Luba Gawur 

Translator

The nocturnal hills were as crumpled bedsheets

In which birds had nested. Remember:

One can trust only chance discoveries

I found the remnants of someone’s coat

That had become hooked on an oar. The heap

Resembles only second-hand clothing and

Concentration camps, and here? A massive laundering

Arranged for us by the nightlong fog?

As though a hotel had been opened above the sleek

Smoothness of the lake –

Lighted lanterns illuminate the water through-and-through

A fire ladder leads down to the floorbed sands below

One could spend the night airborne, if only the earth

Wouldn’t persist in one’s dreams along with its putrid

Cemetery! With a whole bundle of insulted

Coats, abandoned shoes and deserted hats!

One must be cautious, so as not to slip on a dead shirt,

For example. – It’s enough not to close the window to

Keep away moths, that transport the virus of a different light.

The act of one of the dreams took place in a wardrobe

Which initiates the opposing universe.

The old university building, which has been named “The Barrack,”
and the almost always barricaded botanical garden; a few of us
leaped over on our bikes the low-lying chains of an enclosure, the intersection decelerated, during the change of Light.
My immature spirits
Will guard over you, Eva. Then for a long time, inhaling
the scent of the rose-filled bathtub after the school festival, I did not open the shampoo “Salt n’cherries,” which you
Loved, the Minister of internal affairs of the land of kefir promptly closed his borders
Every morning when it was time to run to the Stadium, and amidst the branches rustled the awakened;
I patiently waited while you spoke with the elders, I
Imagined the steering wheel and turned it
Before you is an image, full of signs unknown to me, I recognized myself and marked the “0” sign, and moved as though in a somnambulant dance;
I recognized your friends and house pets,
And also assigned them numbers, near to myself. And further still, birds flew in very deeply
I did indeed speak to you in the language of feathers, but you know how feathers, like a drainspout, let everything escape,
as a drunken patrol guard would. This is called “the pelican syndrome,” I was simply a perfect example, and when I turned away in shame back behind the bench, I recalled that one sentence of yours: “So as not to be afraid, I imagined people as trees.”
Eva, I stopped answering
To my own name.

With this tooth that is growing stealthily, taking advantage of my sleep
In order to, perhaps, flash forth one morning like a terrible weapon
With an adequate physique, although with a more sluggish flow of fluids
And an additional millisecond, necessary, in order to react,
I can nonetheless still attempt to bribe at least the most insignificant angel.

The irritated gods of all of my life, menacing and kind spirits.
That anticipate from me the most cruel “no,” the wheel,
That rolls by itself, driven by the wind and the foreboding of a rainstorm.
All of the creatures who came around to show me something,
Grow silent here, and move away, as though writing in another direction.

A steady rhythm, like that of the Sudanese market, conveys
something else about the same simple sadness. The stray embassy of tungsten,
that provides me with a glimmering sign, what is the meaning,
where does one begin to exit: Everything is written toward the center, toward that uncertain sign,
the self-deciphering hieroglyph that translates itself as the Spasm and the Trumpet.

1.

It’s only six yet outside there reigned so many brilliant sovereigns! My she-devil!
The light seemed to pierce the sheets through and through, I felt ashamed, not for long,
There seemed to be some algae sleeping there, where under the quilt,
it seemed as though inside a transparent whale. And believe me, there I saw the center of the earth, it rotated like a red sticker on a record, it smelled like a charred tape, it stank of fish, that fail to wriggle out from under the burning shroud –
I know, you haven’t been sleeping for two hours and managed to make breakfast, which is now growing cold on the stove,
And you stood beside me for a long time, opened and closed the window, and
returned to the children the ball
that had accidentally flown onto the veranda,
but did you see the same thing? As though through scorched air? And heard that din of the depths, mephitic, suffocating and iridescent?
Otherwise, why did we, exchanging glances, in a flash - sort of fall into a dance – when I finally awoke?

2.

Believe me, tiny glow-beam.
Even when –
when the shadows of fish rise from the bottom to the surface – sparkling in the sun – and I
see their murkier
aspect, I fumble, fire blindly – even then
believe me, tiny glow-beam.

Just now, when it seems the entire ocean fell on a tiny town,
The trees rustle, stirring translucent water,
And it is as though we are homeless, begging to stay the night in an all-night laundromat,
quiescent and content amidst the surrounding splashing,
in a dance on a sail mast, in the heart of a comet
that is full of old names and dates suddenly melded and forged into one kernel in a scalding cauldron,
scattered and dispersed thus, as we can only run within our love.
Tiny glow-beam, I can’t go on without your breath.