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* * *

There is no beginning everywhere and anywhere.
What remains of women is Balzac’s ‘certain age’.
Night within. The night stays over on black water.
This is the humdrum of reason, the prose of the universe.
No, St Isaac’s, it’s not the winds that sway Foucault’s pendulum,
the predawn distance, like the iceberg of a cold morning 
floats out on the same laws from the gloom of the soul 
                                                           and already far away,
Kamasutra, the book of eternal love, looks anxiously at everything.
* * *

The clapping of dead hands,
the adagio of wingless butterflies,
from places in which you now
cannot serve. Forgive me. It’s a long time
since we were so far from each other.
Grimaces of the day. The sickly fear
of mute memories in concert
alarm the silence of others’ partings.
The foyer in a worn coat touches
the finale with its shoulder and the silhouette
of your muted phrases chats with friends
about nothing, but this is only
the prelude to that empty room,
which the night shoves towards without words.
I walk slowly. Each step on the road
will lead to you and there’s no one to help.
FATHERLAND

Stupid, fearful lessons, an unkempt grand piano.
A stew of shining smog, shortsighted sadness.
The passageway is like a pawn shop in some god-forsaken tip. 
                                                                              Keep and preserve.
The hand of the dead man in the hand of the palm-reader. A bee 
swarm of crazy books. The crossroads is spattered with blood. 
The one-eyed raven guards time.
A quiet Saturday cries and laughs and an echo lisps
and the windowpane trembles.
* * *

Town of red-headed brides.
A provincial, suffering wind
drinks up all the water from the puddles 
in one sitting and from gossip
weaves a spider’s web of hurts and leaders
that old women held to their hearts
and sweeps from souls and declines them without cases,
sweetening belches of times with celery or more often parsley.
Doing a hundred sit-ups at sunset,
the horizon disturbs balding thoughts.
Go out and look – it is only in this hole,
nowhere else, that you will come across such repellent, dear mugs,
that whether you howl or scream
you won’t be able to beautify the ridiculous hermitage with this.
This is our cross and we have to carry it in the Judaean night
to those places where we were happy as the lowest beggar
* * *

Extracting the quadratic root
from the flock of migratory birds, imagination finds you
in a half empty café of a remote little European town.
Your pupils reflect the humility and peace
of the dying autumn. No, you’ve not shut your eyelids.
It’s twilight. At this hour memory, like Cinderella,
gathers the crumbs of memories.
An elderly Frenchman is sitting opposite and drums
his orphaned fingers on the table. ‘Baroque’.
Thus there arises the dominant misunderstanding 
of what’s going on.
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