Milan Dekleva

The light is drizzling.

Something is sitting in the twilight in front of the computer screen. Probably a human being.

In the wall, Kierkegaard’s dentures are gnashing.

The ships of time have circumvented the shady hollows of

loneliness,

full of children.

Social separation has brought no salvation.

The banality of evil in Jerusalem has been gilded and is now blinding the admirers of temples.

The world is swarming with our insufficiency. How

to become a little beetle?

Insufficiency. Where does it start? Maybe over there, behind the corner.

The plaster is coming off the house, no longer rural, not yet bourgeois.

The ankles of the ground floor reek of dog piss.

Newcomers are grunting in the buffet, their beards reminiscent of the Bosnian hills.

The war is still underway.

Instead of evil, it’s our memory of the dead victims that’s fading. The spring is coming along with ants. The sacristy of the soul is sore from blueness. Already . . .

Already the resin of longing is oozing across the bellybutton onto the triangle of being.

Is this where love is?

The little beetle, soft on the inside, hard on the outside,

legs segmented like climbing irons

of mountaineers prior to a devastating storm.

Did it see its mother? On the bathroom floor,

with a broken soul? Who was relieved

upon realizing that she’s beyond help?

The entire world, so beautiful for the children

yet to be born. (Let’s leave

aside those who are never to be born

or maybe not before the crash of eternity.)

In Donetsk moan the bricks of empty houses

and the mortar and the nothingness

in the intermolecular bonds between lime and sand.

In comparison with the suitcases which discarded

the newlyweds, turning their hope

into damp trade winds, the little beetle is a promising

creature. Nature makes a selection without gold

flatware.

How to become a little beetle?

The felled trees bud. Memory buds within.

The memory of trees is far-reaching, making our memory seem a transient shadow beside it.

Trees are the dugouts of time. Time falls through their crowns

like a vertical waterfall.

The brightness drizzles.

Trees, the rowboats of time.

A bright drizzle.

Drizzling brightly.

Man has withdrawn, only peeking out now. Afraid of grand things.

Afraid that felled trees are a symbol.

Budding in death?

How can death bud?

Hence, is there a living memory of life in death?

Trees, the ships of time.

How far have they traveled, eating the brightness, sleeping in the brightness.

What about the little beetle? Who forgot about the little beetle in this poem?

The poem is, someone pronounces it.

Someone who once experienced freedom,

having rolled out of it like a drunken beetle.

Remaining an empty future,

a far-fetched libertine project

without cover.

Yet this persistent, ostinato

shivering of rhythm in the poem

is shocking.

For the lyrical subject and for the artificial island

on the coast of Dubai.

The poem is, nobody pronounces it.

The present is always a hopped-over

jump rope,

at this suicidal point,

the speaker can switch, as a matter of courtesy,

to the first person plural.

To know what water is,

one has to plant an olive tree

in a desert.

Dedicated to Tomaž Pengov, 11January 2015

You’re a nightingale, ultimately!

At dawn, I saw you in the bush of Tivoli Park.

In spring, in a hazel tree, singing unconditionally!

You would peck at beauty. For a long time, I could listen

to the ice of history cracking.

All forms of disorder had crystalized within you

for us to be able to breathe.

How satisfied you were taking a respectful bow

to gravity.

You placed your lute onto the air

proving that music and light

are weightless,

containing deserts,

slashed windpipes, silk paths on which slaughterers are specially inventive,

the banality of evil and goodness,

the vileness and virtuousness of man,

which are not a form of time passing,

but a hidden surplus of travelings

and the Milky Way.

You were here, alone with your gift dripping off your forehead

onto your soles dabbed with rosin,

onto the rickety love for empty temples

and the little springs of consciousness.

Within you, time would flow away from perfection

to handicap,

layer after layer, you would flay the skin of sense

and modernism from yourself,

you would lean on the silence of intoxication,

calling for a nothingness. Let there be nothing, let there be nothing

rather than the miserable liberty of buying, exchanging and selling.

How you were rocking in that hazel tree, Francis (or Thom- as?) among the Moors!

You were stronger than a toothache and existential anxiety,

you would sweep Vrtača and Tranča and Tabor

until they shone like a circle of fifths,

spinning to the left, to the left, to the left,

into a coil of a cord having spread through

space

from the navel of the world

having vanished

to give sound to

eternity.

a lake

the moon above

above it a frame of a constellation

higher up the threshold of probability

the unknown inspired into

the nearest

the nearest

expired before

the threshold of probability

below the frame of a constellation

lower down the moon

below it

a lake

between the lake and the moon a tiny beetle

that flew away

long ago