Vyhľadávanie
Bright Cities
I.
The Summer is not going, it stays like inflammation on stuffy roads,
warm stone, no trace of steps (and yet humidity in the air);
wounds are not healing, the same movement every afternoon – to wipe
the dust from one´s eyes and the oil from hot wheels. October.
Not even return: continuance in crevices – the city doesn´t remember,
nor do you wish to: numb footsoles, chapped hands, why not admit –
A strait, a passage, from behind the corner surfacing instead of (another)
memory, a street. Another one. Identical.
And a madman on the platform, quite desolate
(no one is scared of him any more), change at Réaumur-Sébastopol:
on the very top a man is sleeping in his socks,
a bandage sticking out of one, but hardly anyone dares cover his nose.
Behind the window without blinds someone gets deunk,
Quite solitary, behind a window with a blind I change my make-up,
I don´t air the place, I silently invoke the telephone,
till finally I fall asleep.
II.
A finger code, noise, secret antrances, to be angry with oneself
for being (in the first moment) unrestrained, for being (in the second)
reasonable, and resent on´s loneliness – where´s the virtue in that?
From the point of view of eternity, it doesn´t mater whether in this
World, side by side with this body (or some other), from the momentary
Point of view: to choose emptimes. And wait.
An old woman, in fact rather mouldered than old, perhaps senile
and possibly bewildered for ages past, takes the lift up and down,
greets at great length, aloud, repeats „yes“, „yes“ over and over again,
addresses everone as „madam“, „sir“ with an assiduous smile,
and touches childrdnś cheeks with her fingers.
A pin in someone´s stomach, a word in eomeone´s heart:
quarantine, forty days of silence.
A flame, cellophane, a scorhes image,
you infect the whole colony with yourself, and you´re surprised
when they condemn you.
III.
There are wooden houses, plastered or just stuck together with cloth,
carpets instead of walls, cables in the corners, dust in the joints
and the wind under the door.
A jug kettle, a microwave oven, a hot plate,
someone who sleeps,
not moving. He who follows meanders, not aware of the riverbanks
bare of green, indifferent to the pavement: who continues on
to where people ride camels
with knapsack on back,
where grey blocks of flats stand in the sand like a suburb,
only they are burning,
with tents below the Windows,
a waterless fountain and the sky in flames,
you want to go back to the river, there´s no way,
- not in the dream, and therefore nota t all –
You need only to open your eyes, run along the walls,
Burning carpets, acrid amoke,
Barefoot and apronless:
Those stairs
Are still there.
An Endangered Species
Photographs
1
A landscape – a map.
Houses scatterad around
or quite washed away,
remmants of squares,
intersections with a perfect surface,
carefully drawn lanes,
black-white,
not a trace of blood,
an abandoned building site,
only the road is absorbed in mud
or mud licks up the road.
A little boy has lost interest,
dribbling the ball in another playground.
2
Thousands of springlets, streams, feeders
run on the rocks, gathering mass,
advancing, roaring,
and if you stumble,
first they go round you like a pebble,
one actually halts or hold sup the stream,
others leap over, drag,
pass across,
trample down –
a bit further,
downwards at a slant,
in the red heat
a dingle drop slides through a pipe,
falls on a stone, rebounds, sizzles,
the other ones evaporate on the way –
a rough and dry
little tongue
licks my hand:
more.
6
A landscape – a postcard.
Containers, boxes,
the noses of houses dug into the soil.
In the giant cracks of pavements
only boards, papers and bricks
face the invasion of gatherers.
On a vacant expanse two trees remained.
Heavenly peace
- or almost heavenly –
on a cathedral without towers,
ruins standing on end like hairs.
7
We are watchmakers.
Me and my little son.
He has two alarm clocks. He says:
I want these two alarm clocks
to be next to each other.
This one will be Next to
and this one Each other.
To create the worôd from words.
From nothing:
8
Clenched jaws, tight lips –
words come anyway,
Iisue, flow,
and though the images sometimes break in upon speech,
in the end words rise from the stream again.
I have joints, move my fingers, articulate,
discover, grip:
an axe for the essence,
either exactitude – or silence.
9
Still lives – a smoking-room.
A single cable to connect the clock and the radio.
Below them at a depth, two arm-chairs, each from a different era,
and a unit table without an ashtray.
Li-up empty corridors,
a line of bright blue doors,
darkness just on the twenty sixth
and twenty eight floors.
A bit further on
a reastaurant.
In the kitchen, permanently, the stoves stand
and the boiler hangs,
pans, pots, plates
covered with a layer of dust and flies´corpses,
even bats are lazing somwhere
in the corner: their post-mortem sprawl
makes them resemble dry leaves
or burnt toasts,
and finally in the dasement,
like an allusion to uncovered Pompeii,
on a grey-and-green carpet of dust
stretched,
two kittens turned to stone.
