Poems by Vlastimil Kovalčík

SOMEONE

 

You place your hands on the single threshold of this winter night

            Look, at this one, too, who withdraws into her gale

like a wall, a vineyard of breasts hard as wood. Wood in the shape

of a tree in a wheel of shades.

                                                                                                                           

The seal symbolises:

how a thing is almost insignificant.

             So let us summon

ourselves by fire and water.

            The sleepers are related by blood only in sleep.

Until the dream is something like decay.

            Yet someone has founded

a real threshold this winter night through the existence of a word.

                                   

GIFT

 

Sleep-head: you closed your eyelids from a great

distance into the shape of a bird.

            From the will of detail they have stuck to your

hidden nests overturned upon each other.

            Through wings

they measure the silence of our dark sailing in the museum

            of night when

the jug of all shades is smashed so that from the depths of the            

reflection of fire

there could be a fundamental river bank.

                                                                                                                                            

Only to being are we closest and

so once - from the moment of the death of one of us - we’ll

be ever more distant from one another.

            Only now

you sleep beside me: you have your eyelids closed

            to the shape of birds

from a great distance.

 

ELEMENT

 

Flakes make their devotions to the earth.

                     Shallow, already-

frozen snow.

                     Little knots of  twinkling creaking

brightness.

                  This is a plain of fields – for untiring thorns

for the eyes.

                  The heavy eyelids of the furrows crack.

                  Does the cold stare

up as far as the darkening climate of the heavens?

                  And it’s nightfall;

unmoving, only multi-inner-branching air.

                  Clouds, anciently-grey

dulling clouds.

                         Winged birds can never come

to rest on you.

                       Now a headlong uncontradicted

mountain.

                Oval-sketched by trunks of trees.

                The pipes of a solidly spaced

organ.

          In crowns of trees without boles the cross-roads of a windstorm

is unknowingly marked.

          At the edge of forest base only the protruding

extremities of its wooden ancestors.

          Do not disturb

the sleep of decay!

The eye-to-eye of a solitary rock renouncing its

inner-parched dream.

                                   Yet in each place it is

skull-like.

               The mouth the not-mouth of a sand clock?

                                   All the while

substituting the burgeoning shade of death?

               At this moment in the frost

on its knees it watches over the almost finger-nailed mist.

               As if it wanted

to conceal the old known places in my soul.

               And through them

I find once more a spring unfrozen even

in winter.

               A cold unearthed candle glitters there.

               It cleanses

nakedness, it cleanses itself in nakedness!

              And what does it mirror?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                           While

 you still have time to turn your head to the night: the self-cathedral

of stars.

              Is there only a single meaning in a human being?

                          Oh,

to see the cosmos in the moment?

 

Translated by Viera and James Sutherland-Smith

 

 

 

ARRHÉTON

Face to face to any death we feel that being is a

secret.

            Yes, but so it says that only for one’s own

death everyone must live up to it.

                                                       If we knew it,

to live wouldn’t make sense.

                                                Because it wouldn’t

be  the unsolvable, unreachable, unexceedable goal

for us anymore.

                           But even so it won’t last

incessantly!

                     Still, on our ultimate human threshold,

we will be forced to it by death.

                                                      And face to face

will remain only the Unspeakable; Arrhéton.

 

 

PROPHECY

In my sleep I heard  the bells tolling.

                                                            When I

awakened I suddenly realised it couldn’t be that

their voice could reach my place.

                                                       Lights were

visible only as the cheekbones of the skeleton of

night.

            It is, though, a natural prophecy of the

heart of darkness through the mill of time.

                                                                      Maybe,

somebody is dying somewhere right now, , somebody I

knew, and, again, somebody is being born somewhere,

someone whom I will never know.

                                                          But why did they

call me from my sleep?

                                        Because there is nothing

attesting that I am not in a labyrinth right now

and that is presence to everyone.

                                                       It is impossible

to enter it and leave it at the same time.

                                                                 What if

we were not supposed to know why we should have

been born?

                  It is for us to understand that we yet

have to die!

                    Even though, it is all surrounded by

the promise of God’s Secret.

 

 

STEWARD

Crushed ring of the heaven’s shore.            

                                                            The air has got

thicker visibly.

                          Gaping splendour is rooting lithely

into the gloom above the ground.

                                                       In this way

the gigantic bird, recignisable only by the rim of its

wings, lands again.

                                And those who get a glimpse of it,

start to dream.

                         Ripped out, scattered nest

of true whiteness.

                               Its heat is cooling off bonelessly,

multiwavely and  kissingly into flowing seed-dotted

sap during its flight.

                                    And falling, self-sealing

flakes cleanly fill in that invisible, empty apple.

Shallow to itself, and yet deep and satiated

enough – for every one and every thing , as well as

for the whole world.

                                   That is for everything that

lasts for a certain time but one day sinks into the

pond of not being.

                               Is it chilly steward himself

unaudibly and long clinking for now?

                                                              Yes.

                                                                      Not     

only as a boy; but even now – as a very grown man

– I wait with amazement for that unicoloured,

all-embracing rainbow.

                                        After my death, there will

be no first snow for me.

 

                                                            Translated by Saskia Kovalčíková