Ana Brnardić

High above pages of the sky rustle

Down below a customs officer wants your fingerprint

The stamp of your family-tree

On your tourist visa application.

The yellow Balkan moon shines across my face.

I forgot to turn it off as we flew over the ocean.

The family next to me has more experience.

They hid their sad pentatonic up their sleeve:

Showering the official at the counter

With a healthy dose of Californian smiles.

Behind the barricade, cheerful old people

with candy-floss haircuts

extend their arms to take me to heaven.   

After the stormy night during which gods

Out of machines failed to appear

I wait for the dawn by the monastery

A crow walks in the yard in razor creased

Gray pants

The morning is hopelessly dark

And the only sensible thing seems the belief that it is possible

To study language really carefully

The way that crow and Evening Star

Hidden beyond the grey shroud

Study each other paying special attention

To accents and syllable lengths 

At midnight I go blind and turn into a fish

Living deep below the ground

Dreaming of the hum of the black water

Dreaming of a lover jumping out of fire

In an unknown city

Where one walks backward in shoes made of algae

As the black-haired angel gathers pieces of decayed smiles

Covering me up to my chin

My woeful ancestor

The tree that wriggled itself out of the ground

To remind me of something in the night

This afternoon at one I play

I unfold my legs, hands, cervical vertebrae

Then I pull out a soul blade from the soil in my belly

Twirling it between my fingers

The instrument is old and screeching

Like those old oaks in the forest that will thump down

As soon as some shorthair little animal scurries across

An old person’s fingers

Down into the abyss of the forest deafness

The room is getting dark

B-minor scale covers the walls and ceiling

With its jagged crust 

As the eyes return to the depth where they first sprouted from

So they may continue reading in peace that diary

Written out in the music humus by the nails of cold rain 

It was night and I could finally be Juliet

Who sought love among leaves and on the sea surface

Nearby the hotel.

I found some young man there 

Eshatologically serious with book-black hair

White face

And eyes that promised themselves to the other world.

We cuddled in the hotel window inhaling scent of laurels.

Then as the wine began pulsating in our hands

We climbed down to the sea meandering by its side

Leaving our historic bodies to the angel on duty.

We walked into the blackest forest

We found a secret passage leading to the bottom of the sea

Where I learned how to conduct the choir of birds

Who at night pick at the sea sand like blazing flames.

At dawn, Juliet disappeared behind the dark curtain.

Golden letters were burning on the walls

Emitted by the faraway Sun for the sake of those drowned souls. 

Touching them stealthily I climbed upstairs

Where swarms of tired music students gathered, those boys

And girls, those nocturnal Juliets

Crickets chirp all through the night.

The sky gently envelops the earth. 

God is intimate and welcomes his guests

by patting them on the shoulder.

Fireflies shine like 120 Watt light bulbs.

From Juliet’s balcony I observe the animals.

People do not live here.

Not in those houses or high-rises.

They sleep in the logos of their companies

as they descend from stress into the subterranean

picking fruits that hang from the telegraph lines

– upside down. 

When mother stretches her palm – she offers.

What is on the palm instantly grows into a hundred-year old tree,

Into a tower with torture chambers and Arthur’s sword.

What is on the palm presses itself like a premonition, like a fossil of eyesight 

Upon your lip that pronounces: this is how I come into being.

When mother stretches her hand, everything, including your hair, teeth, lovers

And glasses, it all gets tossed on a heap, inside the pyramid of desire.

One eye takes a walk to the left, because it is too painful that miracle egg

on the palm,

That Etrurian word trembling as if it is going to slice the world in two.

Mother charts out the constellations of ships.

There is a lighthouse in the night moving on top of a turtle and a whale.

He also moves on Mother’s palm, moving further and further away towards some other you.

For tomorrow is the great eclipse, the mass of the childhood that fell off along with the fish head

Wondering: where and when is that night now?

And when did Mother close her palm? 

Thoughts recline on objects –

the heavy ones lay on oaks, the light ones descend onto lime-tree leaves –

others clatter like a typewriter underneath

the bark

Lovers appreciate this way

of life where termites disregard the bumps

of notorious recipes of love

feeling iron letters

underneath the temples of loved ones

catching the last of the hurried commas

running like ants out of mouths –

love is both cold and warm

lazy in the Sun

written out in routine handwriting

across utterly disinterested leaves 

For the longest time that ashes soaked in the spilled out essence of bones, tears and Proud foreheads

For the longest time we waited to get out of boxes, out of albums, out of grandma’s warm Shelters to observe that foreignness of objects, iron, buckles, faded letters,

Starched newspapers cries, sky-high flying books,

The cut-up embraces, fabric with a tooth of snow sown into it,

Female curly salutes warming up forest,

Cold soup floating on the palm, banners, needles melting under tongue,

Map and obsolete alphabet whose language we soon won’t be able to read at all.  

I could spend the whole morning coughing up dark spiders

Those dear friends of insomnia, those chandeliers

Those inner beings of mine.

In the beginning God made no difference: man, fish

Or nettle.

He would open an owl’s eyes and stare at the translucent mountain.

In the morning the dark plum of the sky spreads across one’s body.

The head circles around the Sun inscribing its age

Into those wooden leaves. 

Suddenly the roofs are turning blue

The night tucked itself under a snowy shroud

The answers to our questions are spilled in dark ink

I rest my head on the stone of some other country

My love is asleep in the next room

With black trees that grow and black birds

Words blurry and unreliable on evergreen leaves

Soon he will wake up

His gouged-out eyes will glisten in the kitchen

On the cold tongue of silt he will declare his love

For distance

For that flickering flame

But for now he is still asleep healing the wounds with the water from the night organ’s bellows 

The night has gone a bit too far with blackness

The insomniac tenants are turning up their darkened palms 

At the bottom of the wardrobe – actually below the ground – next to the roots

Of a beech that will yet become a wardrobe 

There they are – my father’s shoes.

Black, worn-out, made of thin leather, two dry plums

Wherein father’s little twigs twitch, his cracking ankles.

Those were his first shoes that I can remember.

Naturally, not his first pair of shoes ever.

He never took them off, they were almost grown into his skin,

So alive, fruitlike, mineral. Designed for summer and winter.

It never even crossed his mind to replace them with new ones.

A family of cockroaches – among other – lived in the wardrobe, a squadron of ants

And plant lice. Those shoes were like Noa’s arcs with little domestic parasites

Carrying them from one day into another.

One day Mother grabbed those shoes by their very delicate “ears”

And threw them outside.

But father did not object, on the contrary he bought a new pair of ordinary men’s shoes. 

The black, first shoes with pulled up “ears”, they went to the woods

With no sense of defeat. Just as Father had announced years ago: I had enough of everything, I will go to the woods.

They became earth, a little tree, maybe even a bush with bitter fruits.

Those shoes wherein Father’s daughters grew up

Along with many other unbridled sentences. 

I lean over the ferry deck.

The wind snatches two locks of hair wildly flapping across the face.

The hood with fake fur is twice as thin as a petal.

This ordinary body is swarming with birds and bees,

Mother-bears with their young as well as coots and some other nondescript creatures.

There is no one on the deck yet it is noisy.

The unshackled tyrants walk about rustling their oversized sheepskins.

Their beards look thin against the wind – like an avalanche. 

Underneath the deck, beneath the stairs two are having coffee.

I am halfway there, an empty cup with the remains of a cold espresso.

My breath, my gift of speech and movement, mercy, is still halfway there.

One of them took off his coat. There is a hot stain on his forehead.

I left to see what the reflection on the sea surface will have to say,

Is it enough just to step aside a little bit

Otherwise the foam will smash you against its own bones. 

As I am writing on this contraption

This business of hitting letters differs not much

From climbing some mountain in winter

Using a stick and some decent equipment

These square letters are like some unreachable cliffs

I type with gloves on made of rough wool

My nose is red like on some Tibetan village girl

And the soil where these letters were trampled upon

Is so hardened that it turned black

Though there is a slim chance that I will make it to the top

I will make a stop by the nearest hut

Spewing fumes all around

To rest a bit sipping that black liquid from samovar

So I can continue walking on the frozen gutturals

That generally there at the top

Coagulate into a white death 

The birds were first inanimate, golden

Then their eyes were mailed from the depths of the ocean

God squeezed feathers out of his own pillow

Beaks were made from the forest thorns

One dawn they were borne out of dark

Inside of the marine blue body of dew

Only to find their nest behind the man’s forehead. 

On the first day he wore an iron armour for flying.

Underneath there was a heap of soft feathers and every word in his mouth

Had a spike or two, a beak or a conductor’s baton.

I opened his mouth and carefully took out all the words lining  them up on a coffee-table.

I sharpened the weary beaks a bit and returned them to him.

It was all happening in silence for the first several years.

Cherry liqueur was pouring down the small table where

His words had been spread.  We were climbing underneath the table to lick it

Looking at each other without batting an eye, knowing it will all soon be over.

Those were the winters, one whiter than the other, climbing upstairs in their shoes.

Wedding parades were there, tree tops, wooden beds with their worries and railway terminals.

His armour hid the huge machinery exhaling

Deep sighs underneath the earth. His mighty birds, sailboats, fly eggs,

Stilted etudes, pathetic sonatas were marching ahead of us on night roads.

When it was all over he proclaimed me his fellow one.

He placed all eyes in drawers leaving only a pair of confidential ones.

I carry it with me to towns, towers, in sickness and in early morn,

That confidential pair of mountain flowers’ heads. 

Travellers sit carefully

On the fake leather benches taking off their coats with the colours

Of blueberry and dry grass

The train stumbles into the night like a blind shepherd

Darkness swiftly invades the compartment from all corners feeding itself

On our listlessness

Soon – in half an hour – we will glue our faces to the window panes

Overtaken by some strange belief

That through that anonymous forest

Following our desires and sentiments, roe deer, birds and other creatures awoken

Among the trees will be running along with our train

Upon the conductor’s sign, exhausted by this phantom race

Our heads will sink into sleep

The soft and black flatlands

Bears bumps budding with electric cities

Of the night. 

We were spending our summer holiday in a village where sage, human fingers

And Cats’ tails were growing out of the walls.

Underneath the windows fish were lined up.

Moonlight was dripping down from them onto the heads of wanderers,

Onto the stone plaques. 

Here comes the Sun again! Poppy petals trepidate behind the hill, the sky was

Drying out turning back into a stone plague, the enigma resolved by the old.

Around noon, when heads pop up open from heat,

Sun sinks into the sea, the Sun that now can actually be looked at.

We climb the cliff.

Below are the ant-people, breadcrumb-people.

Wealthy tourists like botanic specimens, supple blades

Of Reason.

Here comes the evening again! The village gathered into a sphere.

The blades bent down, sucked into the invisible mouths of houses.

We crumble the dry crumbs of the evening uncertainty,

Because there is no Sun or Moon, every trace of life

Has been carried over to the other hemisphere. 

Death strolls through the Herăstrău Park

Magnificent with rowdy spirit

White and feisty

Under the open sky reaching back

Deep into past

I sit on a bench wrapped in wickers

A spinal chord, a petiole broken off in childhood

The voices die down

The birds dig themselves into the ground

The lake behind my back is a thick broth of algae

The smaller the body becomes the easier it passes

Through the eye of a needle 

I have composed a mortal secret

To live sometimes secretly in another country

Peeling off garlic and boiling coffee in somebody else’s kitchen

Walking to the monastery lighting up a candle

In the backyard a congregation of birches converse in silent tongues

The face splits up in a mirror

Round and sad it veils itself with golden chanting

Come night I leave my body, my fingers, I peel off bark

In the cold dorm the wind covers us with its long beard

Come morning I am a young tree planted in front of the house

A naked bone giving birth to daylight 

He appeared halfway to the top of the stony steps

In a lily-white shirt

With fingers twice as long as mine he reached into his little pocket

Pulling out a white sheet of paper with a poem on it

I ran away from you - says the poem - in order to reach you

Then we ran away from people

In a modest cafe-bar we ordered a dark beer

His talk inscribed itself into a scroll 

Of incredible importance

            For the future of humanity

Who was I? Having turned into an ear

Into a river fishing for unknown fish

Inside its own belly

The translucent motifs exquisitely woven into an intricate speech

Who was he? The ceremonial desert bird

To whom I surrendered my boxed-in lips and shoulder

We walked by the lake toward each other

Above the fatigue-green water blue from the tense silence

They crucified a tin skeleton

Much like an exceptionally relevant truth 

It is exactly 18:00 hours in Minneapolis.

In the suspects waiting room I sit next to a plump black lady.

She tried to smuggle “food, snakes and insects” into the USA.

I am, on the other hand, a poor bride hunting for a husband.

Mr Kai peers down at me. 

He opens my bag brimming with dowry.

A white manuscript sticks out suspiciously.

He wants to know why I have 200 pages typed in some strange language.

That is a fascinating reconstruction of the life

of our Lord the Saviour - I say to myself.

I shiver and perspire.

I accept the role of a terrorist-bride.

An hour later someone unlocks the door.

Suddenly everything smells of palm oil.

My feet sink into the airport carpet.

I discard the iron prosthesis of my homeland

as I slide into a pink mercy. 

At the beginning of a run the thoughts are claylike, wooden. Then

Dried under fast breath, they dissipate

Into something, for instance a major fugato that runs behind

And alongside us before finally disappearing.

Runners then crawl in all directions across the forest’s belly just like ants, they slide

Down her legs, jumping over the indents amongst fingers.

In dream, the forest is slowly repositioning through centuries, because

It is being tickled by its wooden core amidst the ancient night.

A wintry morning is its favourite book that she opens with the first snow,

Turning the first white page.

Instead of the title there are people there in small print,

Those early birds.

And in the summer, when trees sing from their roots, giving an idea to the birds by means of leaves, 

And insects who had hitherto lived in the huts of alphabet, the forest retreats

As a monk deep beneath the bark of the trees.

The runners than cannot find it in their thoughts and thus blinded

By their heavy breathing they are dash through the desert,

The dried out river bed, the deserted province.

They do not know that the forest had already been lingering inside of them for some time

In their feet

And palms, hoisting up its flag along their necks.

Titmouse moved into its lungs and the leaves of black alder

Are rustling in its ankles.

The runners are already flying like ducks, flapping their wings

With all their might

Only to finally fly out of the forest like a mute explosion:

Out of the book that wrote them they jump out unscathed.