, is wearing a tie, a brown cardigan
and gabardine trousers. His silvery hair
neatly combed off his forehead.
The children cannot spread out their coats yet
to cover their grandpa with them. Her tiny hand
is shielding the sunlight, making room
for the view towards a different place. 

DAUG HTER AND FA THER

on the pavement
a frozen walk
on one side
the town houses behind a brick wall
on the other side
a row of parked cars
this is a photo too
it’s late summer
they’re dressed in light colours
almost festively
they certainly look happy
he’s holding her hand
she is very little
the catalogue of stories is opening up
words
the points on the map
the forming of the world
the forming of the home
wherever that may be
wherever that may be
the daughter
the father
a step
a photo
a step 

THE POINT OF LEAVING

Instead of the old plum tree, a house,
instead of the apple tree, a fence.
I recall the forked branches, from which we would throw
insipid green apples towards the road for them to get split
under car tyres, and the scratches on our skin.
Everything is cleaned up, wiped down, and the toys
have long been consigned to the dustbin of eternal renovation.
It could all have begun with a journey.
With a small step and a clear gaze.
With serenity in the eye.
A few moments, maybe years, later,
we are sitting together, two pairs of kindred eyes,
love, nearness, facing the sea,
no delightful colours, and the constant cold.
The only likelihood we know of,
the inability to verbalise previous lives.
Yet, if I comprehend this world just a little,
it’s urgent for us to let poetry take its measure of time.
Poetry is the edge we walk on,
the edge we keep falling off into new secrets. 

LETTERS AND VOICES

Letter One
Below the window is a city, but there’s only enough space for two
in the hotel room. There aren’t any dreams, it’s too hot to sleep
anyway. I’m putting down word after word. Letters. Quotes. A
traveller’s diary. The forgotten roads travelled to be closer to my
loves. Trust always comes later, as well as the discovery that I’d
missed it. Not only the street, but the entire continent.
Him
The certainty that I don’t want to die without living it.
Without living – with you. The certainty. With you.
The certainty. I don’t want to die. Without living. With you.
Letter Two
On the plane. The mountains cast long shadows in the sunny day,
it smells of us. I’m returning. Where, I don’t know. The seagulls are
flying low as well. They cry when their offspring are nearby. Within
myself, there’s a swan stretching its neck, glaring, chasing away
anyone approaching. On the seat beside me, a father and his daughter
are looking at the photos from a family trip. I’m scared, Maruša. The
borders are packed down there. They’re looking at the children,
wanting the best for them. Looking at the children and seeing their
fathers. Looking at the fathers and letting them die slowly.
Letter Three
New shoes
for the journey
seven hundred and more
a hollow rhythm
overloaded boats
subdued voices
voices
almost breathless
new shoes
on the shore
surely –
inescapably –
Letter Four
If not us, you said. And me: If we jump into the water and resurface,
will we end up on the same shore? You: I’m sure we’ll make it. Love’s
always naïve at its beginning. No-one knows when the silence
ensues. It ensues and you say: It’s enough, I’m out. But if you stay,
you haven’t yet built a road or a house or planted a tree, and we
know how dark a forest can be and how dark the cabins are on
the inside. Your hand seeking mine. It’s real. We’re on the same
shore, but this is only just the beginning.
Letter Five
Perhaps this cabin in the middle of the forest, with its ceilings too
low to walk upright, teaches humility. The wooden porch with
a broken chair shining faintly in the moonlight. We’re not going
to sleep tonight. Perhaps the cabin and the wooden porch will
not sleep either. To be sure, the forest isn’t asleep. I venture outside,
along the road, into the unknown. Along the darksome road
through the forest. I turn around behind the third turn. I don’t like
humility, I say. I go and find you and we go out together. We leave
the cabin. Along the darksome road through the forest. Behind
the third turn, there’s another cabin. We knock. Nobody opens.
We turn toward the little cabin in the middle of the forest, with
its ceilings too low. We knock. The door opens. That’s enough humility,
we say. We’re not going to sleep tonight. We’re going to lie
down, hold hands and listen to each other’s stories.
Her
The certainty that I don’t want to die without living it.
Without living – with you. The certainty. With you.
The certainty. I don’t want to live. Without living. With you.

IN HER ABSENCE

I looked through the window
one more time
a short driveway
with a white scooter parked on it
and a pastor wearing a straw-hat
a rather unusual picture
was already walking towards the entrance
scratching his beard
a warm smile and a handshake
you’re not from here
no
my wife isn’t either
tell me more about yourself
her blanket tossed over the chair
a year of diagnoses then the call
what do you think of first
when you think of the deceased woman
but still
still I’d come
too late
secretly I know
just as she lives on in her son
he will in our daughter
this room
I think to myself
her piano now muted
awkward laughter at the table
an interlacement of entangled words
a conversation about the service
how
we love one another
empty spaces
are always loud
on that morning
everything was about life
both cats
the ginger one and the black-and-white one
were still looking for her
so many photos
how
will we arrange them
and the summer
we are talking now
over a glass of water
it’d started off so promisingly 

ON BEGINNINGS, ENDINGS AND A LITTLE ABOUT MIDDL ES

Don’t give up, Michael. Beginnings tend to be
good, or average at least, whereas endings…
You wish they lapsed into a new beginning. A new story.
It could be a book, but, in fact, it’s a line from a movie
with Mark Duplass. It could be a book.
Somewhere along the way, life takes place nonetheless.
Despite passing slowly, rather linearly.
One might say, tediously.
It could be a book, at least a tenth replay
of a popular movie of no value
to anyone else, long evenings with conversations,
the feeling you have everything because you have nothing.
You’re standing outside a concrete shopping centre
with a big box in your hands containing your first CD player,
together with One Good Reason by Paul Carrack. The end of the ’80s,
you’re waiting for the homebound morning bus
after having mopped up the grocer’s shop before the opening.
You’re returning, not knowing how the wheels will turn.
How someday, thirty years later, you might encounter deaths,
mostly cancer. You’ve yet to find out how all these tiny images,
the collages of our lives, only exist when written down,
renewed in narration, in memory,
when given value, a reflection.
You’ve yet to find out there’ll be a sincere moment somewhere
when you can admit to yourself you need an ending.
But you’ll not find it. 

THE EYES

What was left was an intricate lace of wrinkles,
a lot of bitterness, much less love
in the house always without the faintest fragrance,
death is here, but it doesn’t know how to serve her,
her daughter puts some ointment on her dried-out lips;
the liquified food, the tea, the vials,
the glances through the windows,
the rehearsals of dying,
her staring as though she’d known all too well
the body was awake
and still alive in the eyes,
only in the eyes. 

AMONG ALL THE OTHERS

Someone is dead and suddenly shows up among all the others.
Inger Christensen 

The cirrus clouds, the curly locks of hair,
do not lay shadows onto the path.
Silky hands reaching from afar.
The icy crystals of clouds gently drizzling
onto the black clothes like rice.
For a split second, I jump into death also.
Like a newborn. Still able to see inwards. 

—one day, one day, one gloaming, one night—

—one gloaming, one night, a glow—

—a shade, a glow—

—one day—

                                                                        —one day a quiver in the dense nothing, one day a tremor in the deep emptiness, one day an imbalance between fall and escape, one day a strain in the tidal lock, one day a shrink of the in-between, one day the tilt towards the fall, one day the violation of celestial law, one day the unmooring of the lunar body, one day the release from captured rotation, one day the inching before the gathering pace, one day the gathering of the gathering pace, one day the day of the fall towards earth, one day the shadow on the stone, one day the shadow on the water, one day the waning of the light, one day the shading of the dirt, one day the trembling of the core, one day the shaking of the ellipsoid, one day the dancing of the Sun, one gloaming one day of the gloaming day, one day the day of the day of night, one day the night of the last horizon, one day the rising of the wind, one day the whipping of the tempest-dust, one day the pressure-swell of blood—of avian blood—of rodent blood, one day the bubbling in the tubes, one day the warming of the ectotherms, one day the swarming of the flies, one day the maddening of the bees, one day the hurtling through the void, one day the riot of radiant plasma, one day the quaking of underwater shelves, one day the upsurge of the seafloor, one day the heaving of Atlantic waves—the moonfervid waves—the archspasming waves, one day the flooding of the flats and bogs, one day the terminus of the tides, one day the quailing of the birds, one day the choking of the fish, one day the seething of the mammals, one day the pitching of the ants, one day the crackling of cranefly wings, one day the streaming of the air, one day the sob of spider-wilt, one day the descent of the browning worm—of hot termites—of blackening cicadas, one day the streaking across the sky, one day the wrench of spheroid to spheroid, one day—

                  One day the day of the deathly
one day the throughplunge of the Huygens peak,
one day the unstoppable incandescent apices,
one day the crash into the earth
one day the convulsion of the crash,
one day the igniting of the forests,
one day the cleaving of the hills,
one day the clouds of regolith,
one day the c=upthrust of ancient rock,
one day the shoot and fall of crystal, and the shot and fall
of glassy shards, and the splintering of the glassy
shards,
one day the blinding of the reptiles
one day the incineration of the moths,
one day the extinction of the taxonomies,
one day the hurling of unmortared rocks,
one day the soil firebombed with molten bones—
—with molten bones—
—with fiery bones—
one day the razing of the ruins,
one day the uproot of the relics,
one day the excavation of the fossils—

—one day the Sea of Showers vaporize the Sea of Atlantis, the Sea of Cold parch the Hibernian Sea, the Lake of Death devour the Lake of Garman, the Marsh of Decay waste the coastal slobs

one day through water and one day through fire—
—one gloaming—
—a shade—
—one night—
—one day—

*                *                *

—waves, pulled in by the Moon, were more furious on the night before the day of the last feeding. Above and below the tumult, transformations of life and death were taking place. Beneath a rock at the rim of the treacherous passage, inside fastholds of dabberlock leaves, dark sexes borne on the stipe of olive-yellow and yellow-brown fronds, a mature copepod, trailing egg strings of larvae behind her that if she had lived would have hatched and swum off into the vast blue, hooked onto and then tunnelled deep into the left eye of a European sprat in her fifth and final season. In that black jelly a life-cycle was nearing completion, and in that black jelly this eye-maggot of Sprattus sprattus would die. The next morning, the day the sprat finally lost sight of the portside of her world, the water was calmer and the seafishing was good. Gulls of all kinds circled labile forms below. Far from the rock, many trawlers were faring for rich hunting grounds, some southwards across the Celtic Sea towards the pink granite coast of Brittany, others westerly to the continental margin to fish the failed rifts of the Goban Spur or the Porcupine Bank. The fisherman, by and large, were happy. There would be ling and mackerel and monkfish, there would be tuna and nephrops. Passed-down songs rang out across the glittering sea. It was, everyone agreed, going to be a pleasant day with many possibilities. Those who had been left behind, whether late, unwanted or forgotten about, wandered down to the quayside to watch their boats depart. The prevailing southeast wind had decreased to barely one metre per second and whatever strands of clouds there were changed gradually. Above the surface, the rock glinted with the gentle interplay of wavesplash and sunlight and crystal. A hovering shadow was a rippling ovoid, stretching and shrinking with each roll of water, and then hopping clumsily down and further down the ridges of the rock until its beak could penetrate the surface, the shadow’s caster, a common auk, an Atlantic puffin, who will in the end kill the sprat and with it her parasite, cocked her head and peered into the adumbral seaweed. In the same instant the copepod dug deeper and found her final home, the sprat thrashed in a spasm of irritation, and the puffin, alert to the commotion, snatched both fish and maggot out of the deep, flashing the distinctive red and black beak so adored by wildlife photographers and childlike people, tucking in her little orange triangles as  she flapped into the air, lifting into the swirl in spite of the exhaustion from the long migration across the ocean that had made her almost too tired to breed, almost but not quite, almost too tired to hunt, almost but not quite, for she had broken from the island colony in search of a beakful of sandeel, and becoming disorientated had landed on this outcrop, one supposes two to three kilometres from the shore, or maybe less, or maybe more, and found only instead this single sprat to offer her single puffling—if he himself has not yet been eaten by rats—his last meal before, starving hungry, he will bobble out of the burrow through the sea pinks and wild turnip yellows and fading blue understories of bluebells towards the cliffs and, fluttering over the edge under cover of night, take his first journey out to sea. His last meal before his flight will be this parasite-maddened sprat, who is now gasping in the fresh air and, it might be said, actively dying, and who with her one functioning, seaward-facing eye, if she had the eyeshot to see the things her captor could see, if she, if she—what is that object, what is that thing, is that what I think it looks like, yes, I think it is, the same unmistakable form, the same unmistakable anatomy, it is a Homo sapiens clinging to the rock below, face down, whether expending or conserving energy it is hard to tell at this remove, is that a foot I can see jerking, it is hard to tell, but it is certainly a human being—if she shared the same sensory capacities, vital organs, depth perception, cognitive abilities, the same aptitude for abstract ideas and beliefs, the same facility for language, the same evolved gift for consilience as that human being with the jerky foot clinging to the rock below, mind you don’t slip now, all this and so much more, she would process the information that as the puffin ascends and now ellipses the rock the human being below appears smaller but no less real, no less animated, no less existent, no less embodied and ensouled, no less conscious and emotional, no less deserving of empathy for the common fragility and finitude of life, and so no less meaningful or meaningless, you are invited to take your pick, I am not theological about it frankly, I am willing to listen to your considered options, and—wriggling her head sideways in the mouth of the puffin—with her one good eye she would see beyond the giant tower of that white-coated lighthouse to those fishing boats that appear to be tugged by an invisible chord towards those distant points where sea and horizon meet, where it is all one indistinguishable, heartbreaking gossamer of bluish white, but there somewhere Wales, there somewhere England, there somewhere France, and there somewhere Spain, and—wriggling to face upwards, this effort is draining, there is not much puff left in her, the raspy spines on the bird’s palate are gouging her—train her one good eye on the immeasurable blackness beyond the nightblue exosphere, and catch in the corner of that one good eye before her final, desperate gulp the daylight wisp of that alien Moon, hauling the tide towards the unseeable shore below, waves bringing waves of lives and deaths, and with one final flip, one final heave, one final shudder of instinct, with the growing dread that she will never see her watery home again, or never again experience this onliest, polychromatic world, or witness again that faint, hypnotic Moon, with the creeping horror of perishing in the mouth of the puffin, of losing oneself forever to death, if a sprat could feel terrible comedy of such things, fathom the shallow and scale of this joke that has the power to stop time from unfolding, and with everything paused in air, wings unwinged, like a painted scene of impulses in action, movement trapped in inks and oils, life poised on the edge of life, seize her last opportunity as the bird, shuddering a feather, articulates a cramping jaw muscle, and in that instance of change, this writhing sprat will free herself from the beak, whatever the injury, whatever the chances of survival, and drop out of the sky, and plunge towards the rock, a jewel in the sunlight sparkling, a lone silver beauty tumbling, and falling—

*                *                *

—close your eyes, and fall into sleep, fall into water, fall into fire, fall one night, fall one day, one gloaming, one glow, one night, one day—

*                *                *

*                *                *

—and falling—

*                *                *

—and if anyone cared to look, they would see his face glued tight to the rock, snicked fingernails, scraped knees, purpling elbows. He is aching all over. He is experiencing some localised pain. Somewhere he has lost a tooth, his left central incisor, that was a good tooth, perhaps his best one, you don’t always get many good teeth in life, you have to have the right genes, begotten, as they used to say, by the right ancestors, the odds aren’t always favourable, somewhere along the line there is always a dud to whom some defect or other can be attributed, such as those worrisome moles from his dead mother or these pointy ears from his paternal grandfather, though the exact origin of his red hair was and remains a mystery, neither of his parents could explain it, never really tried, just exchanged a wink and shrugged their shoulders, and there is also this pain in his right foot, specifically in the centre of the heel, where something he trod on somewhere must have gone clean through the sole of his shoe just a few hours ago. He may come to regret the missing tooth later, but all things considered, it could be worse, it could be better, all things considered, including the sore foot, which admittedly is now throbbing. He cannot quite remember how he got to be on the rock, perhaps there was a boat, there must have been a boat, and yet he cannot remember a boat. He has no idea of how to get off the rock, though he knows, if he can be said to know anything, questions abound, that he cannot stay there forever. He tries to recall being on a boat, for how could there not have been a boat, but instead of remembering a boat, or at least the memory of being on the water, all he can think of is land, some mental imprint of moving between planted rows of spruce trees is fizzing in his synapses, and an image now of picking a path through a forest floor of stiff bluishgreen needles is manifesting itself. Between the boles, the moonlight is brilliant. In his mind it all appears brighter than the daylight is now, long silver spears are beaming down through the branches of rows and rows of spruce trees, slicing through the darkness, the pine needles are metal pins glinting in a fire. Among these artificial corridors it was silent and sterile and symmetrical, nothing moved, nothing breathed, it was a deadzone, yes, as if icy flames had long ago engulfed the trees, he remembers more clearly now the silence and sterility and symmetry, and the chill of the gloom, perhaps there was fog, no, there was no fog, it was a clear night, he neither heard nor saw animals, just pine weevils chewing on the bark. That was hours ago and though his sleep has been broken for the best or should I say worst part of a decade, he feels in his body that he got no rest. Those weevils looked menacing, something to keep a wary eye on and your distance from, so when he was tired of walking he cushioned the cleft of his back against a pile of stones in the middle of four evenly-spaced trunks and read the internet on his phone until the sky washed through from pewter to coral. This sunrise, he thought, at this time of year, is beautiful, I am glad to have seen it. I haven’t seen a sunrise like that one in a long time. I may never see another like it. It could be worse, a lot worse. You’re still alive aren’t you? What more could you ask for? He feels easeful making such prosaic utterances, feels reassured. Sitting on the soft forest floor all night would make one’s bum a little damp, and that is what happened, but there was nothing new there, it had a tendency to dampen ever since he was a boy, it had exasperated his mother, and that is not to mention either the periodic piles he has suffered as a man, though thankfully they are nothing to do with his mother, not directly anyway, and she was dead before the first flare up, he even welcomed the familiarity of a damp bum in this strange dead forest, a little discomfort would help to keep him awake, remind him who he was, keep him alive. He tried to maximise the battery on his phone by only checking his single social media profile and selecting the global politics articles he was especially interested in though he knew there would be no hope, for the phone I mean but maybe also the politics, he had no notifications either, and in the end the gadget started flashing its programmed warnings of imminent expiration—20%, 10%, 5%—and each new warning came impatiently quicker than the previous, with a certain automated glee he thought, before it farted out a slow, deflating hum and became one entire, unresponsive, useless, black rectangle. He pressed the buttons over and over to try and revive the phone, but of course it didn’t work, he knew it wouldn’t, he just pressed the buttons out of some affectation, some semblance of defiance, some proof of agency. He sat there, watching for weevils, staying vigilant, thinking things. And after a while spending his time in this way, he inclined his head towards the sky and noticed that the light was beginning to change and soon the morning sky blushed rose in the belt of Venus. He had lived through the night. Yes, that sunrise was beautiful, he could direct his full attention to it now that his phone was dead, such common beauty that often goes unremarked, those shades, this time of year, and just look at that magnificent arch of ballet slipper pink over the dark green roof of the dead forest. Maybe he had stamped on the phone then, in the prospering dawn, maybe it was then, when the sun had begun to rise, out of some sense of injustice, that he had trod on the device and some piece of plastic or metal had gone through the sole of the shoe. Or maybe the pain in his foot had nothing to do with the phone and he had simply stepped on a thorn or some other sharp thing somewhere. Maybe. The weevils, filthy little bastards, did they have something to do with the pain in his foot? Maybe. But maybe nothing—

*                *                *

—clarity, I feel, will be important—

*                *                *

Ткаља (Weaver, original in Serbian)

Ткам,
ред по ред,
шару на шару;
моју пређу
туђ ћилим,
незнаном кошуљу,
незнанки постељу.

Ткам
да уткам
у воћњак шљиве,
плодност у њиве,
жито у амбар,
у срце дамар,
срећу у дан,
и родну годину
у туђу судбину.

Ткам
да исткам
ватру на огњишту,
свате у дворишту,
мир за заваду,
за Доброг награду.

Ткам,
уткам,
исткам
па дам,
за златан дукат
за ђердан.

Срце под срцем

Срећа те нико не пита
откуд ми срце
под срцем.

Истина оста у јесени,
међу крушкама и јабукама

Истина је:
ту свако своје
зна како да чини
док чини.

Истина је:
и у ћутњи се познаје
учињено

кад се Жена опаше кецељом
преко напупелог пупка

када се Младић
усправи
и прохода као Човек

А ни срца већ не расту сама
међ’ крушкама и јабукама.

Вечерња молитва

Деца су сита,
у колевкама.
Уз њих се привили
танак покривач и сан.

Боже,
сад ме узми!
Од овог не могу бити сретнија.

Данас сам украла хлеб
на пијаци.
Лака као перо,
полетела  сам низ улицу.

Боже,
сад ме узми!
Од тога не могу бити спретнија.

А да ми је јутрос
неко рекао
да ћу ипак прегурати дан…

Боже,
сад ме узми!
Од овог нећу бити паметнија.

Бродоломник 

Коме да јавим?
Насуках се!
Јоште сам збуњен
неосољен.

Те чекам неког галеба
да ми замени голуба.
Гранчица маслине
– не треба!

Долети ли гласник
– страдаће!
прождран ни печен,
ни куван
већ сиров!

И ко ова божија шала
неслан!

Па ћу остатак живота постити
као сви добри верници
кад се отргну невољи.

Повратак 

”Они ће доћи”,
прошаптала је једна старица,
повезана у мараму
од сопствене коже.

”Ако прислониш уво
на уснули воденични камен
чућеш
како весело клопарају
њихове таљиге
на повратку кући.”

” Треба их дочекати како доликује” ,
климала је глава друге,
спремна да отпадне
са окошталог врата.

”Умесићемо хлеб
од хиљаду зрна,
испећи ћемо препеличје јаје,
нацедићемо млека
из птичјих дојки:
све да им буде по вољи.”

”Они долазе!”,
брундао је опустели друм,
кишом и снегом разлокан. 

”Треба ме окрпити,
бар ту и тамо
насути шљаку одока
по траговима
њушки и папака
из борби дивљих вепрова!”

”И школа да се окречи!”
”И пала врата подбоче!”,
из ижђикале папрати
већ гуде и гундељи сакати,
повратку синова сведоче.

Као Андерсен 

Добри, неутешни Ханс
читаву младост ми је бајао
афричким љубичицама
које су волшебно ницале
из љубавничких лобања.

Из тебе
не би могао проклијати
ни коров.
Само да смо те на време опасали
белим мермером!

Наша деца
нек буду мој опроштај свету:
изданци који листају,
несвесни каквом се трулежи хране.

Ни крлетка ни колевка
неће их задржати у твојој крошњи:
само моја љубаву у коју се гнезде.

Игра на тргу 

Сву ноћ сам купала
своја мала стопала
у млеку
да буду мека
бела и лака

да ни не осетиш
када ти боса станем
на сенку.

Да заиграм
пред твојом кућом,
на градском тргу,
на калдрми.

Расплићем косу,
жуту, свилену мараму
везујем око бедара
овлаш;

твој неми поглед
чврсто
за витке ноге своје.