Zvonko Maković

When things are shifted,
only shadows remain.
Enforced silence,
cold air.
I told you I was a rose, a whiff of night
reaching the nostrils.
I said: things, well coordinated
relationships. I said: shadows,
the excess of love that once
was only an unknown desire.
Small, untouchable flames
touch my heart - incessantly,
with no distinct reason.
Like a fallen petal, like someone
staring at a glow-worm on a fragrant June night,
like an inaudible emptiness
behind tightly shut
lips.
There in that wet gaze
our poorly concealed evidence
lies dormant,
our meager hopes,
hardly tacit betrayals.
Blessed touches that are now
a sheer passage of time.
Other shadows hide among shadows.
A shift will easily trigger another shift..
I am the silence:
hidden letters cover my forehead.

Whatever I touch,
time touches me.
As well as patience, care,

intolerable closeness.
Soft objects become
characteristics, while characteristics become matter.

Only matter.
In my notebook, I suddenly
wake up like a supple hand,

or, more precisely – a motion. I wake up
in fluid. Like
a melody that echoes in

sleeping newlyweds’ room.
I float and exist always
escaping. Because I am a sigh.

Just think how good
nature is to change me like
money. When in each

of my grains it sees consistence,
devotion. Precisely:
consistence and devotion.

In poems it always looks different.
When I read sentences written by others,
everything seems clear and easy.
Like a sheet of paper which still resists fire,
which hardly feels the signs of ash
on it. In my yard
ash is so comprehensive.
Like an illusion, like a picture that inspires.


Many write about lost beauty,
about misfortune that comes suddenly and creeps
into a silent, abandoned heart.
However, I would like to say something
about my yard and about the big river
which you should see from the window.
About an ash-tree and two lime-trees which
disappeared the other day.


The mechanism of the fairy-tale has suddenly become
completely inconceivable to me.
The ash that falls from the window,
that black soot that only yesterday
used to be a table, a bed or books,
somebody’s life about which nobody thought very much,
that is stuck in my throat and blurring my sight.
When I wave with my hand,
will I still be able to feel anything?