checkmate
for sasa radojcic, sombor, serbia
your
lines keep coming back, at dawn, when i close the door of my child’s
room and walked quietly to the battlefield at my desk, and when i
cross harshly my words with a blunt point pen, one by one, cut their
heads with a sharp knife, swirl deep cuts through the heart of the
paper, hot and cruel as all my ancestors, raging through the nonsense
sketched last night, and then sit tired and sad among the corpses,
a girl lost in a death field, with no water in a jar, and with no
one to feed, staring at the trashed thesaurus thrown under the chair,
and moving the curtains slowly: first light is dancing again in the
weeping tree
and
this sudden urge to cry, helpless, keeps coming back, for this sleeping
world down my window does not know, and will never know how wise and
beautiful whispers are coming out of your cyrillic stanzas playing
in my mind
at
last, there is something this world lacks, thank god, maybe you are
saving us all by staying behind the gate in our backyard
if
you walked away, the bridges would fall down in the danube anyway,
and you would sit throughout the night, somewhere across the oceans,
playing chess with your son, in panic, thinking deep, thinking hard:
what is the word for this little piece you are moving across the squares,
trying to trap and knock down the black king and win the game, what
is the word, the bloody word for the thing in your hand?
a crater
for
mtc cronin, maleny, queensland
they
all read neruda, turning fourteen, rosy and tender, each monday falling
in love for ever, still dreaming first kiss, saddest poem was
a hit on their sticky lips, i read him too, of course, but how could
i possibly love what everyone does, i was on my way, running fast
out of dusty ohs and ahs, stubborn and busy looking for the guys unknown
to them, always for the guys nobody else would dare to touch, and
it was at that age … poetry arrived/ in search of me/ i don’t
know, i don’t know where/ it came from, it was pushing me
stiffly to the hidden shelves, i couldn’t fly, so what, i climbed
to the top slopes, nobody ever borrowed this tome? i will, and i will
fall in love with these oddballs and dudes, a moment i turned to my
side of a bed, my russian lovers were shooting themselves in the head,
quiet french men, holding me like a champagne glass and sucking my
tongue, gazed at the time past behind my neck, my old and newborn
german blokes taught me to think, think, think while laying on my
back, all shady souls were watching me undressing bit by bit at the
front of a window in my free lines, and penciling my first curse,
and running away along breathless running lines, loony mates recorded
the speed and time, the world was down there to stick a tongue out
at it, nothing to rhyme or write an ode about, not a sonnet of a birdie,
but a wild manifest of a roaring cat, left, but marching left, sometimes
slipping down the crack on the right, between the shelves
turning
fourteen for ever, here i am, racing in a late hour after songs
of despairs, left on the shelf, leafing through the pages, as
they are life – whisper the ladies grey and harsh, hush, life
is whatever hits a soft surface of my chest, the meteorites, men and
other particles, dreamed or touched, written or read, they all jab
and hollow up a mine of me, a crater
i
would still prefer he is a star and lights up a lamp when we circle
around babies or cure our scares, but i signed it anyway, margie,
the petition for a crater on mercury to be named after neruda, go
there and check the link i am attaching, what do you think?
First
published in Prague
Literary Review, February 2004
will
you understand?
squeezed
into my patter
as an embryo in the womb’s water
i curl muscles and pucker up lips:
my name is
beg your pardon
thank you
it
is easier to read the winds around me
than pronounce these chits
i
can flee all the rages of the seas
but the cloud of my mother tongue
that follows my boat, a greedy sea-gull
will it ever leave me alone?
the
only one i have, a bad penny
the alphabet stiff as a birthmark
once shiny, dainty and rich, now
a weary rug stuck to my skin, just
a puff, groan, a shivering heave
i can’t strip off my flesh
and
if i could, while the storm is throwing me
to a strange strand, what else to dress in?
a
moan i gasp to the wind
does not make any sense,
who will ever grasp what is behind
my silence once i reach this land?
oh
mein gott! mio dio!
boze moj! my god!
will you hear me better
when i touch the furthest shore
and
understand me
with no translator
when i sigh
my lord?