Miroslav Válek - The gloom

Miroslav Válek - The gloom
(Skľúčenosť)

I would like to be the pharaoh with an achate eye
I would like to retain in supply
my lead, my distance from the affairs
After all that play is still too complicated
and you never know if you are the one who seeks or is sought for.
The ingenuity of a hideaway, distances, even the time mean so little that only coincidence or a momentary distraction of fate
allow the things to disappear from memory,
but what has happened, lasts, it remains within us,
we are in a way involved in the flood of the world,
even the improbable becomes sometimes obvious.
Do you remember ?
In the burning air, in the fire of lilies,
when, hidden from all
we saw the souls of things dazzlingly shine,
you stretched your hand saying :
"I feel the sunspots"

(I)

Run, Gaius Iulius Ceasar
I will count to thousand and find you.
I see you, sweet Cleopatra.
To your hair the raven was sinking and until now
his wings remain in the sky - severity of eyebrows
and beneath it quietness so dark
that you must believe in blue eyes of thunder
and ask the height, albeit kneeling,
to let it happen.
The planet ?
Some joke
of some god !
Go, seek !
There is always something hidden
behind the back of something.
Dig under the poplar in which swears
the lame demon of the tree,
where groundwaters falls asleep on the sand's forearm,
where the clavicles guard their secrets
and shy naked worms tie hands of corpses.
It thundered in the boulders
where the herds are worried,
as if the air listened heavy headed by the rain,
as if the grass dodged before some voice :
Enter the things and tell what you have seen !
You saw the love contradict its cause,
denying connection between sex and fetus,
preparing its green beds,
her ceremonial riding corps entering the purple,
covering itself,
with its dog tongue licking the Moon down from the sky
- dynamite -
her bloody beds hanging on every shrub !
Drink from the footprints of bees, learn from the wisdom of insects,
which flying browses the eternity
so incredibly fast that it forgets
even before he gets the knowledge.
Oh, you already know,
where water becomes tear,
why the axe enters the memory of seed
and how the glory of body
is locked behind !
And where is the skull of Minotaur ?
Where is that tender lover
Where are the children of Herod ?
Where are the men who entered the fire as men
and left it as a wave ?
Maybe in the future. I don't know.
What is past and what is future ?
I can not distinct
the sound of falling water from the falling water.
I am the cause as well as the consequence
just as the butterfly is the future of the caterpillar
and the caterpillar is the future of the butterfly.
And love ? And hatred ?
Ugliness and beauty ?
The are too similar, much too similar
and conspired
up to the sweat of the mirror,
they show to our eyes every our mistake.
Do not regret.
The life is only carrying a lamp from place to place
in a dark room :
Always a bit of light from slightly other side,
but it is still the same face which we see.
Do not say what you suspect.
I believe,
that a spoken word may still list the universe.
I emphasize
the infinity of sex
as well as sexlessness of death.
Death speaks to us in soprano,
sleeps in the ear of the music,
listens to our hoarse bass and suffers
with feeling of inferiority.
And yet every day it comes down and asks
to be allowed to create the total compliance,
something between yes and no,
some sort of strong relationship between what was and what is.
Death, which likes the absence of wind so much
that every our breath causes ache in its back,
death, which feels the movement of a future fetus
as a storm in its knee,
paints the hurricane to the corner of its eyes, comes,
death since the creation of the world comes in this way
and investigates :
What is the man ?
Oh, the man !
A sun shield for sunflower,
A shelter from storms for earthworms,
A crutch under the armpits of clay !
Nevertheless -
Is there but one death ? Is not there a thousand of deaths ?
Don't wonder about it. Don't worry.
Of course it is still possible that happens only
what has already been thought,
yet unspoken repeats, forgotten returns.

(II)

Before the Christmas in the year nineteen sixty four
the head of Holofernes travelled by a train
so lovely cut off,
that a small merry-go-round full of good people
revolved around it.
It was a bright day
and a razor blade lied between them,
which they were passing around from eyes to eyes
At the same time Ramses II lay
beneath the concrete pavement of the Poplar street,
because his wife loved a chaffeur,
who at first was not willing. Then he rang.
My lord ! How could it happen ?
She is innocent.
She only walked down the street
with black horns in her eyes.
Sometimes it seems to me that the Earth as well is a head
separated from a huge trunk and thrown
to something which is approximately known as the universe.
So the swords on the throat,
violence, blood
and all the assassinations
are only imitations
of that primordial gesture ?
And meanness and treachery
and wars
and plague,
and our embraces under the seal of the moon,
oaths whispered to the sleeve of night,
in the cat silver of stars,
yes, that love, that lie,
all that already have been ?
Is it only inertia what makes us
keep returning to ourselves, to begin
in the same way as before ?
Oh, before !
I recollect you in fire by which I remembered you in pink
and in which your hair were suffocating me like smoke !
And you kept your hands above it,
you were incantating it,
your fingers were counted by the fire,
you tamer of snakes !
In your hands also Pompeii as well as Hiroshima were burning,
your hands,
lit by the white rays of flour,
even in the hour of death were protecting the yeast.
You were the everyday bread of the world !
This happened,
it was written,
you already know it.
So why do you allow me to enter your shadow
with my naked leg ?
I am only a knife,
in your vicinity
crossed with lightning.
Choose the lightning !
My hands are to the elbows worn from your skin,
I touch you as an animal,
I open you by memory with my teeth,
you burn my tongue like a bad spirit.
You crazy lamb !
With hoofs pointing to the sky you will be sacrificed !
Save yourself ! Run away !
Oh, before !
How many thousands of years your blood has been dropping ?
From how many tiles you were secretly wiping it away ?
And it you wanted,
you could deny even the crack in the heaven's vault,
if you wanted,
you could keep even a hair between your thighs
you would deny even deer and trains.
You are the water
I am the thirst
The night is coming
The sky overgrows with black hair
and it dawns as if inside horse's teeth.
I can hear a tiny pin fall under your skin.

(III)

Close to the stop of trolley number 18
Bones were carried away from a cemetery.
It was July the thirteenth, the judgment day
and the sun was so orange
and so terribly beating to the heads,
that from a grave
incredible dancers ascended,
medics with skin of melted copper in a yellow pillar of fire
and students of the conservatory
with such a music in their calves
that even the wood has forgotten its perfect pitch
They sounded to the men in their eyes,
sowed seeds,
with a bare thumb
itched clay on its wrist,
they ate bread
and as if from a dream smiled.
Close to the stop of trolley number 18
behind the fence of the cemetery
an old woman was looking for bones
Close to the stop of trolley number 18
an old woman
into her black skirt heartrending was crying.
There was sun, it was orange
there was too much sun for such a day
She could not see
neither a little hole in the skull,
nor the little finger,
as if it even had not been buried
nor her own hand before her eyes
she could not see.
And the sun was so orange
and so terribly beating in the head !
An occasional gravedigger lay in the grass
drinking cheap rum and singing :
"And who has seen,
and who has seen,
the Jewish god,
in a red cap,
without his rod ?"
How many things are there we have not seen,
which we will never see
and before which we are blind,
confusingly rampaging in the driving lane ?
So the time passes, so will pass alongside
loves and chances,
opportunities and friendships.
Only occasionally
the good luck will strike us with a shiny fender
and falling we will see in it our sudden portrait,
a terrible face,
as if photographed through the pupil of the devil.
So the time elapses
the rain uncaringly counts its drops for insomnia of the nights,
we hurry home, put the life down like the pants,
which have traces of knees so clearly visible
as if we have been kneeling on the stairs
of some secret Calvaries,
we hurry up,
switch off the lights,
in the moonlight drink our bromine
and cheer up
by the obedient babble of gas.
So good bye.
You are falling to a blue corolla's glow
only your fingers still shine yellow
only the styles above the level of indigo scents.
That is where a tear in the eye of tear cries
that is where you white switches in your teeth crush,
that is where the darkness checkmate of your complexion unbuttons,
that is where the wood's clay aches because of hard stones,
that is where it with little tongues, stained with snake venom, blows from the emptiness of bones.
That is where, a little nowhere, a little in eternity
you will be alone.
Walled up in the walls kneeled
while the band returns from the funeral.
A horse in snow. People like soot, black and crass.
Night with dark face falls on the brass.
The air is like glass
Where did the robbed woman pass ?
The woman in black skirt, who walks
like a clear dew on the water's paths,
behind every coffin, in each procession,
already so transparent,
that she more resembles non-water,
already almost dew of dew, a mere nothing
carries inside her a whip crackling
and with steps short only like the hands of grass
even a bit shorter,
she walks the whole eternity.
The blind circle she revolves on her finger like a key,
she locks the world, opens for her the heaven,
in the loneliness of her life she tortures her god :
My God, you have not risen from the dead.
My God, you have already disappeared.
My God, have you never been ?
And again the sound of trumpet behind the window lights beats down.
Some crazy jazz. The drunken saints
lie on the pavements.
Silence.
Mother, don't you sleep ?
Darkness. Wind tunes in his palm the violin.
Tonight, naked and bloody
I lashed out of the fire and flew up.
I know : the certainty
I will hang on the nail my black hat black like tar.
(Not because you will not be, but because you now are)
Do not lift it.
Cover it with your hand.
Under the hat
darkness.
Love will subsist us from the pure water,
Be always with me
and more than yourself love me.
So to live on. To stand on your feet,
to resemble the sea,
not to count the ebbs.
I know : the fear.
The unpatient count to thousand.
You already feel strange contours within.
Run away ...