Bright Abyss

Mid morning. The light
is bathed silently in blood,
nothing moves except the heart-valves
and their blue rivers.
Long chains of cells
eat my thoughts to lace.
I count the sunrays
through my fingers
thinking only god is perishable,
but your touch deathless.
I wonder who other people are
I doubt they ever had
skin and bones.
If only I could forget
your animality
at least, a little,
all my atoms would scatter
in a hailstorm
through the empty air.
What a joy,
to be finally beaten
and sacked by the wind.
Removed from
the confinement of the world,
dancing, lids shut
upon your pulse.
No quarantine,
no parenthesis
of hard lack.
Love like
it never was,
pure darkness
opening in one blow
every door.

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Jana

“I know the sun would wane seeing our souls’ minerals shine
Veins and muscles are truer than prayer”
            – Mayakovsky.

Fresh as droplets of sperm
are the things that never come back.
You were alive – this morning –
You were alive – and sun shocked –
Your body- equal to a charge of light –
Your womb of peach- swarming-
Eight months, now, brimming with life
Young girl, such a metamorphosis is love
I know- we, women,
are the beasts at the end of the kiss.

To your walk across the poppy fields,
they substracted their stolid souls.
They came with broken bottles,
shaky kittens and stabbing hands,
they came with perforated skulls
to reduce your hearts to none.
We, demons – this race we belong to
– we’d better not know.

Ensnaring the last sunrays,
your hair in the dust is a lake of honey,
your womb a butcher’s shop – emptied.
Eight months, now, deprived of life,
eight months -sucked by soil,
aside.
– At eight, you already have a name-
– At eight, it reduces God’s to none-

I saw your name on the report today
two blood colored kittens- sticky paws,
tried to escape by your left rib.
Your name, girl, tasted as
my bones had been removed.
– Do nuns have overdoses, slash their wrists
Do they hang themselves- simply? –

I don’t know- we, women,
Is it better not to shout and hit?
No one talks about you, Jana,
no one except this red stain on your soil
and all it can say is:
“Harder days are coming”.

(For Jana, 25 years old, and eight months pregnant Croatian girl mentionned in the Trešnjevka Women’s Group report “Women and War” -1992)

February 18th

My accident, my little one,
they say I should love you without hope,
for hope is only despair and failing,
one dirty habit I shoud break
like a vase for flowers
not blooming on this earth.

Small breasts and beautiful legs
won’t keep him, neither ties
make stardust of endless lies.
It looks like fate crushes to chalk
the shell you curled into,
like it confiscates all the blue.

I can’t be sorry to want more
than a black sky with suns of steel.
I can’t be sorry to want a grand joy.
When I see your roots growing in air
in a fatherless moonlight,
all the lovers strangely lie
side by side, like knifes.

But surely it is a strange place,
this maternity corner, all white
and silent like porcelain, not yet broken.
And hope sounds like your red heart
beating under his palm,
hope – is just one phone call
before the pill.

I know nothing of death, my little one
and I don’t want to know. Oh.
Please, wait.

Back to you

Is it too late for a Stranger’s remembrance-
Is it perharps too early?  – Emily Dickinson.

There’s a trace
something in my chest, leaks
so strong you can smell it in the streets
a blossom of fire
as in sleep, suddenly moves
there’s a spur of flesh in your absence
nailed into nothing there’s a spur
a carnal trace
constricted as in some spray paint
not to be exposed to direct sunlight
but laid in a refrigerated body box
a trace so alive, so luminous
it blooms along my frozen nerves and lips
your imprint
a poison of unknown name
that perforates and burns, say, after use
my salty throat and uterine walls-
there’s a spur of flesh
rising from underneath the skin of loss
outliving cold veins and still blood
there’s a trace
piercing the balloon of my amnesia
gunshots holes in my funeral dress
now, fling open your worn blue coat
don’t stay chaste with me, love
It’s not you, it‘s me, god chastised
for living without you was lying in a coffin
but now, sweet defiant, look
there’s a carnal trace in everything
blood colored suns on the road to nothingness
wooly cells, red diodes, lustrous anomalies
that leads me to your cummy hands
as you knead my heart and eat it like bread
on your way to some peep show cabin-
Oh my weird stone, my man, my absolutist
there’s a rain
there’s a rain of flesh in this noisy space
in every interference there’s a trace
there’s a spur of flesh in your absence
that stands naked in the rearview mirror
and delivers me from heaven.

Yana

for Yana Djin

In my dream a little girl
is running through walls of tall grass,
like a bird slipping out of a birdless world.
I’ve never seen her, but I know
as I know of shot larks,
the silence of her black inexplicable eyes,
these georgian solemn eyes.

Her extreme youth and absence of pain
are unusual, maybe she has simply become
what she had to be, clear as a song
and free. Nothing less,
nothing more than a string of notes
that has found its final shape
among the pointed stars.

I recall white stallions following her,
men drowning in quicksand along the way,
and in the middle of this untranslatable film,
the sensation to be left in a ruined country
to face it all alone.
Far away, her footsteps beating the land
like hundreds of thin wings.

I refuse to explain why the horses
are suddenly so angry and so white
that their teeth reflect the moon like snow.
Why her body is so slight and the Black Sea
so blue.
We’re all drowing in quicksand.
That’s why dreams are forever like home,
they watch over the mad birds in our skulls.

In summer, when the earth doesn’t feel
as dying from thirst, I sit on the porch
and write to her who witnesses birds
feeding on garbage in New York.
I write to her about that little hell of days,
a glass of wine between us.
It feels like before I never had a sister.

At this point, I wonder if a dream like that
is supportable. A dream in which she’s gone.
Each detail remains clearer than reality,
like this white stallion who bites my hand
before I wake up.

Yet nothing hurts.
His mouth is full of pearls.
Softer than feathers.