Miroslav Kirin 

Translator

Unfathomable, just like when I rinse the dirty dishes in the warm, gushing water,

put them aside to dry, and my face is aglow with happiness.

With an unmeant easiness I open the window to let in the fresh morning air.

The water is boiling, and from the silvery box I add four teaspoons of coffee.

You are still fumbling in the bathroom but you’re coming.

With the cup of coffee in my hand I make my way to the table and sit:

at that moment a woman in the building across the street shakes up her sheet.

The sheet flashes white and she quickly withdraws her hands, as if they were

her shame, suddenly made visible.

 But do notice how easy it is, with a few jerks shake out all that has amassed.

my tongue falls out of my mouth

it is no longer a tongue, it is a huge calf’s liver

of the calf we slaughtered yesterday

assures me the butcher of my favorite butcher shop

but I didn’t go to the butcher shop

and neither do i have a favorite butcher shop

it is my tongue that has fallen out of my mouth

this huge liver

i’m putting it back pushing it into my throat

i give up when i realize that it is choking me

my tongue falls out again

hangs onto me creeps up my neck licks my body

through my tongue through my tongue through my most grievous tongue

They don't allow me to read on the tram, especially you, with your hair swinging

left-right.

You’re tossing it onto the page I am reading, splaaash, all the words vanish

and I have to look up at you.

What would Jane Hirshfield say – why did I stop reading

in the middle of her poem To Judgment: An Assay?

You change my life with your hair

“as eating an artichoke changes the taste/ of whatever is eaten after”, says Jane.

Hair is of a rather odd nature, seemingly dead: you can cut it, you can burn it.

Yet, still grows.

And then my lively fingers comb it, get entangled in it, their life gets entangled,

someone else’s life does, they change their taste.

Suppose I suddenly wish to see your face as you’re tossing your hair.

At its best I can only hope to see

the flash of your hands, that will come out of the blue

to raise your hair, comb it with the fingers,

and then let it mercilessly splash  

across the pages of my book,

like foamy water from the bucket thrown out into the street at the end of the shift

at the barber’s.

The ground – still wet from the afternoon shower. Each little grass-blade

persistently returns the raindrops to the sky.

Having overheard this harmless dialogue, we failed to notice

the nightfall - suddenly it was there, between two cups of tea.

The clouds cleared up and I invited you to go out and watch the stars with

me.

Little do we know about them but it won’t diminish the pleasure of watching

them.

Later on we resume drinking tea on the porch.

On the floor – like an empty wallet, a crushed frog. Seems I brought it

on the sticky sole of my sandal. Didn’t hear a thing (as if the death of a live

being ought to be audible).

It would never happen to Indians, you say, they walk

barefoot out of respect for tiny beings.

I will never walk the night garden again, I decide.

Why don’t you write a poem about it, you add having finished reading

a collection of ancient Chinese poetry.

But the thing is, how to write a poem about a crushed frog

out of respect for Chinese poets?

Early in the morning a naked woman kneels on the kitchen floor praying.

The smoke from the heating plant rises steadily.

A soprano from Schnittke’s madrigal interferes with the voice of the potato  vendor coming from the street.

The chill descends to the root of a plant

on the balcony left in oblivion.

When the vendor leaves, I replay the madrigal and this time the woman’s voice

seems unbearably lonely.

A moment ago she was with him, now he has left her.

As if she has lost the support of her own verticality, her voice broke down,

aimlessly departed somewhere horizontally, indifferently.

What was this naked woman praying for early in the morning?

Isn’t her own verticality in the kitchen all that takes?

Allegedly, God crouches by each newborn child whispering all sorts of tales into his ear, inducing him to scream. The child’s silence stands for the defeat of God. However, all is bound to end up in the denial of silence. John Cage set a limit to 4’ 33’’; he knew well enough that if we insisted on the silence without limited duration, the boundaries of our world would collapse. Can noise be measured? Probably, some measuring instruments are reliable. Or at least people say so. Take the dead body of the actress Adrienne Shelly. Let’s measure it without any shame and show it in the open casket on the day of the funeral. From her New York office she descended to the apartment below to argue about building noise made by a 19-year-old immigrant construction worker. He does not hesitate a second to strangle her. God had tempted him for nineteen years and won. It was a victory that turned out to be a defeat. The absence of love or God is silence. What is the absence of silence? God can always pose a question that cannot be answered. There is not a single moment without the sound of blood pumping through my veins, without the sound of tiny hairs quivering in my nostrils. Sometimes I cannot get to sleep because I hear my body organs quietly working in the background – honestly, is there anything more dreadful than being constantly aware of the presence of your own body? The body feverishly turning over and over in bed, the body exhaling bitter breath which then hits the pillow, rebounds and finds its way into the ear. My ear is a storehouse that stocks the moaning of a woman making love: it keeps returning to me long after it has vanished. It is a storehouse in whose dark corner the crying of a little girl soars up. In that storehouse a power drill is turned on once in a while to mend the world now completely deranged. Soon a car alarm joins, wailing endlessly. Is it also on the same mission of mending the world? Is it to say that if you do not have a resonant body, you actually do not exist? In the far corner of my aural storehouse a tiny bird warbles, always the same one, always at the same time. His crystal solitary warbling questions the meaning of the crystal night. The bird that I cannot recognize by night comes back by day. If I do not find one in my pocket, some other bird will be hopping before my front-door; shivering, happy for finding a refuge from the heavy rain. Don’t you recognize me, he tells me and starts pecking my palm, refuses to say more, and the next moment he is only a beggar handing me a creased yellowed paper, his eyes betray fatigue and blindness, even  some terminal disease. At least take it and read it, he says and as I close the door the paper falls down on the floor, the light goes out. At 4.48 a.m. I slowly descend from my flat to object to the noise made by idle teenagers engaged in endless verbal ramifications in front of my building. They have been tempted for nineteen years now. Of course I know what comes next. It takes a few seconds before I lie there on the ground, beaten black and blue, hardly moving my limbs. Why should I be ashamed of it – I will show my scars, they will not hum only because of me. Let them wail as pressure-cooker, as a long forsaken train whistle. My body has experienced yet another humiliating defeat of words. Yet, I have not lost my faith in them.

THE BOAT WAS PACKED FULL,

the coast deserted, soon to be lost from sight.

We were rowing for hours,

we were departing and arriving.

It was a useless job,

it seemed that time stood still.

Yet, we sailed into

the heart of a new land.

And someone has

already been there:

a boat brimming with blood,

bobbing in the dead calm of the sea.