Jan Gavura

Once in two thousand years all doors shut down,

The light is out, the air is gone.

Stags, gorillas, Antigone and Romeo

Look at each other

knowing – here comes the end of the time.

Their heroic souls

Are filled with mildness and unknown excitement

Before the short, painful end.

Only a rat that used to know the sewage

Longed for the scent of sweet water and scraps.

It threw itself on the door even at the cost of scars

And loss of hair, and passed through the last crack

To the other side.

After the rat erected,

It began to look for somebody to mate.

You cannot stop the sky

From raining. Yet there is still some time

To pupate, to have one more dream.

I can see you leaving, one daughter after another,

For further and for longer,

Leaving darker and darker shadows.

Somewhere in the stratosphere

The date is set, the day of rebirth

When you get stripped of skin

And your new smooth body with metallic glitter

Will be served for consumatum like food.

When I see you coming home,

Opening like a book,

I will fear the unspoken words,

The curse you would rather

Choose not to be born.

Goya on Olympus circles with the brush.

Steers his black tempera,

And wordlessly watches the stars.

The sixteenth century vibrates in the gallery

Like a string on an invisible bow –

Arrows pierce the perfect body of St Sebastian

Again, again and one more time.

Visitors in the alleys circle in a bee dance:

Full hips, dyed hair, contours of muscles

And inside all the same: smell, blood, insatiate desire

To penetrate, rub and be penetrated.

Life is still defined

By the relentless plant fight for light:

Saints and archers, Madonnas and dancers,

Who falls behind is damned.

The brush touches the canvas,

It’s a plan to the beginning, perhaps to the end,

While in deafened Goya’s ears roar molecules,

Unseen planets.

I killed my first wolf

When my hair on temples

Began to turn grey.

If you know how,

A roe can be killed

With patience, on trust.

Look at wasps, living targets.

Gleaming into a hunter’s heart

They call: try us, our bones are soft.

There is only one truth,

We have never heard of contradictions.

Even a hunter can be killed,

His years counted exactly

Like in homework of a pupil

Who secretly loves his schoolteacher.

In this simile

There is someone who knows the way,

Someone who is the way,

Who like a grey wolf runs astray.