Janko Lozar 

Translator

The midsummer sea, the hot pitch road, this grass, these shacks that
       made me,
jungle and razor grass shimmering by the roadside, the edge of art;
wood lice are humming in the sacred wood,
nothing can burn them out, they are in the blood;
their rose mouths, like cherubs, sing of the slow science
of dying – all heads, with, at each ear, a gauzy wing.
Up at Forest Reserve, before branches break into sea,
I looked through the moving, grassed window and thought „pines“
or conifers of some sort. I thought they must suffer
in this tropical heat with their child´s idea of Russia.
Then suddenly, from their rotting logs, distracting signs
of the faith I betrayed, or the faith that betrayed me –
yellow butterflies rising on the road to Valencia
stuttering „yes“ to the resurrection; “yes, yes is our answer,“
the gold-robed Nunc Dimittis of their certain choir.
Where´s my child´s hymnbook, the poems edged in gold leaf,
the heaven I worship with no faith in heaven,
as the Word turned toward poetry in its grief?
Ah, bread of life, that only love can leaven!
Ah, Joseph, though no man ever dies in his own country,
the grateful grass will grow thick from his heart.

The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud –
clouds that will keep no record of where we have passed,
nor the sea’s mirror, nor the coral busy with its own
culture; they aren’t doors of dissolving stone,
but pages in a damp culture that come apart.
So a hole in their parchment opens, and suddenly, in a vast
dereliction of sunlight, there’s that island known
to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude,
for making nothing. Not even a people. The jet’s shadow
ripples over green jungles as steadily as a minnow
through seaweed. Our sunlight is shared by Rome
and your white paper, Joseph. Here, as everywhere else,
it is the same age. In cities, in settlements of mud,
light has never had epochs. Near the rusty harbor
around Port of Spain bright suburbs fade into words –
Maraval, Diego Martin – the highways long as regrets,
and steeples so tiny you couldn’t hear their bells,
nor the sharp exclamations of whitewashed minarets
from green villages. The lowering window resounds
over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas.
Skimming over an ocher swamp like a fast cloud of egrets
are nouns that find their branches as simply as birds.
It comes too fast, this shelving sense of home –
canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as
the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.

Raw ocher sea cliffs in the slanting afternoon,
at the bursting end of Balandra, the dry beach´s end,
that a shadow´s dial wipes out of sight and mind.
White sanderlings race the withdrawing surf to pick,
with wink-quick stabs, shellfish between the pebbles,
ignoring the horizon where a sail goes out
like the love of Prospero for his island kingdom.
A grape leaf shields the sun with veined, orange hand,
but its wick blows out, and the sanderlings are gone.
Go, light, make weightless the burden of our thought,
let our misfortune have no need for magic,
be untranslatable in verse or prose.
Let us darken like stones that have never frowned or known
the need for art or medicine, for Prospero´s
snake-knotted steff, or sea-bewildering stick;
erase these ciphers of birds´ prints on sand.   
Proportion benedict us, as in fables,
that in life´s last third, its movements, we accept the
measurements of our acts from one to three,
and boarding this craft, pull till a dark wind
rolls this pen on a desktop, a broken oar, a scepter
swayed by the surf, the scansion of the sea.

Perhaps if I'd nurtured some divine disease,
like Keats in eternal Rome, or Chekhov at Yalta,
something that sharpened the salt fragrance of sweat
with the lancing nib of my pen, my gift would increase,
as the hand of a cloud turning over the sea will alter
the sunlight – clouds smudged like silver plate,
leaves that keep trying to summarize my life.
Under the brain's white coral is a seething anthill.
You had such a deep faith in that green water, once.
The skittering fish were harried by your will –
the stingray halved itself in clear bottom sand,
its tail a whip, its back as broad as a shovel;
the sea horse was fragile as glass, like grass, every tendril
of the wandering medusa: friends and poisons.
But to curse your birthplace is the final evil.
You could map my limitations four yards up from a beach –
a boat with broken ribs, the logwood that grows only thorns,
a fisherman throwing away fish guts outside his hovel.
What if the lines I cast bulge into a book
that has caught nothing? Wasn't it privilege
to have judged one's work by the glare of greater minds,
though the spool of days that midsummer's reel rewinds
comes bobbling back with its question, its empty hook?

Our houses are one step from the gutter. Plastic curtains
or cheap prints hide what is dark behind windows –
the pedalled sewing machine, the photos, the paper rose
on its doily. The porch rail is lined with red tins.
A man’s passing height is the same size as their doors,
and the doors themselves, usually no wider than coffins,
sometimes have carved in their fretwork little half-moons.
The hills have no echoes. Not the echo of ruins.
Empty lots nod with their palanquins of green.
Any crack in the sidewalk was made by the primal fault
of the first map of the world, its boundaries and powers.
By a pile of red sand, of seeding, abandoned gravel
near a burnt-out lot, a fresh jungle unfurls its green
elephants’ ears of wild yams and dasheen.
One step over the low wall, if you should care to,
recaptures a childhood whose vines fasten your foot.
And this is the lot of all wanderers, this is their fate,
that the more they wander, the more the world grows wide.
So, however far you have travelled, your
steps make more holes and the mesh is multiplied –
or why should you suddenly think of Tomas Venclova,
and why should I care about whatever they did to Heberto
when exiles must make their own maps, when this asphalt
takes you far from the action, past hedges of unaligned flowers?

It touches earth, that branched diviner’s rod
the lightning, like the swift note of a swallow on the staff
of four electric wires, while everything I read
or write goes on too long. Ah, to have
a tone colloquial and stiff,
the brevity of that short syllable, God,
all synthesis in one heraldic stroke,
like Li Po or a Chinese laundry mark! Walk
these hot streets, their signs a dusty backdrop stuck
to the maundering ego. The lines that jerk
into step do not fit any mold. More than time
keeps shifting. Language never fits geography
except when the earth and summer lightning rhyme.
When I was greener, I strained with a branch
to utter every tongue, language, and life at once.
More skillful now, I’m more dissatisfied.
They never align, nature and your
own nature. Too rapid the lightning’s shorthand,
too patient the sea repeatedly tearing up paper,
too frantic the wind unravelling the same knot,
too slow the stones crawling toward language every night.