Falling salts of mercury

     I lick off without attention.

No great moon of Solomon

     has been set for my tears in the skies.

A post. Why not beat my forehead to

     blood on it? To smithereens! We are

like fellow criminals, fearing one

     another. (The murdered thing is love.)

Don’t say these are lovers? Going into

     the night? Separately? To sleep with others?

– You understand the future is up there?

     he says. And I throw back my head.

To sleep! Like newly-weds over their mat!

     To sleep! We can’t fall into

step. And I plead miserably: take my

     arm, we aren’t convicts to walk like this.

Shock! It’s as though his soul has touched

     me    as his arm leans on mine. The electric

current beats along feverish wiring,

     and rips. He’s leaned on my soul with his arm.

He holds me. Rainbows everywhere. What is more like a

     rainbow than tears? Rain, a curtain, denser

than beads. I don’t know if such embankments can

     end. But here is a bridge and

                                            – Well then?

Here? (The hearse is ready.)

     Peaceful    his eyes move

upward. – Couldn’t you see me home

     for the very last time?

8

Last    bridge    I won’t

give up or take out my hand

this is the last bridge

the last bridging between

water    and firm land:

and I am saving these

coins for death

for Charon, the price of Lethe

this    shadow money

from my dark hand I press

soundlessly into

the shadowy darkness of his

shadow money it is

no gleam and tinkle in it

coins for shadows:

the dead have enough poppies

This bridge

Lovers for the most

part are without hope: passion

also is just

a bridge, a means of connection

It’s warm:    to nestle

close at your ribs, to move in

a visionary pause

towards nothing, beside nothing

no    arms no    legs

now, only the bone of my

side is alive where

it presses directly against you

life in that side

only, ear and echo is it: there

I stick like white to

egg yolk, or an eskimo to his fur

adhesive, pressing

joined to you: Siamese

twins are no nearer.

The woman you call mother

when she forgot

all things in motionless triumph

only to carry you:

she did not hold you closer.

Understand: we have

grown into one as we slept and

now I can’t jump

because I can’t let go your hand

and I won’t be torn off

as I press close to you: this

bridge is no husband

but a lover: a just slipping past

our support: for the

river is fed with bodies!

I bite in like a tick

you must tear out my roots to be rid of me

like ivy    like a tick

inhuman    godless

to throw me away like a thing,

when there is

no thing I ever prized

in this empty world of things.

Say this is only a dream,

night still and afterwards morning

an express    to Rome?

Granada? I won’t know myself

as I push off

the Himalayas of bedclothes.

But this dark is deep:

now I warm you with my blood, listen

to this flesh.

It is far truer than poems.

If you are warm, who

will you go to tomorrow for that?

This is delirium,

please say this bridge cannot

end

      as it ends.

– Here then? His gesture could

be made by a child, or a god.

– And so? – I am biting in!

For a little more time. The last of it.

9

Blatant as factory buildings,

     as alert to a call

here is the sacred and sublingual

     secret wives keep from husbands and

widows from friends, here is the full

     story that Eve took from the tree:

I am no more than an animal that

     someone has stabbed in the stomach.

Burning. As if the soul had been

     torn away with the skin. Vanished like steam

through a hole is that well-known foolish

     heresy called a soul.

That Christian leprosy:

     steam: save that with your poultices.

There never was such a thing.

     There was a body once, wanted to

live    no longer wants to live.

Forgive me! I didn’t mean it!

     The shriek of torn entrails.

So prisoners sentenced to death wait

     for the 4 a.m. firing squad.

At chess perhaps with a grin

     they mock the corridor’s eye.

Pawns in the game of chess:

     someone is playing with us.

Who? Kind gods or? Thieves?

     The peephole is filled with an

eye    and the red corridor

     clanks. Listen    the latch lifts.

One drag on tobacco, then

     spit, it’s all over, spit,

along this paving of chess squares

     is a direct path    to the ditch

to blood. And the secret eye

     the dormer eye of the moon.

And now, squinting sideways, how

     far away you are already.

10

Closely, like one creature, we

start: there is our café!

There is our island, our shrine, where

in the morning, we people of the

rabble, a couple for a minute only,

conducted a morning service:

with things from country markets, sour

things seen through sleep or    spring.

The coffee was nasty there

entirely made from oats (and

with oats you can extinguish

caprice in fine race-horses).

There was no smell of Araby.

Arcadia was in

that coffee.

But how she smiled at us

and sat us down by her,

sad and worldly in her wisdom

a grey-haired paramour.

Her smile was solicitous

(saying: you’ll wither! live!),

it was a smile at madness and being

penniless, at yawns    and love

and – this was the chief thing –

at laughter    without reason

smiles with no deliberation

and our faces    without wrinkles.

Most of all    at youth

at passions    out of this climate

blown in from some other place

flowing from some other source

into that dim café

(burnous and Tunis) where

she smiled at hope and flesh

under old-fashioned clothes.

(My dear friend    I don’t complain.

It’s just another scar.)

To think how she saw us off,

that proprietress in her cap

stiff    as a Dutch hat…


Not quite remembering, not quite

understanding, we are led away from the festival –

along our street!    no longer ours    that

we walked many times, and no more shall.

Tomorrow the sun will rise in the West.

And then David will break with Jehovah.

– What are we doing? – We are separating.

– That’s a word that means nothing to me.

It’s the most inhumanly senseless

of words: sep    arating. (Am I one of a hundred?)

It is simply a word of four syllables and

behind their sound lies: emptiness.

Wait! Is it even correct in Serbian or

Croatian? Is it a Czech whim, this word.

Sep    aration! To sep    arate!

It is insane unnatural

a sound to burst the eardrums, and spread out

far beyond the limits of longing itself.

Separation – the word is not in the Russian

language. Or the language of women. Or men.

 

Nor in the language of God. What are we – sheep?

To stare about as we eat.

Separation – in what language is it,

when the meaning itself doesn’t exist? 

or even the sound! Well – an empty one, like

the noise of a saw in your sleep perhaps.

Separation. That belongs to the school of

Khlebnikov’s    nightingale-groaning 

swan-like…

                   so how does it happen?

Like a lake of water running dry.

Into air. I can feel our hands touching.

To separate. Is a shock of thunder

upon my head – oceans rushing into

a wooden house. This is Oceania’s

furthest promontory. And the streets are steep.

To separate. That means to go downward

 

downhill    the sighing sound of two

heavy soles    and at last a hand receives

the nail in it. A logic that turns

everything over. To separate

means we have to become

single creatures    again

we who had grown into one.

11

To lose everything at once –

     what could be tidier?

This is an end to our days

     as we wander in these outskirts,

and to our joys – read burdens –

to our lives, homes and both of us.

Empty dachas.