Katica Kulavkova

I am writing about you and describing you for
months, Julia,
all until you turn
into a shadow of reality
into a mythical story

I can’t, even if I want to
set myself free
from that dusky and spectral
mirror of despair, Julia

I can’t, even if I want to
exile you
from my thoughts, my dwelling space

You, my unborn, yet already kin-forsaken
birth, who comes to me in my dreams
whispering something so silently
and so yearningly that I can’t hear
but I understand.

She is taking a nap in my soul
like an ideal off-pouring
so I can’t do anything else
but stroke her without touching.
Endearingly, in a dream
on the other side of reality
a sprout then, a sprout now.

We have come thus far, Julia
that you hope for death
and I die from hope.
Death, your hope.
Hope, my death.

Your passions, your sufferings.
My passions, my sufferings.

           P.S.
           The letters should be given in person
           to Julia, the woman who doesn’t exist

in banal times
and this time is not such

.

Written in Macedonian,
in Macedonia,
the quondam Roman province,
the current coin for squaring up paltry debts,
from where all Macedonians are leaving,
and no one returns
in foreseeable future.

December 2017 – February 2018

You have nothing else but yourself
And even you are neither whole nor unified
but cut into pieces
like the ancient Macedonian kingdom

You have nothing else
because all that Else is not for you
because your life had stopped
even before it was gone
even before you died
it is here, but as if it weren’t

all that because you were
dangerously free-minded
not only a clever female mind

because you were
an unbridled lover woman
a scandalous adulteress
though, actually, an outplayed and outwitted
daughter of the Emperor...

Was it in a place like this, Julia,
where neither people nor gods visit
that you yearned and ached for years
reading and writing
writing and reading?
Beyond hope. Without hope. Hopelessly.

Was it in a place like this that you enjoyed your
solitude
surrounded by nature
and nothing else but nature?

Was it in a place like this that you got sick of nature?
Was it in a place like this that you suppressed your
urges
under the carpet, behind the props of consciousness
crumbled, squashed, cramped, turned into ash?

Do you exist even now, as you did then, beyond the
visible
out of fear that you may be seen, Julia
by the eight-fold (Octavian) eye of your Father?

The sights rise in me from somewhere deep
and follow up in order:

I see you gazing
up at the sky, in the line of the horizon
down at the sea, below the horizon

that sea which has a name
but it is no longer important
    – a sea is a sea –
the expansive sea is ideal for meditation
to let yourself disappear in it
in the deepest of the deep
   (this is how I feel like saying sometimes
   when I surrender to the sight
   like to destiny, without remainder)

 
I am observing you as you sit, propped up on your
    elbows,
at the window sill, so like Iphigenia
mythically, ascetically, poetically

while you are staring and can’t get sated with looking
at the invisible, there where Jullus Antonius
yes, exactly he, both yours and not yours
waits for you to come out from the bath
naked and wet like a spring
quivery like the genesis

then, he puts the bathrobe on your shoulders
    warm from his palms
    smelly from his crouch
    playful from his embraces
    dewy from your orgasms
    and spasms
Julia, Julia, Iulia, iuia
you, July summer heat, scorched, yet just sprouted!*

And so, death turned into hope
and started to live
like the people in Macedonia

     the state which is smaller than a poppy grain
     the state whose life is patched together
     and illusive, pure hibernation
     barely living, asthma
     the state which is dying in installments.

Did you sense, clamped in the trauma
Julia
that you will exist
in your own way
for the others
for all of us

    – who to our own selves became
    foreigners at home, among their own
    with a home, yet without one.

Your injustice is so public
so intimate, Julia.

Since you don’t exist for your father
you don’t exist for yourself.
Once a daughter, Everything
then Nothing
from #ItAll.

Here lies your trauma:
you are all in one
a witness, a sacrifice, a culprit
for turning #ItAll into Nothing.

A huge Shoo, shoo, shoo, shshshoo ...
Shush, shushsh, hushshsh, sh, shshshoo ...

May you not make a sound
till you do make a sound, until you don’t make a sound
without resentment, but with a script
whether weaving
or embroidering
or wood-carving

or sculpting
an embroidery, a wood-carving, a sculpture

it is important that you leave a trail for the trackers

stone-carved into the Prilep marble, Julia
a pink script for porous
black days!