ASPIRATION, INSPIRATION,

                                  respiratory system

If we are here and everything runs

like the wind in treetops whispers,

then breathing is elemental.

And if we are here, there is totality in it

of all diverse existence’s properties.

The word of fire murmurs in it.

Arbour mundi, sprouting in its aspiration

for the vital spirit to inspire our respiration,

For, if there is flame,

its elementalness makes love to earth,

and the earth’s density conducts

sonority of pulsing veins: if there is flame,

the blood does not grow numb and a lizard moves.

In the process of its being-here, it runs willingly

towards a river – the primordial union

of magnetism and water. And a river

wipes away from our hands the rage, the ire,

the heavy gunpowder’s residues.

There are mysteries, but if there is

water, then tears, sweat and saliva

are the foundation of an agile body,

sensuously conscious of itself. The flow,

which makes a metal wave in rocks

and melts us into the radiation of

a tree outgrowing its own bark.

If all this is here, there is the world –

on its circular journey into the hydrogen atom.

***

Five villages.

Two spinning wheels.

We play on the triple-serpent skin.

Today is the day when we celebrate

by leaving it alone.

The ritual takes time and duration in

the murmuring vegetation opens

at night.

When an animal leaves its shin

in the desert, the presence hollows it out

into an instrument. And we don’t know where

in human hands it will call again its spirit

back to life –

to tell how the time of its existence

sounds like on Earth.

What is yet to come was first in the forest.

What will one day be the forest, knows this already now.

It is born as it has always known how to be-that.

And when suddenly, in a scratch of enchantment

she starts playing Bach at the age of seventeen,

in one of the five villages connected by two

fire-driven wheels,

the door is unraveled for everyone.

SLOWLY AND WITH TRUST

                    in the informed vibration

I moved deep into the forest,

for you to live and at least

this way stay near me. I have my birds here,

who tell me everything I need to know –

for you, they have a special whistle:

I can only detect it with my stomach,

only decipher it with my heart.

They sit a little further on the side,

onto particular stones, branches and roots,

so that everything could breathe freely,

and transform themselves into sound.

Equally as their conductive sonority

communicates, it also cleanses,

both appearance and substance: how you

set it for yourself, how you turned, slipped into

repeating circles, transformed, avoided, started anew,

each time one wave of the hidden mode reaches you.

I live withdrawn, to the place from where everything

emerges, thus, from here, I know long before you

something flows in your direction: when

will sadness overwhelm you, or when madness,

emptiness, when peace again. Whenever your

pool awakes, I scatter into the stream

some manna of a special flower for your support.

Yet, as long as you give me no access to your

banality, too, no one will move

truly further.

WITH AN OPEN EYE OF EXPERIENCE

            to await the morning star and Pleaides 

You live in the furthest suburb of

solitude. The rocks here are much

sharper than what is seen from

a distance when observing

the soft misty back of one’s

lifescape rising out of the sea.

Many have been drawn here,

but from the reefs people quickly return

to their shelters. The streets in this

neighborhood only form as

the ear learns to close the flaps

against the wild roar: these

are the only walls that divide,

when the noise is outside or

inside. Where you stand, is not

a matter of place, but of the state of mind.

You must walk as determined

as the resilient lichens, daily

torn off rocks by the salty wind. 

If ever you oar into a sea-cave

you find yourself deep in your

pulsing stomach where the sea breathes

in pure darkness with animal wilderness. –

No different, only more obvious

it becomes in these conditions that

to man even the most enigmatic infinity

is more bearable than finality.

Before dawn, your heart licks itself

through thin layers of intuition, back

into implicit knowing, yet, disperses

again in drizzling rain as the day goes by.

All beings who dwell with you

here on this world’s periphery,

rejoice at any visitor’s footsteps,

and disappointedly withdraw,

when the conquerors do not

appreciate them equal to themselves. –

Existence is so precious here,

that no one wastes their vital force

and no one forces others,

for everything is subject enough

to the testing of the bare sky.

Every word and every gesture,

unnecessary, could numb

the sensitivity for life: solely solitude  

is found here in abundance.

***

The door from the world to the house:

you step through it into the open, into

sheer timelessness. It makes no difference,

in which echo your foot lands.

The corridor today

facing west again

and you’re holding your

hand made of wind as if

something should arrive

any time now, and if the heart

isn’t precisely aligned,

everything shall spin into

another hundred years of thick air.

Outside, the leaves were ageing

instead of her, sadness and

passion only depended on

the diffusion of light. Every now

and then the yard was surrounded

by children’ weep but the dunes of fine

sand muffled the sound even before

the dust touched the window glass. –

No one was ever going there, not then,

nor any other time. They left her so,

her body to dissolve among the fragments

of the century, as she has fallen over

the threshold and kept laying there until the night

when she was awakened by a swarm of rustling

fireflies bursting from the walls.

Each room, disconnected from others,

had its own life, none of them

had neither hope nor desire for

hope: that was their peace.

It was a house that had no

dreams – we dreamt it.

***

The trap follows them. Spelled. It impregnates.

An oak within a soaked trunk carries a new one under the heart.

So moves the path, has the stone let it, rolls on it.

This way a desert ends up on a secret encounter with

the forest shade. A tree is height. The moon is inception.

It’s been seen. From beneath a silent bark. Echoes

a barking wish. Descended night. Slow. Motion

dries its wet soul on the rock. The sunny time beside,

now occupied by a foreign implant. A plane. Stuck

in a crack at the turn of the century. Seeking sense

through a cloudy acumulus mundi. Out of nowhere,

agility attacks the puma. The procession

hopes for the unveiling of signs.

Who first touches the last one.

A lapse leaps forward on the roadless slope.

The revived infinitive.

An eye for survival, a tooth for survival.

Take a breath to go. A takeaway spell.

Sheep jostle with the grass.

Everything follows behind.

Not much of this arrives.

It follows them anyway.

***

It persisted in the unnameable.

A garden full of shouting,

ever suspicious,

and with no intuition of how

someone had long removed

herself. For she lived like a hole that

accumulates wide-branched cuts in itself.

A meadow full of comments and prohibitions.

Only the plants knew about them. Only

denying really knew her.

Paths, full of signs of territory taken.

Houses and whole villages wrapped in

a veil of the untouchable. She grew with

the reservoir, that fed her desert body

with one single act of love, sometimes

for months. That’s how she learned

to hibernate already in her childhood.

Meanwhile, the other side has long since

demanded even more than what they’ve

overly possessed.

The mountain, already so tilted,

it was only a matter of time before

it tips over. But it was finally the sea

that tipped.  

What odd ways man invents,

at least to vaguely play a role

of balance.

A sperm of a wolf gives birth to a rose,

from a pollen of a rose a storm is born,

in the storm he filled her with dry fire,

from the ashes she picked up yet still

completely raw meatball and a melted

piece of gold, wrapped her finger with it,

so that something had transformed back in

the past, and when the soil has neutralised his, too,

emerged from the disenchantment a stream

of unlabelled umbilical cords,

of unclassified lives.

***

Even a shark sometimes breaks a tooth

on the glassy sea. Since everything is already

so reinforced. And since we do it all,

before the last button on our shirt

is undone. We stare at our own reflection

and do not find it suspicious even when

the picture imitates us. We are the holders

of reason: the golden retrievers of progress.

At night we cover ourselves with submarines’

wreckage, and light up the room with missiles

to read the last chapter.

If we do manage to find the page where

we were left, it falls asleep,

while we calm down the fiery quarrel

in the aquarium.

***

In times drier than

burnt roast, erasure

takes place routinely. Once,

people were at least put on a train,

but imagine the scope of organisation,

all that communication with the involved parties!

Today, this is done effortlessly, far more

mysteriously, without wheels, without

clouds of steam rising behind people

up to the sky. Technology has greatly

advanced, and why should we

unnecessarily involve the minister

of transport. No whistle at departure,

no one hears gunshots at the farewell.

Don’t be afraid, the procedure is completely

routine: you won’t even notice when

the extraction takes place.

From this department, you’ll leave straight away.

No one will miss you.

No one will come for you.

You do not leave this place in hordes,

but individually:

loneliness casts you out,

loneliness leads you, into loneliness it brings you.

You do not leave this place at all.

You just fade out, somewhere in the middle of

the living room.

For exile is a place into which you are born

and which you carry with you everywhere –

it has no eyes that could acknowledge it, neither

here nor there.

You see, it didn’t hurt at all!

***

When they fly at night, they need to make

their way unheard through a polygon

for the stars not to reveal

their presence by twinkling

when obscured by another body.

When in the morning they take rest in a swamp,

they must sleep with their eyes open

to return their predators the gaze,

that makes a being different from meat.

When they fly over the sunset in the evening,

their only guardian from a fool who shoots into

the sky just because he is irritated by romantic scenes,

is life itself, which

wants to be.

ACCESS

      to one’s own presence

Our river keeps swallowing clouds,

leaving gravel behind:

when sometimes a solitary boat glides

between the mountains, the trembling surface

sounds in the occiput.

Neither you nor I

know the score of the sky,

no man knows exactly how

to describe sadness. If ever

we find ourselves watching in slow

motion how metal decays and glass

cracks in our brain, the wounded rocks

don’t heal – out of them grow

ever new landscapes: in time

of our lives we have seen only

their fingernail.

Vigilance belongs neither to the predator

nor to the pray: it is created in the in-between,

when the resonance of awareness tells that

a tense elastic thread is just about to release

somewhere in the universe – and we’ll only catch,

how it takes off the coat too tightly fastened

button. Appearance is only a trick,

for us not to get tired of gazing

at the logic of inception.

But just in case: always before

we return to the house, we whistle three times

in the garden – for the wind to find its

ancient entrance to our dream-bodies.

WAITING FOR AN ECHO,

         approaching a new herd and name

No greetings were spoken –

except with their attentive glance.

It would have interrupted the patient

silence of the mind. For too long their

eyes kept biting at the distance, for the

the approaching caravan which was

descending from the mountain with

the same persistence. At first, nothing but

trust could sense it moving, before it gradually

revealed itself in a couple of dark spots,

and gained a bit more  sharpness every half a day.

Only their own childhood,

when they were left alone out there,

in a wolf’s jaws of the rite de passage

and the howling of the moon into the Earth,

filled them with faith in

landscape of which slight descents

have sometimes swallowed the picture

for hours long: as if there was never anyone.

And even when those there seemed

so close, here everyone kept sitting still on

their skins, knowing it would last at least until

the evening before the frosty plain beneath

their guests’ feet unfolds its full vastness. –

And they will slowly, yet decisively  

light up the ceremonial fire, wrap themselves

in their finest scarves, and raise their flags in

a warm welcome: a gesture that will

muffle the ear-splitting hiss of the wind

as they close the yurt’s canvas behind

the bride, to embrace her into the murmuring

passing of the bowl with yak’s milk,

from the hands of the old one to the hands of

her new blood.

                                    (Lost-in-translation: Radharani Pernarčič)