Poems
Defloration
The Hanged Man
has been elected tyrant for this year
Eyes were raised
by even those who originally
didnʼt want to cast vote
(One-sighted choice)
and right away the biographers
rashly contorted the gallows of Memory:
he was executed for What Not
on August 6, 1945
Under the influence of his death
He set himself free
broke through his barriers
and fell into the boundlessness of Spirit
(they called it Defloration)
The more sober-minded spoke
of the coming of a new age
The morning wind spread
The Hanged Manʼs speech:
“To sow oneself with cancer-like
Precision
Can be done by anybody!”
(The eyes of the lepers
were raised first)
And the last Unresurrected Doubt
was dispersed by a bluish flock of birds,
which was flying over that place
with an odd overstrain
This flock was the only one with the right
to distill with its wings
the geniusʼs penetrating conscience
But not even the sound of the wings
drowned out the beating
of the dead heart
which resounded with a hollow echo
all round the country
and FILLED everyone
(The doctors called it:
Suicide)
There were more and more birds
So many that even the last
Fear-decimated people
unceremoniously put down their knives
for cutting the nooses
and their thoughts of Resurrection
in order to be fulfilled
to the beating of the wings
The only question is
who is to be elected tyrant for the next year
Headless eyes havenʼt decided yet
but they say
that the new prophet
wonʼt be mortal, yet again…
(1989)
Anxietea
Meanwhile vapors rose above the forest
(why canʼt I want once Iʼve uttered)
on the ground there was the wind, the book and Schopenhauer
“life is something that should not be”
(how wide-angle evening unearths torpor
by wiping away the moment Do not breathe
and we both shall be pronounced missing
I longed to chart your provinces
and explain the ciphered ornaments
tragically long-drawn-out
How much sacredness was sown into you
By the void encounters of your ancestors!)
The villagers came, saying they were waylaid
in the shades of the trees
with their roots mystically uprooted
by a fold of black knights
The paths are so, so sinuous today
and in order to die you only have to overbreathe the time
(above the summer cinema hovers timelessness
and oppressiveness in the domain of breath
lumps of your pauses and centripetality
donʼt lie to me, I know you were dead before already!)
Raving fear of the rattlingʼs compulsion
eyeless crevices in the visors of the helmets
clenched hilts of double-edged swords Glimmers
tense snorting of the horses and the rumbling of the hooves
(after all, they walked up the hills of blue-beheading
they sowed you into my irises and fortresses
why would I run away now – you emerged from within me
So much time in every one of your movements
as if you wiped away the torture instruments on which they formed you)
The villagers came, saying they all were slaughtered
and sucked in by the earth, then they listened
to the receding rumbling of the hooves
odd countryside Heavy as breath
Their words accompanied by the acoustics of the amphitheatre
and accompanied by the silverish movements of the characters
Reflections of light on the surrounding trees
nice weather and acceptable admission fee,
tipsy spectators The Legend can sleep
(You cling to me trustfully
as if I didnʼt face you with the sharpness of the chilly sentence
light flickers on your face
leaving you at the mercy of thieves
Tomorrow Iʼll finish reading Schopenhauer)
(1990)
Concertea
An untuned cello pressed
in between the knees
of a virtuoso with a halo of flies above her head
with a pugnatious bow into the flickering fans
eyes charged to the point of igniting Candlemas
The strings clang
with dead flies
Adagio resounding in the crystal of ruins
Black mass in a tabernacle of culture laid waste
The imagery of dust knows no bounds
In the cracking of the ceilings – acrobat Collapse
In the crumbling plaster a deranged poet
marks the whole house with his verse
Holy fooldom, inflammatory and trembling,
Supposedly awakens in man on the verge of a vortex
Still, it is as penetrating as the whims
of bloodthirsty insect.
Then he sis down, exhausted, into calcic fog
reading his arch-breaking verse
in the exacerbated onomatopoeia of flies
that expose the marrow
And the untuned cello still resounds
with the dreamy tremors
knocked out
by whitened bones.
In the Sign
Something in the spine awoke me.
Stretching
At full throttle till the breaking point,
Awful ache, I had to break through:
Neither the bow
Nor the book
Nor the bow
It couldnʼt be brooked any longer.
A while on the bed in half-sleep
The bow and the book?
The bow
Bent and drew, smoothly, at last,
Without breaking.
The bookʼs binding
Didnʼt fall apart, at last,
Holding together openings on all pages.
The ache dissolved, slowly,
As it all fit together,
In a while I could lay myself down,
And fall asleep peacefully.
Throughout, the vertebrae
werenʼt given a single thought.
