Goran Čolakhodžić

It is reasonably easy to imagine
living for most of your life without any people,
without you, and you, and him, and her,
easy between two turns in a walk
just before spring, when the eternal
return of fresh starts is guaranteed

or in autumn, when it is all the same
and anyways you can follow the path
only by yourself, to the hospital and from it,
in the morning or in the middle of the night.

It is simple to imagine
that this might be our goodbye, of course
an unsaid goodbye: yet it still is spring
and in one and the same moment everything
lingers, passes and returns

and tomorrow again you will mean much, new
and beautiful like those snowdrops by the bus stop,
at least
until they melt seamlessly into the grass, taller
every day, and cease,
no one knows when, but on time.

I hunted hares
abundantly and inaudibly:
the crosshair killed, there were no shots,
furry bags fell promptly down
on the parched grass in the dusk. They remained
stiff, eyes open, with not a drop of blood
on their clenched wounds: in fact ridiculous,
innocuous in their death which had not
taken over life, and so was see-through.
I did not run out of bullets,
and neither did they of death: they produced it
constantly
in ditches and on mounds.
Autumn is falling, it’ll be that.

Whoever yearned for wholeness
was never satisfied

To be alive this morning: to be waiting for a story
yet to grip mere sentences by their hair

Things are bigger than our vague happiness
more constant than the illusion of eternal presence
stronger than the links between this consciousness
and the next

Unlike a hazel bush
you cannot climb a plane tree:

bark flakes off and you fall
down on the cracked asphalt in front of the Ministry

A parade of tanks in fact
does not change space in any way
still less time

In the barrel of the gun lies the future
and the manifold past of the flesh –

under the steel there lurks
a return to the beginning
and the end

History is divided by the passage of brigades

Because of their march we
cannot get across

I have lived until now among
a couple of buildings, on some twenty streets,
in three or four hectares of woodland and meadow.
I haven’t thought – vast spaces are over there,
and a considerable part of them belongs to me.
long have rectangles encircled the horizon,
reproducing the specimen of space visible from here.
now, from this high, dark viewpoint,
I observe the centre from the margin, I realize
the patterns of repetition, the forms of permanence.
poorly drawn, the trapeze of the city from here to
rapska street,
from it to the mosque, from there
to a point in the east (find the angle
opposite the known α) and again to the room where,
momentarily alone, locked up and calm, I look
out of the wide windows. the trapeze will be
repeated
infinite times, or a little less, in order to create the city.
it is only from high places, at a small zoom,
that the generic quality of space becomes apparent.

there will be spawned endlessly that couple of
buildings,
some twenty streets, three or four hectares of
woodland and meadow.
endlessly those light-bulb factories which,
with their lights fused together into a single unique
copper smudge,
will, every evening, make up the west

We had never asked the double hedgerows
nor had we looked for windows in the fences
yet at the end of summer, of their own accord,
the houses revealed their lamp screens red & gold

In hallways paved with Slovene tiles
there’s a smell of potatoes and other people’s lunches
In the houses of others the stairs are more empty
and their entrance halls resound with the sweet
buzz of fridges

On the table full of fabrics and boxes with buttons
there lay the dresses of our immortal neighbours
Above our eyebrows – coffered ceilings
and windows onto orchards deepened by September

Now one has to knead and trample and stomp
lemon balm and mint beneath another’s windows
in an afternoon effort to unbolt again the spaces
opened by sheer luck at the break of day