Pride

The innervated, wheaten maidens, encounter the wholemeal men,

The fresh-breathed angels present astral bodies.

I know:

I became entangled in the good and the bad

like in a hundredfold trifoliate clovers

the apples of all knowledge ring out, mixed up in bast-bound baskets.

          So I am to ask for a path

     to You

     stranded at intersections of dreams?

     So many times already, blue eyes darkened by day in

     the darkness of night.

     Eighteen russet months of June

     will not hear,

     as they scream

     the question.

     Eighteen winters will not hear the stone-deaf,

     grey winters.

The womanish warm leaf-tongues rub and scatter empty words unto the wind

a fanatical snake of aluminium winds its nests on the paradise tree.

     I don’t know, Lord,

     what is good,

     what is evil –

     gazing into eighteen years –

     attentive, raw and watchful

     all the more headstrong,

     all the wiser,

     I do not know.

Canticum Canticorum

Wine berries foam,

            Fragrant nard

                        Heavily floods the orchards.

I grazed my brothers’ flocks

            In the torrid heat of sunshine –

                        And so am bronzed.

The buzzing night is granite-blue.

            From yellow stars

                        Aflame, the sky singes.

I hide my burning eyes

            In the cypress eyelash forest,

                        Like the pools of Heshbon.

“Oh, my dear, open up!

            I ran round the orchard,

                        With powdery dew in my curls –

Repeat to me your lips,

           So I would guess again,

                        If you drank apples from the evening.”

“How should I open it for you?

            The creaking door,

                        When I’m taking off the dresses,

Mothers will curse me three times,

            And the herds of goats

                        Will not give sweet milk.”

The night, granite-blue, buzzing

            And the vineyard’s grafts unstable,

                        And fig leaves –

And I can’t sleep at all.

            I open the wooden gates –

                        And my dear has vanished.

Saffron and cassia fragrances.

            Oil dripped

                        And myrrh drips on the door handle.

The road blurs slowly

            Like a sprung stitch.

                        A black-eyed darkness beyond the porch.

I was searching for him – didn’t find him.

            I called him

                        –  But he didn’t say anything to me.

(And he is pretty as a star,

            As heaven's recess –

                        Everyone will recognize him.)

I enchant you, maidens in fragrances,

            Through a woodland roe deer,

                        Through a doe sudden as assassination:

Don’t look in advance for love,

            Don’t wake her,

                        Until she comes to you herself.

Essence

The pregnant, thick Pacific growls under the glassy sheet,

the pink-fleshed leopard fur bursts out silky fur –

god’s biblical whale spurts with burning blubber,

like his biblical archangel drips with a glow on the stars.

You see —

that’s precisely why.

Humus bursts through pavement.

Under each silent surface you sniff out a firecracker of essence.

The sky will burn out of the stars

as of windblown torches.

The ebb and flow of trains will announce the hour’s swelling.

And when you cry out;

“laughter”,

Thirty-two-toothed braying women.

And when you whisper:

“death,”

blindness:

the deaf-mute

chokes.

They’re stretching, these trembling animals you’ve lured from the wilderness,

whose names you’ve pronounced,

whom you have praised by name.

Red and warm matters are born of clichés as of mothers,

the essence erupts, in a gurgling hemorrhage out of melodic suffering.

The name bulges with the world,

the world is bloated with afterlife –

– and you

words overgrown with flesh

pronounce

like the Creator –

with dread.

Seafaring

In a pitch-ark, sealed of its own, heated affairs,

the lashing flood’s parting

and the world’s wheezing

I avoid –

I let out the tender doves from a far-off blizzard of apparitions,

amphibians of shiny mica

and flexible, robust vipers.

Symbol of cosmic wings,

and lacquer-coated fangs

clasped in the fawn manes of biblical ark animals.                            

Oh, dull elephants of lethargy, dreams swaying on their heads!

Oh, pride, an eagle’s claws, buried in ecstasy in a lion’s neck!

Oh, the ship strikes the world with a malicious, metallic wave

– there

     dark

            bloodletting

                        of chaos

hostile, fierce flood –

– for how many more days until the valleys gleam with the enamel

of the supple-waisted apple trees in pink curlers? –

– and here it smells of resin,

the essence is full of colors,

the wiry soprano of Marches winds itself on the alto of Julys.

In the pitch-ark, sealed of its own, heated affairs,

the lashing flood’s parting

and the wheezing world I avoid.

Fur

Oh, lynxes, wildcats and pumas stuffed to fluff,

foxes with yellow lining and yellow eyes of glass,

oh, fleece blownlost, stretched flat and beguilingly,

early morning blownlost

strained taut onto the dreams;

oh, miry, wolfish tree needles like pine fur,

the chaos of bear’s bristles,

confusion of muddied days –

– I comb you with sharp disdain,

oh, fur of my dispersed springtimes,

loose, shaggy fur,

without meat,

skeleton

and blood.

This is One

Days thrown by the boomerang will return with the spearheads of reminders:

magnificent girls wheedled

woollen sheep emerged from the mountains –

what made you rush through everything – consider it,

     calculate consciously,

what made you rush through this song,

     the sung forest,

          the trees’ singing,

               the wood.

Oh, watercolors of mornings, greasy midday oils,

sleepy pastels of evenings and charcoals of deep nights!

Buckets drew the acute spring bliss from the well –

it rushed you,

this,

through the whirr, streamers and ribbons.

This rushes you today through tenderness:

ships flow capacious,

brimming with godly madonnas^[1],

with skin of touch and wax maidens full of sweetness,

affection and smiles,

have faces fragrant with primroses and red nasturtiums of hair.

This rushes you through pathos:

the victory plinths cool off.

Your palm explodes vertically. The banner explodes above your palm.

Lightning strikes apples’ cores. Life flows with thunder.

And delight intoxicates like a scent. Bird cherry rumbles about the temple.

In the silent arctic past, you roam with memory maps –

Oh, buckets unsatiated,

Tin buckets, bottomless.

By acute, spring bliss you draw from all the keys.

I consider it, calculate, and know:

This is one thing,

This rushes you.

Betrayal

Nobody will police me.

Sin of suede and bats

hung in attics of fear with a half-mouse head to the

ground –

At dusk I sneak out of the tower, out of the fortified tower I run away,

through the cutting of sharp wasps

through the barricade of poisonous herbs –

Heavily they rise from debris, shaping the crags of commandments,

twenty Vedic hells.

flames,

an ululation

and whizz

a fanatical night threatens, punishes, throws stars as stones,

with mercury I’ll slip through fingers.

Nothing will police me.

You will turn into a wolf, I into a wagtail,

you into an eagle, and I in the winding awes –

with impenetrable intention I will anticipate your every pursuit.

The world will not police me.

Oh, darling – oh, dear – oh, my sweet,

if I myself

don't want

sweet May's

fidelity.