Glorjana Veber

I love the way solitude is arranged at night
book edges cat half-closed window
when the silence has the most space to be seen
slippers peel smell of lilies
and the body releases the chained soul and starts to walk
are we most human when we sleep?

like tea or soup in winter
cold fingers frosty windowpanes covered roads
I could believe that warmth is the only love
footsteps smell of colour shifted branch
from a distance we are all ready for life
for a fall for a run for hands legs and sight
and then?

if there really is an incredible silence at the end of darkness
a straight wall its edge and the edge of this edge
yet I fall somewhere
somewhere where someone before me fell

you tell me to write but I have no paper
and I don’t have this poem on it
this night I was searching for it on twenty square feet
I opened all the drawers

painters say something similar about canvas
sailors about distance masons about plain
chefs about taste alchemists about stone
my father used to say something similar about life

that there’s no major difference between depth and height
you tell me to talk when hours and hours without necessity
without traces I carry my arm and the walls don’t push against each other
they don’t want to catch space

you talk to me and I think
how as a girl I dropped all poems into the stove
how for breakfast I heard my father opening the little door in the basement
how he scattered ashes underneath the tree
and after fifteen years my brother cut it down
so it would one day fall onto our house

it was raining that day as it is raining today

you talk to me and I answer
that there’s no major difference
would the tree still be standing
because what i’m expecting and what is coming
is occupying my breathing

I hear music and feel no other need
I see a girl in the corner playing my grandfather‘s piano
with my own fingers
we shall all meet again
and the silence will explain the meaning of the universe

there are revolutionary alleys overlooked by many
fugitives in all directions of our new cities
I want to stand on the expanding land
I want a smile with an explanation

as on the face of a foreign land
my essence is crying at the point where others awake
in famish in misery without a dog‘s opportunity
in another place high above us

concerned with our own smallness
a temporary consolation
I need to listen to the screams
sometimes it‘s all I need

I would vote for the poet. I would go to him
and give him my vote. I would vote for him with silence, white,
so silent, forgotten and alone,
as are the unheard words of all poets, workers
and proletarians, their fleeing from the mouth that cannot pay off language,
therefore, if you feel me serving you, please

vote for the crumbled, sullen, ugly poet, crushed from work,
sprinkled over paper, his straw of dry grass,
let’s pay him the elections, not with whichever money,
but with poetry, the mediator says that gold will gain value,
look at them, poets,

for the language candidate they would all give their loans,
debts, word, paying off to beauty, to her, sitting on the edge,
consoling him softly and worriedly, she who is carried by the non-elected poet,
knows without words that we stand on the same page of the book, he who writes and i
who reads and no migrant border between us,
no chemical agents, parties, currencies, plastic bottle caps,
and since this is not enough, between us there is that
which is less than silence, nudity, lemon or a goal,

no, the two of us are like water, washing ashore a book
for engines, tubes, vending machines, comfort, oil, continents to flow off it,
and ultimately even language slips beyond dark matter, where
totality is still without smell, rhythm, and shape, do you still believe,

that there I would find the poet’s madness and embrace it,
shorter than breath, memory, joy, or déjà vu,
so much shorter that even the poet would be taken away from me,
so he would not escape with me and I would leave him in my imagination,
since only there a candidate with a phd could be elected,
yet without a job, a shiny pendant, spectacle from a box,
human replacing human, relative, townsman,
just as all the foreigners across the wires of the purchased sky,
you and me just as he to himself a loyal follower, who cannot exit
imagination with me,
only him I would tell that in the keyboard

an ant, an artery, an ideal, dirt are stuck, or that the form from the bureau
reeks of wrath of a working woman’s day, the sweat of her unemployed
husband,
the smell of her hand, it touched a toy, she won’t bring it from the store,
not just any toy, but the toy-car with the price of the gaze of their child
a day before. only to him, the bestial poet, without stars or muscles,

I would trust, that I got an apartment by knowing the right person,
no taxes, arithmetic, fillers or bureaucracy, only parents
on the ground floor of the house. he would approve atomic bomb, since time

without shortcuts, appliances, bonces, servants, and brilliantine
without birthdays, holidays, visits, rides, and chocolate is so damn long,
that you erase the events, which should have happened, so that a half of year
would be
like a month without a pay, life of an empty banal planet,
with crooks, tycoons, dirty fellows, the naive, bureaucrats, smugglers,
with trained elephants, logic bills, as an apparition

or only a cynical poem of the day, covered in ice and its top,
a barefoot wish in a pine forest, like deserted snail shells,
dried saliva, left without greed, as it is just how it is supposed to be,
in this sucked-out world, without houses, door, roads, field, without event,
like space that life will pick up off the floor one day
to leave a mark on the bottom,

not in my, but in your imagination,
you, who I will vote for, because I cannot vote for myself,
yet I can carry a poem for us both.

the meadows rose
they picked up their bodies in the morning and left
they closed a dandelion clock and its wind into travel bags

they left so that they also took the memory of themselves
in the morning nobody looked for the grass
the slopes were bare the soil was carried away

nobody knew it was an ordinary morning
a girl opened a picture book a farmer made a furrow
I ran across the field

nobody told us
until one day a blade of grass accidentally grew
and suddenly all meadows have long been there