Bogomil Gjuzel: Selected poetry (1962-2002)

Poet, prose writer, playwright, essayst, translator. Born in 1939 in Chachak, Serbia. Graduated at the Department of English, University of Skopje, in 1963, and spent an academic year at the University of Edinburgh as a British Council scholar, 1964/65. Was dramaturgist with the Dramski theater, Skopje, in two terms: 1966-1971 and 1985-1998. Participated in the International Writing Program, Iowa City, USA, 1972/73, and in the poetry festivals in Rotterdam (1978 & 1996), San Francisco (1980), Herleen (1991), Maastricht and Valencia (2000). One of the ten founders of the Independent Writers of Macedonia association and its first chairman in 1994, and since 1995 editor-in-chief of its bi-monthly journal Nashe Pismo. Since 1999 he is acting director of the Struga Poetry Evenings International festival.

Published books: Poetry - Mead (1962 & 1971), Alchemical Rose (1963), Libation Bearers (1966) - awarded with "Brothers Miladinov" prize for the best book of the year, Odysseus in Hell (a selection, 1969), A Well in Time (1972), Brothers Miladinov Award; The Wheel of the Year (1977), Reality is All (1980), State of Siege (1981), Empty Space (1982), Darkness and Milk (1986), and in Serbo-Croatian in 1987 - Aleksa Santic Yugoslav Award for 1985-88, Destroying the Wall (1989), Selected Poems (1991), Naked Life (1994), Chaos (1998), She/It (a long poem, 2000), Selected Poetry (1962-2002) (2002). Selections in Serbo-Croatian: Sky, Earth and Sun (1963), Mead (1972), bilingual Poems (1981). Selection in Slovenian: The Fish of Sense (1985). Selections in English: Three (1972), The Wreckage Reconsidered (Chattanooga Chapbooks, Tennesse, 1997), The Wolf at the Door (Xenos books, California, USA, 2001). Included in all the anthologies of Macedonian and Yugoslav poetry since 1963.

Prose books: History as Step-mother (essays, 1969), The Whole World is a House (travelogues from Ireland and USA, 1975), Mytho-Stories (three plays, 1982), Legends (stories, 1984), A Bundle (essays - in preparation). With Ljubisha Geiorgievski Black (a tragic ferce, 1989).

Translations: Shakespeare's Macbeth (1969), King Lear (1972), Hamlet (1980), Julius Caesar (1981), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1984), Twelfth Night (1985), Troilus and Cressida and The Tempest (1992), and Titus Andronicus (1994). Translated and adapted numerous plays from English, among which: Bond's Saved, O'Neil's The Long Journey Into the Night, Sheppard's Buried Child, Pinter's Lover Selected poetry by: T.S.Eliot, W.H.Auden, Ch.Simic (1984), E.Dickinson (1986), and S.Heaney (2001). Has translated and co-edited (with Louis Simpson and Serge Fauchereau) an anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, 1978, with second and renewed edition in 1999. On his poetry Lech Miodinsky wrote and published a Ph.D. dissertation: Bogomil Guzel, Poeticky dialogz natura i kultura, Katowice 1994, in Polish, translated and published in Macedonian in 1999.

Journey to the City of Lenguel

I

I came to the City of Lenguel
A sigh captured me
I pushed back walls
And with tlie bricks of dream scratched out a dwelling.
My soul came in through the chimney
And my cry rose over the towers.
I was slapped by the windy plain
Ripped open by boar-toothed citizens;
I'll pick up the weathercocks
And move south, singing of migrations.

II

The growing City of Lenguel is no match,
Cannot fill the spaces in my dream;
The sky sits on the roof and begins its daily round.
I stain the tower with blood,
I migrate with my song, settle down in my hunger
Among bricks of that dream.
With horns of slaughtered boars
The north blows its trumpets at the gates.
The plain disappears.
Now there is no nest for my cuckoo offspring.
It is a season of nomads, dust and sunshine.
O save the road the sun has covered with lead,
The road to the City of Lenguel, the lead city!

III

The City of Lenguel is melting
The duel ended when two rays
Two darknesses clashed
In the silver horseshoe of evening.
I have gathered so many icy kisses on my face
I can bury my sainthood
I draw my sword
To cut the weathercock.
My song swallows everything.

IV

The clatter of diseased iron and copper
Melts the City of Lenguel.
My song migrates to the south
I can hear my mother
Praise me behind thick walls
And gossip behind the globe.
A chorus of toothless winds
Come down the staircase
(The steps are made for long feet)
The winds are tired from the mad ride
Through dawn and the laughing plain.
That jackal's howl circles my house
The bricks glow under a polar light.
They call out my name, invite me to an evening;
Of feast and story telling
I hear the yawn of salt-
And wind-diseased metal.

V

Knee-deep in the City of Lenguel
I hear the pealing of lead bells;
The road's corroded body,
The river's eye swollen from sleeplessness,
Blind thoroughfares and nomads
Burn into me.
By horse lies dead on the cobbles.

I'll turn away, destroyed on towers
And crenellations, from the jawless skull of the north
I'll set fire to the nest of snakes,
My birthplace in the south,
With a new song and migration.

I put out the sun, fall asleep;
None shall know I was born
In a season of cruel nomads.

* Lenguel, or Lengyel, is an archeological site in western Hungary, where evidence has been found of setllements of the fifth miillenium B.C. unlike their neighbors and bearing resemblances to those on or near the Adriatic. These findings give rise to speculation that around that time there were migrations from the Adriatic coast (now the Yugoslav coast) to the basin of the Sava River. ED.

Odysseus in Hell

1.

Get lost,
you lotus-eater, disheveled wanderer,
I'm just a boy asleep on the wind's corners
hiding in sand castles;
stop pursuing me!
Does one ever get away?
O.K., I'll turn into a worm:
All I need is a dark night, fresh soil,
two words for my song,
none for my love.
I married secondhand Hydrae
they were whipped on the bare steppes, they danced.
I placed an order for freedom
O which sun made me a beggar?
I don't want women
I want hot springs
sharp pinlike winds
to lie on
(I who roamed
the wind's corners).
I want the rituals of mating
performed in young woods
where the sun is plentiful.
May your own blood tear you to pieces,
bitter wanderer of the planets,
stupid Graeco-Macedonian,
let drums hound you out of the mountains,
let marshes and traps swallow you.
Get lost!
And while bells at the crossroads
announced a war, condemned Odysseus
fell backward into hell.

2.

I am Odysseus, a Graeco-Macedonian.
Odysseus rolled down the morning
and slopped to break through noon,
he blew out hell's candles,
his thoughts had cheated him.

3.

Both hell and I
are being stolen by shadows
I shall disappear when night wears
its freshly ground stars;
on a white night the blood
looks thicker.

Timid hell was being built
by some old bums with girders
of hard wind.

You walk on music with bare feet,
the wind dresses you in transparent skins,
you are a citizen of the world,
man of white wines and sailcloth.
The sands—my innumerable parents
on the old evangelic beach—save me
with hot pliers
and their brazier of death.
The misery
to mate in hell
with reeds and sterile dragonflies.
At crossroads I still make the sign.

4.

Between the Grecian and Macedonian lands
there is no one
yes, O yes, no one.
White villages, sad horses,
keep heaping stars on me
or I'll vanish.

Don't think of those wretched horses.
The villages of Taurus and Crystal:
Two green eyes. Swamps.

The tall dry grass of tlie steppes
killed the old men;
the Hydrae undid
the knots of the souls.
Odysseus nibbled at the road
of the unshod horses,
tlie earth got smaller
and Odysseus belched witli satisfaction
yes, O yes, bravery.

The village of Taurus
enters the sky,
the village of Crystal
enters the earth to be changed
into a light year:
Two green eyes. Caverns.

Higher up the Arctic boils
the scents lead
to a white village
razed by longing.
Someone wearing a farmer's cape
stands against the horizon.
Darkness stops breathing
and lecherous souls dance
to the whips of precocious Hydrae.

Give all the new ones to Odysseus,
the true Graeco-Macedonian.

The land reduced to a tenant farmer.

Go still higher, Odysseus,
you are the fastest runner
between the wastelands of Greece and Macedonia.
Tear down those ambiguous Hydrae
so they won't crack their whips
or suffer
for a soul that isn't there
for a road corroded by the horses' vomit
between the wastelands of Greece and Macedonia.

The villages of Taurus and Crystal:
Two worlds. Blue violets.

5.

Dry branches and thin men
protect you from the sun,
unless you melt it by going near.

You poured acid
on this coin
as it led you down the road.

In the end
he spread out the sun
broke the light
threw away the dark.
He was not married.

The Hydrae still mourn him,
the steppes continue the raids.

He lit a fire and vanished.

The women waited at the crossing.
The strange
Graeco-Macedonian roads
settled themselves in his body.
It's time to run away from yourself, Odysseus.

A song and the sun torn apart
was all that remained.

Satanael

Boredom. Neither day nor night
You came to the surface, a pochard
And lie saw you. But then why dive back
Not frightened, just surprised—were you?—
At being seen
Why obey him, dig, bring up
The earth in your mouth?
Shame on you and your vanished sea's
Transformation.

So you spat out a rock for two.
After which nightmare or daydream
Did you decide to push him in his sleep?
The rock grew up on an island
Not surprised? Be quick
Or the earth will outrun you
You raced in four directions to push him
There was no shore, only the extending earth.
You cursed and made the sign of the cross.

How come in an endless world
You spoke with that sweet-shitting bee, his spy
Of course you saw her, but riding
The goat you had to mumble to yourself
She went and taught him how to knead
To whip out mountains and valleys;
The earth, sensing danger, turned into a hedgehog.
Mad at your stupid rebellion
You dropped half your name.

What next? Leave holes in tlie First human
So he can fill them with healing herbs
Make yourself a clay wolf to bite
And maim you; rule over the dead, limbless snake.
Before Adam tills ask him to sign the lease
Advise an angel or saint
You know they'II take it
Though make sure they get confused
Let him smell the basil leaves and have a son.
... that's enough. Now you are spat upon,
Farted at, chased by rabid dogs and stinking torches
Hot-Iron-Face, you go down the black pit.
It's all over
Just confirm where things are
Don't you sometimes think
"What if I hadn't surfaced . .. fallen asleep
Talked to myself like any old fool ...
If I hadn't allowed him ... ?"

Sure but then you wouldn't be the fly that survived winter.

* Satanael, according to the traditions of certain Macedonian and Bulgarian sects, was the elder son of God, Christ being the younger. ED.

Estrangement

In the seed of the darkness
a six-winged dragon sobs
after a dark future,
as the wind whines on winter nights
scratched by the angles of our house.

Weaving like Penelope the world by day
and undoing it by night!
The same threads can weave another pattern,
the webs in the angles of history
become dead nets without a catch.

We have broken the landscape into pieces.
No memory can put it together again;
the world is become a beggar's coat
full of patches covering the face of God
that gleams like the flush of a drunk's buttocks.

The soul hovers in emptiness — waste
thrown into space from a moonship.

Bolen Dojchin–The Sick Hero

1

The White City sleeps under the cover of fog and snow.
In its swaddling clothes the universe continues its agonizing birth;
One cannot hear the cries of newborn children.
Posterity is forgotten; the cradles do not rock;
The black seed is buried; fresh wine
Ferments the evil blood which will crow in another time.

The green bronze gates are silent,
Wet with the warm tongue of mother-fog.
No one knows where the stand the ramparts,
Whence cometh the fields and the wide world.
The caravans have arrived and are locked in the taverns
(Camels still groan from the burden).
The inns are invisible, wrapped in warm breath and white smoke;

In the wine now one seeks his own blood,
In the bread strength and new oaths.

Wherever there is death there are limits,
There is the chain of stillness; there cries mean the end;
And no one calls back death from there with his screams.
Therefore I am lying ill in the tower of air,
Dampening the glass with my breathing.
I leave my teardrop to wander alone.

2

We lie asleep above an abyss. Each has his own hell,
In each nerve, to endure and to survive.
One after the other the candles are lit there
To make it brighter and warmer.

In our fingers, in breathing one limited world
In which again confusion and stuffiness dominate
(One cannot live with the thought
That nothing moves behind our backs)
Even what kills us
Is soiled by the familiarity of our own hands.

Slop squinting through the navel in that dot of a sky
From that trodden womb of nutritious fogs!
We wait, and we scratch for our birth, and yet we are not born.
Thus the fruit perishes in the womb
Without the separation that must come from our own hand.
That law is cruel which says we must deliver ourselves,
That we alone create our doom and peril,
But it is more dreadful to bear
The curse of an unborn germ.
Had not our mother and country been cursed by us
Then upon us they would make double curse.

Therefore I lie ill in this tower of air
Deeply wrapped in the folds of fog and snow
Waiting for that day promised by my fates,
The new curse to unlock the world
And then the final stroke to receive it.
I have waited for the salutary lark,
Have scratched about in the parental dark,
Have trodden upon those miraculous wells and plants,
Have spotted the weapon with stains of blood,
And again I lie ill in the White City, in this city of grief,
And again nothing comes to happen
Nothing to make me use my strength, consecrated
To the birth of so many dawns,
To the rising of the birds
Blinded by rainbows of blood.

3

In my dream I touched bottom;
To be nothing and nothing more. I was nothing; I foretold nothing.
But even in the last pores of earth,
I found air to be breathed.
And it is this same air of the White City
(Which whitens this city and blackens the earth);
Like a gimlet my fate drills
Through the hard life to make this easy poem.
Regrettably, no one can stop it.
Let my joy utter its cry,
Let the word sing out its law.

Oh, to be nothing—only to measure that word!
And to measure the other—to be all and to measure all!
But even then there is no peace,
For we are born to be without measure,
To touch all and to be like none.
I, who touched bottom, dropped the sword
From my hands, soared like a bird in this fog.
To reach many hearts and be back milky again I sought hearts; I sought milk again.
Broken in blood I can confirm this
(Gladly would I sign away my soul).
I mourn the fallen bird.

But tears are blood, and I am broken
I must be as I am or change;
I must be familiar or strange.
Each is minted in the coin of his time
But blow, and that shape is no more;
Even metal can be changed by sighs
Or, cruel, hold shape,
to be used for a kiss or for war.
And it will no more lose its strength
Then we our desires.
We are the same as metal.

Yes, the metal or you—silence will say yes
To us or to metal the silence will say nothing
Neither kiss nor weapon,
Neither air nor the worm, heart nor emptiness
In which it is bred like a mushroom,
Neither birth-light nor grave-dark.
The mouth filled with air or with fertile earth
Out of it will spring a new Samuel,
Only he can pull down the silence;
There is only one choice: to be or to die.
I only am here to choose,
Mute voter in deaf fog in a White City.

Good night, fate, I've done,
See you tomorrow; there's always another day.

* Gjuzel's "Bolen Dojchin" is a modern version of a very old Macedonian folk narrative, of the same name. ED.

Troy

The gates of the city burst open,
and in came the wind—like someone
just freed from siege,
like the empty soul of a conqueror,
who afterwards expects nothing—
a senseless, idle gust,
sauntering along the streets,
wearied by their corners,
a beggar's breath,
looking for warmth and bread crusts.
It was the cobblestones that moaned,
the palaces that shivered.

And the wind brought people,
who had let their ploughs rust;
solitary people tilling the sky,
reaping the harvests of summer nights,
the fat grain of the early stars,
leaving it all unwinnowed.
Instead they used swords;
their ploughing was of bodies, their furrow cut to the heart;
they plucked out hearts like stump roots,
they burst gall bladders.
with livers they fed the vultures on their shoulders.
At the last they rolled away the skulls
like stones for building.
For building there was never time.

Mothers were torn from their children;
both milk and cry dried up.
Streets were watered by broken pipes,
pulsing like ruptured arteries.
Sacrifices were hurried;
the hope was for nothing
but to turn the temples into sties
and to provoke the usual stench.
The wind unraveled the bell ropes and the flags,
and, with its whirling tail,
it passed like a broom through the city
and struck the gong of the sun.

* Gjuzel studied literature at the University of Edinburgh in 1964 and 1965, and his earliest poetry, while reflecting his own experiences in his homeland in the years after the war, also shows tlie influence of T. S. Eliot and of the Scots poet, Edwin Muir (1887-1959). ED.

Black Came the Plague

The plague came decked out in a silken coach
Not like a gipsy in rags or a scaly old crone
But like a beauty on a caparisoned horse,
Under a veil lifted by angel-eunuchs;
Beauty that scorches,
With a ship like the fire dragons spew,
Like a tribute drying up the blood.

A black sea-galley.
Lower the flags from your towers and strongholds,
Lock your shutters and gates,
Shut yourselves in behind your eyelids
Still it will spy you out
With the inexorable worm in the air.

Houses crumble worm-eaten,
Clothes fall apart like cobwebs,
Scuttling through alleyways rats die
Caught in flight.

Changed by fate into a stork I saw all this
From the chimney—how my people die,
How the threshold crumbles;
Changed demonlike into a grain of millet I saw it,
Changed into a wizard who rides on a broomstick.

Show yourselves, Christian leaders,
With fire and the sword of salvation
Kindle and burn, crush the tribes,
For I saw the spy passing secretly
To visit you, changed into nothing,
More devil than I.

Flood at the International Writers' Workshop

Since the sky started crying
I haven't been out-of-doors for thirty-one days:
By now the earth must be a pair of pliers
With tatters of human flesh stuck to its jaws.

I imagine myself on a seesaw, balanced so lightly
That if even an atom fell on it (let alone a bomb)
I would be hurled like a stone from a catapult
Straight back into the trap of Macedonia.

My people, are we God's voracious eye
Suspended in the air like a traffic light
Which, as it blinks, directs the flow of nations?
Right now I'm only that greedy eye of legend
Which, on my side of the scale, outweighs the world.

In the Ark, our elevators work erratically:
Every deck is bursting with trapped livestock!
On the first floor, insects have turned into neurons
Without any owners:
On the second, saurians form a mythic chain
To swallow each other so they will all disappear,
Be too feeble to achieve total consummation;
On the third floor, the mad vegetarians
Roaring with hunger, lay waste the frigidaires;
On the fourth, the carnivorous flowers
Make plans to devour God;
On the fifth floor, this lone Macedonian
Mangles their languages, re-creating Babel.

And every line that occurs to me sinks like a plummet
When it should splash about like a happy dog
And, like a dolphin, jump through its trainer's hoop.
But I'm dense when it comes to featherweight words!
The verb should be in a state of constant erection,
In equal readiness to strike, or stroke;
The adjective stick to the noun like a lizard catching flies;
And the noun should swing both ways,
While the conjunction is a universal passkey.

So the sky sobs on, like an hysterical child,
Like the she-dragons of my legends.
The gutters gurgle, and gargle.
The drainpipes are subterranean Mississippis.

The words refuse to swallow us any longer
Now we have set them to quarreling among themselves:
Trying to strangle each other, they bite off their tongues.
They have burned to tell us everything they know,
But, being dumb now, drooling idiots,

Speechlessly, they copulate witli rainbows.

* Gjuzel spent 1972-1973 in residence at the International Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. ED.

Professional Poet

The last word, the last hasty swallow

you get up from the table, after your working day
and catch the first bus to the kitchen
you tear off a hunk of bread, inhale the good oven odors
Your body, leaden with weariness, the mold
you cram with rich food
Switch on the set
and inspect the backyard
through another screen
with a wet linger
you flip the pages of the sky.

Nothing will come of nothing.
Clematis tendrils
float in the void ... THEY MUST BE TRAINED ON A TRELLIS
your daughter brings you a chair
The table is set, your wife calls
through the window of a parallel world.

After dinner, you walk in the garden
alone in your pressurized space-suit,
stars all around you
even beneath you. Your antennae must be redirected.
the pear tree, newly pruned, requires manure.

Back to the module:
Daddy, what does it mean
to be a monster?
Suddenly, the chain of command dissolves
bits of paper whirling in free fall
around the table:
untouched paper
and your pencil, ominous as a revolver.

Homage to Stone

Stone, you that for ages fell ill love with the dust
stone, you that cure yourself falling
and still ail for the sky
you, who reject to serve anyone
gnawed by poverty
covered with pleadings, scratched with nails
worn out by bare feet
caressed in despair to bring you to life
thrown so that you may circle like a bird
around the thought until it turns to stone
tinkered with heartbeats as with a hammer
and still dumb mute
proud hard obstinate stone.

You who sacrificed both death and life
for a fiercer existence
you who rejected the temporal presence
you who were once a plant, an animal and a man
but returned to your primeval being
near the beloved dust,
you wlio brought strife into space
you who made the elements quarrel
you who imprisoned the light
you who lure us into your permanence
terrifyingly indifferent to the uninitiated—
go burst with the seed of dynamite
burst with my bad wish
proud hard obstinate stone.

You were always the unavoidable nothing
you mocked fire the stench of water
you lied to the earth
made the highest peak equal
to the depths of the abyss
you who toy with gravity
fall and get up again
in order to suffer more
where is one to find for you a peaceful depth?
Levitating incurably in the river of life
you'll be without rest
proud hard obstinate stone.

You who like a ball break the lightnings
raise the barricade of comprehension
you who pass like flooding lava
through the rotten door of the senses
and thrown by my muscular catapult
drop in the empty space of unwritten poetry
you who like Moloch melt down the darkness
throwing the sparks of rust into the light
you who crumbled Saints' halos
together with softened skulls
you who steadily dismantle the skeleton of air
you who will not admit a tear
until the whole eye flows out
sizzling like a hot drop of metal
incomprehensible ugly and divine
proud hard obstinate stone.

You who straighten beauty's bones
like to a sweet woman that has no choice
but to offer herself to you
to be sucked out like a beehive,
you who dealt with the ages
we now only mention
as with a pack of snotty brats
you who assaulted the stars
until you taught them to keep their distance
you who ground down the gods
rolling them through a dry stream bed
and then slyly permitted them
to borrow for themselves your flesh
what evil what malice to you
mean vile foul exiled stone.
Sultriness

I

Those deep wounds in the sky,
the lightnings, bear no fruit.
Only a bloody slaughterhouse remains
like a battlefield after the attack.

And the rain that falls brings no fruit,
only the headless corpses of the newborn dead,
and the house has turned transparent
like a phantom, an empty sheet of paper,
like a mouse scared out of its wits that rushes
straight into the mouth of the cat, History.

No help at all from the sound of thunder
which plays jokes with our ears,
only a still deeper division grows
in the gorge of the bottomless pain.

II

Light is forbidden
The lightnings have become subterranean rivers of fire
of the arch of current between two poles.

The stars are lost fireflies
which the heavy air draws
to bring illness into the root
and thus enflamed spread the seed, if at all.

The ash finally nourishes us all,
bread-stone which crumbles from satiety.
The Dagger of Beauty

I

Is this a time of hatred
or the seasonal change heralded by doves?
If spring is coming I grow still uglier
in the mirror of droughts and barren years
and my love will again gallop away
on a herd of wild horses from before my gates,
gates which are still buried deep in snow.

Now my ugliness plunders the chambers
and I make the whole house creep.
The master is out hunting for signs,
hunting for new seed and new blood.
She is in her bridal chamber
spinning and falling asleep over her beauty
but soon my shadow will swallow her.

Oh, you are too far off, master, to see
how she forgets herself combing her hair before the mirror.

With my yellow thumb I open the window
looking for the gypsies to come
selling poisoned combs and ugly mirrors
looking for weddings with new-found weapons
but the time offers only the wind's keen dagger
a time of love and hate.

II

My thought is thawing. Outside
the young black earth is sprinkled
with the blood of roosters. Still
the master, the man of the sacred woods,
is not here. I can't hide from the white dawn
or the dagger given me by this time,
nor from the gypsies who peer through the windows
loaded with poisonous gifts
nor from the armed weddings
which have their scimitars.
She is in her chamber spun into her beauty's dream
menaced by my shadow before her door.

My dagger is great from hatred
and can't be hidden from the white portals.
It will crawl through the pitch black woods of night
to cut the thread of her dream,
my master's beautiful dagger
who hunts hopelessly for his seed and blood.

The night is full of fresh green woods. This night.
Her door is quite eaten by dreams
and cannot stop my solid shadow.
Tenderly I creep beneath her silks
and bridal dress. She is beautiful, warm
in the lamplight, unspun in her dream.
But my dagger of white dawn is even more beautiful!

I cut off her head, that ball
of unspun dreams. The dagger sang
softly over her throat and vanished in the dawn,
the dawn that lopped the fresh green woods of night.
My shadow razed her chamber.

Well, master, come now to kiss your blood
which gave you no manhood in the hunt.

III

Her head blossomed in the heat of a May day
and, like a torch of dreams yet unspun,
gives the chambers a shuddering light. The house is razed.
The gypsies and the weddings trampled it down in their spring raid.

Now she is more fair. Fairer than death.
O, how I love her! That red hair of hers
woven from the fibre of the East, where her blood
paints the landscape of the hunt for male seed.
At last her beauty has slain the time
and emptied the hourglasses on the steppes
where men roam awakening the woods.
My ugly shadow has vanished.

Only the child's cry in her chamber
was severed by my dagger sharpened by the dawn.
That second night I sacrificed my milk
which could have suckled whole tribes
that each morning and evening trampled over the roof.
I will not give birth from love. I buried
the old year's seed under the very threshold if I remember right
awaiting news from the master
who has ordered all this in his thoughts.

IV

I hunger after you, master, in the full moon.
Wormwood sprang up on the threshold for snakes to litter there
that neither the gypsies nor the armed weddings might cross.
The locusts came and the summer plague
to harm the old year's seed with disease.
Her head rotted away in the noontide
and melted in the hot evenings. Her beauty
remained alone in the house free to multiply with worms.
Now only I walk outside in the night fields
leaving behind the hallowed home
and the stale bread buried in ashes. The dog
howls in the distance. I am alone
all the time fighting this beauty,
waiting for you. This powerful body of mine
will be impregnated neither by draughts nor a thousand barren years,
without you new seed from this year's hunt.
Come, my master, I starve for you!

The doves died and the summer brought death.
The house is bound with the chains of draught.
My ugly shadow is left to roam the convents.

V

Let worse befall me! Alas, the hunt failed.
He came that morning when I gossiped of my beauty
to the dagger, on a dying horse, with a perished falcon,
he came ashen and pale from the thought of the failed hunt.
He said: it's still the same, and asked for his bride.
Softly singing to it I showed my dagger.

He called the servants caressing me with his whip.
Let worse inflict me, for the hunt was a failure
and the new seed not brought. And while I waited for the servants
I sang to my dagger the soft familiar song of beauty,
for he was not that master from before the last hunt;
his hopeless thoughts of new seed had devoured him.
But he was a better singer. He brought the servants with torches
and said again: it will still be the same, and crushed the wormwood
setting the old stone on the threshold. The wormwood sap burst into song.
The servants took out their knives, singing tortured
by the hopeless hunt. Let the worst befall me,
for the new seed was not brought.
I threw away the dagger calling for four horses.

They brouglit four horses. I bound them to my body,
and sang to all the points to tear apart my beautiful body,
my beautiful body to all four points.

The horses pulled, and died, but sang!
The Apocalyptic Spring

I

The war came with snow instead of blood
It met the sun adorned
With all the nuptial plummage
Stars cursed
As we trampled them.
The field spreads out obediently before us
Is this a wedding or a war?
A spring war
When none are fighting
A betrayal.
Am I the only warrior to die?
The field goes over me.

II

The shrubs attack from all points
Who knows where anyone is
Among the pieces.
A hundred throats laugh like animals
The earth shaped by three hundred skulls
Is driven wild as a barren woman
So seeded with warmth
She might conceive the sun,
We fight for his throne
What if she conceives a hostile dog?
Along with my devils I shall abandon them
The apocalyptic bull
Will break into our homes
And carry us on his blood-stained horns.

III

We had a double dream
One is us
The other our relics
Thrown up by the earth
The objects we could feel
Are expelled like whores
Our shadows go round us
Like open traps.

IV

The deserts whistle
The drums are trampled down
Wedding-guests or warriors have marched across
The bagpipes hardly breathe
One by one the whistlings die
The fairest one left
Is silence.
Silence

As evening soots the gradual snow
Bird and beast are silent under the heavy firs
The hiss of landing is heard
By the paralyzed hermit from his cave
He cannot repeat the prayer he knows;
An evening of strange accord
Between prayer and the primordial
The light and the silence.

Space hides in its curvature
The unsuspected leap of a mountain lion
And tomorrow when the sun appears with his
Angry halo over an earth thawed and gurgling
The air, bloodied by spurs, will scream
What symmetry will then contain the primordial
What bolt-like prayer, what suffering or wine...
Vision

The ancestor's head spoke from the closet—
Open the door of this calendar
Float on the year's draught

I opened the door
And passing through many numerals
Saw:

An axe chopping
The rotten trunk of the sky
The stars scattering, a family of mice

Men-fish and men-birds
Rushing back to the ovum, being reborn
Multiple-eyed and multiple-legged

A woman knitting and out of the loops
Worlds appeared like soap bubbles
They burst and

Drops of mucus fell endlessly
One huge mirror turned night into day
I was a million reflections

Space was Gulliver's mocassin
And time stretched, an accordion
Then the skin broke

I found myself alone in the dark
Inside a mute drum—
The dried head of an ancestor.

The Second Coming

I

This morning I stood upon a dead man – Mwngjesit u ndala mbi njeriun e pafrymw
And the earth groaned – Dhe toka rwnkoi
The deаd аnd the earth are one – I vdekuri dhe toka janw njw -
(Earth, enrich yourself with our death) – Tokw, kamu me vdekjen tonw

Through its breаthing – Pwrmes dihatjes sw saj
I recognize the vapours of the man – dalloj avujt e njeriut
I stood upon – tek koka e tw cilit rri

(Before you destroy the world
Listen to your heaves
They will save you)

(Para se t’a gremiswsh botwn, Dwgjoji gulçimet e tua, Ato do tw tw shpengojnw

II

When the dead rise
Struggling for breath
Will the earth be emptied?

Will I then see my father
The-only-one-without-a-navel?

III

This is not the rustling of leaves
But the dead spreading rumours
And those are not furrows
But fresh wounds
Decay quickened by lime

We sit down and eat the dead
Bones do not stick in the throat
But bullets they were awarded
Or a piece of knife rusted by blood

Instead of buds nipples blossom in spring
Nipples of women who screamed
And died during their orgasms

IV

The crypts will yawn like empty warehouses
The tombs will open like large calyxes
Of flowers no longer carnivorous

The icons will verily become saints and apostles
The churches will crumble
And in their dust the barefooted Christ will joyfully splash

(Who says I am for chaos?
So long as the laws get broken)

Hot roots but rough arteries
Burst through rock
Transforming it into another force

V

The dead will come off the foundations
The immured structures collapse

VI

When spiders lower themselves from the sky
I, the little doubter, will recognize that man
And he will recognize me
By the original icon I have carried around
Heretic

The stars scattered like dice
And the sky troubled by a fearful pattern
Shipwrecks men and saints
The thorny wreath of oblivion does not save them.

Hell’s pot boils, spilling over the filth
Boyars, priests, beggars slurp up the thick soup
No one's spoon is long enough
To scrape greasy salvation's bottom.

Brothers, we have gone through to the end
Munched fire, thrown a new ball
On the roulette of the sky. From every direction
The void between stars blows our sails,

A breeze keeps swey the mold
From our open and simple tombs.
A new constellation will appear in our nothingness
Just as a worm was born in your faith.
From “The Desert Woman”
(a sequence of poems)

The bitch of the world and space
has milked my seed
and left me a husk
a grain of sand in the desert

Still my seed is a gliding roe
a yoke—the sun in the egg
that bears
a new Adam—son of the Ocean

I see this
because I am the eye at the fish

always open
even when dead
A Stranger at Home, at Home Elsewhere

So many times I said to myself—
you should finish the work at home
you should burn everything to ashes

Then
like a cold fly I stumbled
around the city lights of the world

Tonight
when all the lights and senses are mute
The root (that yesterday crunched between the teeth)

now lures me back
to become its own sprout—
a head impaled on a stake
Quest: In Search of My Genes

It seemed they had fallen from me right at the beginning
like coins through a possible hole in my pocket
as if from those Gypsy boys in a Skopje self-service
who were caught with shoplifted chocolates
which slipped through their pockets right into their boots

because at Star Dojran, Koljo's lies
(or rather, the irresistible mythological imagination
fed by several generations of frustrations
before the until now closed Greek-Yugoslav frontier)
consumed "the promised lamb" on the Greek side

and when we crossed the newly opened border pass
at the Greek Doirani there was no exchange or bank open
so I couldn't change my travellers checks
but, after I ate a carp in a restaurant, the proprietor,
who knew some Macedonian, changed a 100 DM note.

Finally, at the village of Chuguntsi, now Megali Sterna,
there was, of course, no trace of my grandpa's genes or mill,
he who had fled from the pressure of the Greek Patriarchate in 1903—
the stream bed was empty (the source captured?):
under a plane-tree from his time we took some photos.

"Want to dig up Turkish liras?" laughed the peasants,
the offspring of the Caucasian Greeks settled here in 1921,
a Yorgo took us for a walk through the village
and then in his own bar paid us a coffee each,
we speaking with our few words in Greek.

On the way back, driving to Kukush, or Kilkis,
we were caught by a cloud of rain with light buckshots of hail
(but what is that compared to the heavy artillery fire
with which the Greeks chased our people in the 2nd Balkan War!)
with only one ray of light like Providence towards the North
while all the time a small grain of sharp stone
was pinching me in my right shoe,
so when we got back home, i.e., to Star Dojran,
I could hardly wait to get hold of the intruder
and throw it far among the other stones on the lakeside.

In the morning, after a whole series of self-directed dreams,
crossing easily from one to another as if tossing
from one to the other side of the double bed,
I had left myself nothing but the question:
what does reality offer me to wake up?

Breakfast, said the woman I was sleeping with.
How do you know? I jumped.—You were speaking in your dreams,
and I guarded you.—From what?—From other women.
And I was already hearing the genes of my family
talking over who has obtained what of the past for how much...

When I finally got up and dressed, although unwillingly,
my pocket had a real hole (and likewise my sock!),
the lake was still there after all, with the frontier,
but from my ancestor on the other side, was I here?
or for my grandson who will be watching through a pair of binoculars

from this same spot, me and himself, probably
a stone among the stones of sand on the lakeside,
from this or that side of the frontier,
button and buttonhole of the same jacket,
and the lake, by all means, gone by then.
Future?

As the landscape fades from your eyes,
so we, the homunculi of your pupils, grow numb
as figures inside a dead mirror;

and so our genes melt like the ice cubes in our drinks,
or break apart, groaning—
are they pills to make us better or poison for oblivion?

We drink the ashes of our dead
and our glassy eyes fill up again
not with reflections of you, or of God

but with the strange, unknown landscape
of some new or foreign land
we walk through as if invisible

with eyes so transparent they seem empty:
yet sometimes their surface alone seems to ripple—
like pages describing what might have been?
Poems

In the beginning was Darkness
and here it is now, at the end

In between there was
Light here and there

and many sparks dancing:
one me, the other you, etc.

only flashes in the mind
and then nothing

* * *

Since there's been flying into Space
the bird built its nest
in its own shadow

The Sun, setting,
fell into the hole
dug for it

by agents of Darkness.
Ridiculous worry

You can't be "too much i' the sun" (Hamlet)
however much you may wish it

because you're placed under the protection
of a parasol

and if you dare to close it
you will be stilled by its protective wings
Envoi

1.

The world is changing my poem
but my poem's also changing the world
at least my world

My world is the poem
My poem is the world

And I -
a mask over emptiness?
Whose -
spirit or matter?

I am in my world and in my poem
I am what alone need not endure
but without which both poem and world can come to a
full stop.

2.

What will be seen first
is who and what is

Something? Nothing?
So much the better

But at least I was
Upon me fell a ray
of primeval light

And then it went away
when I let it.

Off you go, I say to it

3.

I'm coming, it says
Speaking of Freedom

Breathing is as easy for us
as flying is for birds

whereas
it ought to be a toilsome task

which exhausts us so
that one day we don't get to work

only such breathing
not mechanical, but willed

can bring back breath to the dead

London, 1973
Déјà vu

I read the book and I
re-run the film in my mind
Something familiar?
My gesture
reminds me of something

Have I forgotten
or have they destroyed it?
Who? I or another?
Rival culture?
Natural disaster?

One thing I know: I was, and am
No - one, and nothing challenges that
But the more I know, the less I believe
And already I hear them say to me:

Know less, and then believe!
Believe in the unseen
in the invisible
even though it has been
already seen.
Breaking Up the Wall

Does the brick make sense
When the wall is smashed?
It does.
As obstacle, as opposing force,
wanting to save what it meant before
in the line of the sentence made with
the other bricks on the page of the wall

Like a typewriter striking the page the hammer
punches holes in the paper-wall
and the letters drop out on the other side
utterly incomprehensible, broken up
even if only one letter falls out
first of the alphabet
absolute A.

The quickest way to break up a wall
knock out all the bricks marked A
no wall or building can survive like that
carry them then to a desert and build
a pyramid there
which from base to summit will shout
a long sharp A
so that the very stars will hear
and the letters will all be knocked from the walls
and multiply to infinity
every one of them differently

Only thus will language be re-made
only thus the world be rearranged
and only thus maybe
a new poem written

As it is
I have only exhausted muscles
dry dust in my mouth
and the fallen bricks—

the heads of those
who knocked their heads against the wall
and still weep with the pain of the hammer

and my own head
against the wall
I broke
-en ME
Survival

Barefoot, wherever you stepped
you uprooted plants and perennials, already

drying, until you had walked to the limit
and grew a trunk, perennially
rooted in you, at home.

One day, in the cleaving of light
and dark, it will fall from you
(into the abyss or the thunderbolt,

it hardly matters), and you will endure
as a dandelion spore,
survive

in the origins of hope
like a hat flung carelessly from the car
one moment after the fatal collision.
Vita Nuova

Death comes for us as a chimney sweep
with bloody eyes and a soot-smeared face

to set fire to our former lives, though
he burns himself as our house burns down

and the chimney collapses
(pounded by rains for a daily wage

of half-unfinished work)
How can we live without a chimney

—an open hearth
beneath the cold stars?

The fire among us
and all of us burning

blind to each
other as well

as the chimney sweep
who gathers our ashes
A Flight

The womb of the cave inside you breathing
and the voice of a wild beast
sealed by padlock

silence breaks down the door
flees from the camp, rides
off into a vast desert

speaks to itself
or...
to God
Prometheus’ Eagle

The Caucasus is a cage for me too.
Even though I'm not chained to that cliff
I have to peck his liver all day long
so at night, of course, I'm just buggered.

While his liver regenerates and grows
I dream of the endless space
where I used to glide freely
before the gods gave me this damned job.

They don't know what they want anymore:
they say – peck him, but not too much, don't let him die.
Let it hurt him, yet sometimes just tickle him
so that he blurps out his thoughts.

Yel I don't even understand his words!
I know what's in his entrails,
I know what he eats and drinks
but how figure out the language of his cells?

Hmmm, they pretend to be gods, but they understand zilch.
While I peck away, and I can't do much more,
mice and rats eat up even the sacrifices
still offered by the people
not to mention the summer and winter crops.
As I say, I'm so stuffed I can't even fly
(and I've grown to loathe liver, I've had a gutfull, enough for a lifetime!).
The poor guys, they must think Prometheus is only the liver.
An Island on Land

"... the Republic of Macedonia is a landlocked country..."

Who says we haven't got a sea?
We don't have it now, it doesn't wash our borders
but once it was in our backyard
then it dried up, what was left was confiscated
together with our house, and us, refugees left homeless.

How can we make do without a sea?
Banished upwards, to the north, we remain (until we cool off)
still in harmony with it (that umbilical cord!) beyond 300 mountains
So what if (as in bygone times) it was (is) called white, black, blue
it is always the same yet different – morning, noon, night.

Good that it's here, though locked in caves and underground rivers
the high tide thunders in our dreams, the ebb tide runs us aground into reality
Drought is its salt, its blueness – vast, open sea, horizonless –
is a glacier stuck between cliffs that takes shape from longing

for the primaeval ocean – with internalised traces, excessive in their power,
of its breathing in the pulse of our veins.
Finally – and why not? – our salty blood is
punishment for the ancestral sin. Because you once drank brotherly blood
that is why to this day you cannot drink the sea.
The Nightingale Is Among Us Again

He has returned to the garden to boycott our poverty
ignore the embargo, and sleep through the war.

No one knows why. Perhaps he loves the trees
we had meant to cut, though never did, or the company

of crows and cackling magpies, the doves and cats,
or simply children, the pool sprung from the cracked drain?

Perhaps he loves us, "lords of the manor" ... not likely, not since
a neighbor, who never slept "for all the goddamned singing,"

tried to run him off. Now he's silent. He's found
a mate, returned to an invisible nest.

What's happened to us? The songbird's
clueless. No concern.

Nor his concern ours ... for over a year we never
noticed his absence (as our absence will go unnoticed).

Now we remember because of song
disturbing our sleep, this constant unease.

May such song spill among this modest poem
and next year find us, here, at home

with the new lords of the manor, absent,
a new song pouring forth, as if nothing

could happen, or would. Our neighbors, falling
toward sleep, burrowing under, futures only oblivion.
The Womb on a Palm

Like a ghost cavalry, the rain retreats
across the field of black birds; only
the spent shells are real, the open wounds
in the lake's palm, those sharp points of pain.
Not wounds; like ugly chancres, more.

The beast whose flesh becomes ice,
becalmed, and licks its sores—
one long tongue a wave of soothing consolation.
The nymphs unfold their linen on the shore,
slough away the foam and dirt.

Half-dried reeds ululate (like spears
transformed) on how their wings gave out—
offshoots of the sitting duck,
mallards and cormorants, their green
and blue feathers, plumes and beaks.

Water turns and turns and restores its womb,
among these pale clouds boiling in fire.
Blue sky now. The sun. And the lake
a great emerald roiled from deep transparency:
Easter egg speckled like a rainbow trout.

Ohrid Lake, late March
The Scapegoat

after René Girard

Be free, but on your own.
Flee to the wilderness across the border
if you want to be unlike us
or among us, under such control.

It's better you suffer, you
and your heirs, better
to admit it and free us
from our guilt
so we won't be forced to repeat this ugly incident.

You've been chosen, all the same,
not by merit but by lot--
isn't it enough that what you've said
is already censored and forbidden
before you've said it? Stillborn acts.

You'll encourage others
to swear and spit on you-
and they'd do the same to us, too
though now their praise flows over us.

Others might choose you as the next
Sweet Victim. You may think
we killed your father
and each took turns with your mother,
but it was you who did it,
who though, so blissfully sincere...
The End as Renaissance

The circle closing

Who throws you the rope?
Time itself, the season for change...
Your own country.

You have stepped into it
tied your feet only
to swim the Adriatic
and sink like a torpedoed hull
to the bottom
stone-cold drunk

You have organized terrorist cells
with safe-houses in your body
beginning to explode

You have placed the noose
around your neck this perpetual halo
that hangs around you
now just a matter of time
when you will hang suspended
above an open pit

your own well of time, concentric
circles on a boundless surface

this noose is only the first

8.12.1989
A Reminder

I strain a muscle the length of my right arm
lifting a haversack for a girl on a train.
What is she carrying? I wonder.
This heavy load, stones all the way from Athos?

I carried a weight that heavy, once. A stone
I turned over at the port of holy Hilander,
splashing in the blue shoal, waiting for the boat
to Jericho. It was like a rainbow. I couldn't resist.

I kept it in my pack, by boat, bus, train. Then
I kept it to press the pickles in barrel, going
sour, and then it split, the rainbow's colors running,
mourning for the sea, its one true brine.

the train to Prague, 12. XII 90.
Incarnation

keep the bones of your ancients
let them put on weight a little flesh

use the ash of the ancestors
to knead the living

and dust from the desert's floor
turn it into mountain karst as

a dream falls of its own accord
like a flailing comet

and the half-life of memory
again reality again

stone breaks from the karst
and falls to the desert tempted by dust

or bursts at the stake a heart
turning to ash and air and wind

and held by the wind
the body looks back

to the skeletal house made of bones
gleaming and smoking
After the Flood, Them Again

Not only did the Ark have a rough landing, but it also ran aground
on this hard rock of Ararat, here and then (as if it were now),
because its gopher wood (of acacia or cypress tree) is rotten
and has already decomposed from the scars it earned during the Flood
(just like this Old Testament scroll
which tells us about the event, and is now crumbling at our touch)

the shipwreck survivors have long been scattered
in pairs, or single (widows or widowers) –
those who had survived the storm and the Flood
and those who had barely saved their lives
in the stampede that occurred while disembarking the Ark
in fear, chaos and panic, and, of course,

what matters is that the lives of the people and the animals
of those who were chosen by Jehovah (and, perhaps, Noah),
have since continued and have multiplied
(though some species, very likely, have been decimated)
together with the seeds sprouting wildly in the thriving peat
(like the punctuation marks that are missing in this scroll)

the old bacteria and insects, the new mutants
the people of all races and their mixture, the descendants
of Noah's sons, or of the Ark's stowaways...
truly – Noah disappeared without trace (like a captain
who last leaves the sinking wreckage)
but the rainbow remained as a sign of a new Covenant

but what shall we do with these new Noahs who are building
their own arks for the oncoming flood that they prepare
so that only they and their chosen few survive –
worrying like ostriches who stick their heads in the sand
made dizzy by their own insatiable desires,
and we, who are to fulfill them, divide by cloning, AIDS...
Judas Iscariot

Am I the only Traitor
because I am Judas "of Cariot"?
As if Jesus himself was not betrayed enough
when, even without my kiss, he was cornered on the Mount of Olives.

I at least kissed him (only when He allowed me to)
before some other disciples pointed a finger at Him,
I at least joined Him in death, and they remained
to cross themselves and baptize through kissing the crucifix...

My conscience still suffers because of those thirty pieces of silver
and the damnation that I sold Him cheaply (both Him and myself)
but how about all my disciples and heirs
who sold themselves for nothing and even bribed others

to sell their "Teacher" (and their "disciples" among others)
who they didn't even know in person (let alone to give him a kiss)
and even when "He" had neither seen nor heard about them...

Since then it's become easy to be a traitor – but not to find a man
who is worthy enough to be betrayed for a reasonable sum,
and today, there's lots of buying and selling for different reasons
but no real Jesuses and Judases in this world, not the least in Cariot.
The End of the Century

Of the Rock that begat thee thou art
unmindful, and hast forgotten God
that formed thee.

V Moses; 32, 18

They say we refused the stone as God's gift
(instead of it we chose the Fruit and the Fall)
so our life turned green, then ripe and then rotten
and not immutable and immortal

Therefore our prayers are in vain
our breath and words uttered by heart
(breathing as a constant sacrifice?)
from speech – until muteness

Perhaps we've already entered the stone
(the darkness within deeper than the darkness without)
within the rock and the cairn at a crossroad
which even at noon doesn't cast a shadow

and we gaze from within like owls
with sparks in the eyes, praying in silence
and accepting the Nothingness, the bridge
over the abyss between us and God

They say, after our Fall
even God expelled Himself
closed himself within Himself
to be born and to be given birth

And we only kindled the fire
but did not vanish –
we returned to nonexistence
and glow inside
Dead Christ

After the painting by Hans Holbein Jr.,(1522)
and the interpretation of Julia Christeva*

They've just taken him down from the cross:
he is a corpse like any other corpse
bluish, cold, suddenly grown old, diminished, dried
with blackened wounds instead of nails

Perhaps they saw him like that – his mother,
Mary Magdalene, his disciples, the future apostles, etc.
"How could they believe that he would rise again?"
Hypolite asks himself (i.e. Dostoyevski himself in The Idiot)
"They must've run away in horrible fear..."

Just as he would've run away
from the cross if he'd known
that he would really die crucified
and forsaken by his Father ("My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?")
that he would be taken down from the cross like a simple corpse

But only the truly dead Christ could rise
"from the gruesome abyss of sin and hell" (Calvin)
and through the death of his old body
could he make room for the eternally new and the communion
of the faithful

Though "God is dead, God himself is dead!" (cries Hegel)
His sacrifice is the "greatest love"
and "final renunciation of the self for the Other"
like a "victory over the grave Sheol" and "death of death"

His sacrifice was, actually, a gift to himself out of mercy,
and not a punishment and suffering – a reconciliation
through individual service to mutual atonement,
as is the meaning of the Hebrew "gha'al":
"to redeem property and persons from another's ownership"

That and such corpse they put in the grave
and presumably from there he disappeared the following day
but what if he in fact remained inside the grave
and was later joined there by his apostles (and by all of us?)
as Pascal interpreted it:
"Jesus Christ had no other place to rest on earth but in a grave
and only there did his enemies stop torturing him."

That is also the spring which suddenly appears
from my mother's grave to quench my future thirst!

* - Julia Christeva, Black Sun, Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1994.

Chaos

First you hear some noise outside
numerous voices, a few shouts and moans
revealing pain, anger, unrest, wild joy or exultation

You go out to see what it is and wherever you look
mouths open and close with hunger and thirst
or it is only the huge mouth of the universe

which roars unearthly like an earthquake
or thunders and strikes – faraway explosions and fire
from cannons and tanks at the frontline of the horizon

Invisible crowds yell and scream and shriek
and from these cries you seem to depict some words
existing in some unknown and obscure language

Get quickly inside the house
close the door and the shutters of all windows
lest they too become mouths

Then close the eyelids
to be illumined within by the primordial darkness –
outwith there is only a causal chaos

*
– It can't work like this!
– How else?
– Any other way, but not like this!
Different, not the same!

They all are /we/ you the saaaame...

shouts the Echo of the Voice:
I am different,
I am at least Handsome, says another

Don't knead me all in the dough
I am at least a speck of separate dust
though unseen and unseeable
I fly/fall separately and individually

*
They spit on you from one side
from another – they yell at you
from yet another – they stick out their tongues at you
from yet yet another – silence

and in the middle of that chaotic whirlpool
you don't know what side to turn to
whichever you choose
it seems you are doing it yourself

and the wind returns your spit
now sprayed with the cries –
those making "the strategy of chaos"
cannot themselves put up with the consequences

they only return to God
what he bestowed them with
their own ignorance and weakness
and the dust they'd been kneaded with

but without His breath which we spent
in futile quarrels – why, who, how...
that's why we're only a shapeless crowd
to divide us according to the eastern sin and sign

*
I tell the garbage man
collecting garbage along the beach:
They've done it again!

He looked at me lively and smiling:
Let them do it as much as they want
It gives me a job to make my bread

God forbid if I were left
with only what the lake washes out
I can't bake a roll from it

and there's so much filth on earth
that all the jobless could find work
till the end of their lives!
Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani?

to father Stephen

Did they crucify him alive
and who removed him dead -
did only his shadow remain to hover
and the print of his body on the shroud?

He crucified himself when he wanted to run
from himself to the four ends
of the world and he removed himself from the cross
when he found himself resurrected

(it was a drop of dew
felled by a random ray
on two crossed veins
as it slipped along the groove of the leaf

its green meat was eaten by a caterpillar
only a skeleton-ghost remained
while the worms inside and the vultures outside
did their work)

The stone remained to testify
where the cross had been raised
eaten up by termites
and the scream opened to gasp

The stone was smashed by horseshoes
worn away by the bare feet of believers
for the dust-annunciation that will disperse
to be spread everywhere

The opening circled the cross for a while
(then it became an aura around the head of the resurrected
and finally we saw him withdraw
to the Father - to the black sky.

And since then we've waited for the answer to fall
like a fiery rain
or a space spore
for a new life.

(the bud opened into a flower
to feed or to eat the bee
the seed cracked through its pod
to be pecked by or to mute the bird)

But why do we keep on dressing the cross even now
like a scarecrow with the rags of our suffering –
to scare the trained vultures?
to protect ourselves - the self-sacrificed?
Communion

according to Mircea Eliade

The foreigners who baptized us,
tore out the first page of the Gospel
to hide the truth
that He, the Savior, was one of us

To welcome him back again
at the head of all our dead
dress up in your finest garments
and wait by the set table

He will arrive in the morsels and sips
and if you do not feel him, he came and went
He, their Savior, but not ours, which means
that you are already theirs, foreign

and we, and ours, maybe we are already gone.
A Delphic Oracle?

My body is Apollo's lyre
and if you pluck the strings
perhaps you'll sound an unknown chord...

perhaps you will unleash the shaft
that in this game till now has always
managed to escape its mark.

Delphi, Parnassos, 1. V. 1980
The Room Is Not Empty

The empty space may be a wall
cracking the head
the axe the rock has blunted
the diamond plucked from the scalp

The room is only empty

of myself and of material things
through which countless travelers
pass easily without passports
without baggage in their forward or return

There in the emptiness I orbit

unoccupied with worry
where the settlement of care is yesterday
at war with the being of tomorrow
to humble or humiliate in time

to pass away again senselessly through the measured now
Emptiness

There is a hole in absence
where whatever ought to be leaves
some kind of emptiness behind…
The forbidding self groans after me

with something out of which
I'm cast, like a seed from the pod
still in me yet enveloping me
like an invisible bubble,

a womb above an empty chasm,
this hushed silence when
the chick is hatched and the egg
remains whole, untouched:

that's how my faithful dog at the doorstep,
left the bones he had greedily gnawn,
as I step out of the house and stumble:
kicking the marrow and cursing him.
Eclipse

A new voice:
Let there be dark
And there was

as if needles pierced your eyes
and sight spilled over into your palms
as if you were Oedipus on his way to Colonus

an old man who walks with a cane between your legs
like a sixth sense—now you are a prophet and need no light
to guide you, now it is the trained dog of fate who guides you

clairvoyant in your own house while
others grope and randomly collide and
bloody fireflies of pain illuminate their path

so god forbid that light return and that you see again
you'll lose whatever immunity you had, you'll need
an extra finger to reach the flute's rarely touched notch

a note upon which no one is playing
with the always missing sixth finger
in the dark so difficult to find the right hole
Fate

On a flat plane, cast three stones
and then choose one. Perhaps

pick the shiniest—as it turns out,
it's the finger bone of an ancestor,

a die polished from so much use
no matter how much it's thrown,

it betrays itself as constant zero.
You wish you could hold on

to chance the other two. You head
back to the beach, but by now they are

so mixed with all the countless other rocks,
faceless faces in the gravel,

you could pick any one, as if it were
the only the thing you owned:

you could make it throb and pulse, like
grabbing your own balls, and holding on…
The Sea, the Sea

after Xenophon

You think the sea labors?
The sea absents its work—
turning in gyres like a water mill
pounding water into mortar, grinding, pouring
sand from porous absence, producing
out of time our own sweet time
and doesn't give a damn for us, fellow Slavs!
I Heard a Complaint

The man who knows everything
complains to those who don't

believe him: they've given him a spade
to prove he can dig, and he has shown

them, how he can get by
in the hole they tell him now to lie in
Doubting Thomas

After he'd appeared among us,
Jesus took a bite of fish
just to prove he had been resurrected
while we, in awe, just stared.

Then Peter was the first
who ate the fish to learn
if it, too, was flesh and not
spirit. After, Jesus
made an offering and all
the disciples took from it;
that is, all but me. The Twin.
And it was then he told me,
Reach out, and probe your finger
in my wounds. Touch my hands.
Hither thy doubt, deep within
my side. Give up your faith-
lessness, take on belief.
Which I did, like an automaton,
and so I am remembered forever.

Yet this sudden thought, this un-
uttered cry that hangs in the air... this
is where the future lives:
Raise from death, O Christ,
the fish you have just eaten!
And then, this instant premonition:

Perhaps there will be believers in both
the body and the body's resurrection,
but there will be no fish left:

All the Christians will have devoured them.
A Figure of Transfixion

Somewhere in his Vision, Yeats centers
(and likely argued in Rapallo, constantly,
with Ezra over it), on Byzantine "oval,
bird-like eyes, transfixed upon the miracle."
(Like some eternal profile
of the hieroglyphic god gazing
at the infinite, his godhead beak
pecking free of its telluric eggshell.)
Still, in 1925, he pre-dates
Spengler's dismal vision of our fate
in The Decline of the West, and writes
of Byzantine eyes "staring at infinity."
The miraculous and the immeasurable…

As a child, I thought those faces
fixed inside the frescoes and ikons
of our church were so transfixed
because they meant a kind of trumpeting
announcement of the miracle
they'd undergone. They had
seen Jesus or God, or, like St. John
of the Apocalypse, had been buried
alive and witnessed Death.
They looked as though they could leap
from the wall, in flames. Yet where
could they go, with those ghastly, mutilated feet?
—they couldn't cross the threshold,
couldn't touch us with their agony
as we stood still before such figures
of transfixion. I never believed
in their miracle. And I was always
afraid of their bloodthirsty eyes…

Perhaps the miracle itself
was suspect. In the frescoes,
the white sterile absence where
the eyesockets had been
seemed to make their blind faces live
again. During five centuries
of Ottoman oppression, faith itself
became so literal—if only out of pure
despair—the true believers would gouge
the pigment (most often malachite,
applied to pupil and iris) from the painted eyes
as a miraculous cure for disease.
Their hypnotic orbs, hollowed away,
perpetrated shallow miracles. Now,
centuries later, I stare at the palimpsest:
these figures of transfixion, disfigured for belief...

The transfixion
continues. As though Czar Samuil's
blinded soldiers have only just
returned from Vodocha—"the place
where the eyes were taken out"—
to reinvision how it takes possession.
When we climb the slopes toward Matka, Saint Andrea,
or Nerezi, when we enter the stone chambers,
it seems their faces, these figures of such
deep lamentation, all look so natural
in pain. Haunted by ikons, now
I am one, transfixed, staring through
windows to the slopes outside, to the wild
mushrooms scattered in the forest. Purified
through fasting, I've become famished... outside,
Borjan catches up to me and calls with a child's
natural curiosity, "Papa, look! You're staring
at the future!" (This is the familiar
game we've invented, my futile
explanation for the emptiness.)
"No," I cry, according to the rules, "it's nature
I'm astonished by..."

*
But neither the future nor creation
can answer my own figured amazement,
neither appreciate the wonder nor
comprehend such miracle. Only the dumb
gaze of emptiness—"the immortal
cast of the beast staring through us," Rilke
would say—the same somewhere always
somewhere else. The fetus pulled unwillingly
from the warm womb, as though the earth
herself has become one vast, looming orb
of penetration: with lots of mushy abstract
thoughts chasing each self-referential reference
to itself through murky clouds; oceans
of current and humans, trafficking in voices,
among the tribes. Like a poker groping through
the living ash, we gaze at the stars and the dark
space behind them and the emptiness of that terra
incognita we'll soon enough be heading for...

Ourselves alone with the world.
The then of these years and the now
of the future, the measure between,
the time when they both pass into one
final time running backwards,
where the light will emerge
from our eyes and be absorbed by stars.
And transfixed, we will collapse
along with all the atoms that composed us,
along with gravity itself, and with death
become all the bits we were
flying away until we re-compose
as anti-matter, so that
we might transcend forever,
if only we would, or even could,
believe in the miracle...
A Knife at Your Throat

For those in this world
for whom only force counts
—to them, you cannot respond
with pious tenderness.
You answer: power to power

You cannot coo like a dove
attracting a mate
as long as one shot still kindles,
peppers the air with its lead threat
—no mere fluke how all
is tense with possibility.

You cannot act
as if force does not...
cannot sing like a nightingale
who swoons at the sound of his voice
(hoping to topple you with fascinating
rhythms) because, you see, you yourself
have fallen, too: the once suspended air
rushes out—exhausted, breathless...
Drink Wine, Before It Sours

Where is the new crop, that Beaujolais
of impure thirst that quenches like a spring
and never sours?

And yes, if left untouched, will spoil.
Yet, if drunk, even
if it becomes your last

glass refilled time and again to its brim,
you must sip at each toast.
This is the glass you cannot avoid.

Old wine grows rare,
thick and rich, a taste
only the resurrected will enjoy...
To My ex-Yugoslav Friends From FYROM

How will we meet again, my friends?
Will we recognize ourselves, how
we are what we always were?

It startles me, for example, to see your faces
in the newspapers and journals
that are still available here, with articles

about or by you. How much older
you've become in these years, how
changed by all the meanwhile, mostly war.

Each of us knows it in a different way.
Hiding in a cellar, exposed to some internal
opposition. Only time accelerates in space,

fragmenting all our borders. We
are bastards in the quarrel's wake
among our European stepfathers

in world capitals, as our forefathers
were: coteries of tribe, nation, state...
We speak our monologues to God

or to the grave. God, how my own face,
grown old, pulls the broken bits together
like a magnet. You can't see me,

perhaps—perhaps you never will.
We have eternity to catch up
with each other and our work.

We'll face each other on the Judgment Day
and pluck our eyes in disbelief,
drinking at the club named Who Was Right?
Homage to Vasko Popa

Bark, you dogs, just bark...

I had just read that poem of yours, the only truth
in all Politika's culture supplement, when I saw you,
strolling down Prince Mihailo Boulevard.
After we hugged, I said, "Well, you told them!"

"Whom... do you mean?" you asked me coldly.
"Well, them..." I answered and cut short, only then
just noticing the one beside you, walking in your shadow.
I made a gesture to the air, to nowhere in particular...

This was some time ago, two decades back perhaps.
I don't recall the season in those dangerous, "woolen times."
I was in Belgrade for a short while, likely on my way to England.
We had not seen each other well or long enough that time.

It turned out to be the last. Later, I understood your mythical
wolfs refrain, how it meant to signify those curs, the watchdogs,
these politicians. Perhaps you felt true wolves panting behind you,
licking their fangs in wait for our "brotherly" throats

as you told your fear of it to another friend and poet
much later, just before your expected death and the death
of Bosnia , and then Kosovo—and now us... You
must have known how wolves wake at the sound of yelping dogs.

We were those dogs. With our gapteeth and dentures, most
of us remain. Most of those young wolves were broken; bleeding
and crushed, they fell from the pack—from self-inflicted wounds
or what they gave each other. Only the eyeteeth of their own

cleansed selves remains, this cursed inheritance for our descendants.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead?

for the presentation of Tom Stoppard's play
at the Macedonian Dramatic Theater

As if to be born,
they were summoned.
A messenger was sent for
to take them from the womb
of their anonymous mother.

From there, their job
was to head straight back to the palace.
In a doubling, the play
sets the two of them, alone,
on a bare stage.

The only thing they own
is a coin they cannot share.
It should belong to neither.
Flung in the air, it always
lands on "heads."

Like Siamese twins
separated at birth,
one does nothing without the other.
One is the other: Ros is
Gil and Gil, Ros.

But each seems himself
whenever they knock heads
against the question: Who are we?
And why were they picked up
in the here and now?

Offstage, lines are whispered to them—
how they should declare the state is rotten,
that young Hamlet
(since they once were friends)
is so distracted by it all.

(Hamlet could just as well
be a model Macedonian:
a father, killed; throne, usurped;
and a mother who remarries
as quickly as she can.)

So many questions
without answer...
Why should our Ros and Gil
be the ones to find,
if not create them?

Here come the foreign actors,
who go wherever they like...
at least they know who they are,
what and how they'll act
if properly paid.

They make the whole thing
all the more confusing.
They construct the trap
for the usurper to disclose himself.
Poor Polonius falls victim.

The play's the thing
here, of course. The King
has been set up—a secret drama—
yet means to send his stepson
into exile, if not execution.

The bearers of the message
have returned—who else but Ros and Gil
(under their Macedonian guise as Trpe and Trajche)?
Yet Hamlet has cleverly turned
and turns upon the messengers.

So grossly abused
by their own companion,
once removed... there was a time
in the beginning
when each could have shouted No!

But that's not what the playwright wanted!
So the play goes on...
Are they really dead?
Perhaps they've just refused
to be born again or summoned.

Peeping through the key-hole,
they whisper to each other: Not yet!
This time, they won't cheat us...
meanwhile, let's not answer,
even if God himself is calling!
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu?

How could I have missed the fall this year?
Have I trans-shipped cargo texts across the English tongues
of the Atlantic and through the mixed Mediterranean
only to founder upstream at the river's source—this spring, my mouth?

In its own tongue, the spawned eel returns to Lake Ohrid
from the Sargasso Sea, though it—like me—
has no idea of origins, even as it wriggles through
dry earth or rotting leaves. Hear, then, what instinct says:

even gold can rust in evil times, not just our senses.
Perhaps I should have plucked an eyeball out
and set it like a camera's objectivity to catch the failing
of the single leaf, to live again through that unforgettable fall

named Bosnia, or witness, like an old eel
on its final journey to the Sargasso, how we pass
in the Irish leaghs of eternal autumn. The eye will
whittle down the golden maggot in each of its cells.

*****
Each gorgeous day
emerges from fog
to wash over me like a pebble

from the muddy river. Far from the city's lid
my son and I stand alone, in the gorge of the river Treska,
under the shell of brilliant sky.

That smells like the sea, Borjan says—my true
descendant who can smell the sea in the depths of mountains
on a southwest wind with the clouds, foaming and racing,

like waves. Like waves, like the manes of galloping steeds,
I say: where the riders cover the peaks with their cloaks
like shrouds and the coins from their pockets let loose and fly

like the confetti of last falling leaves,
and seeds flung far from sight
spring even on half-rotting trunks

pulled from the river. Logs for the winter—
meant to burn slowly and for a long time, to warm us,
inside, where it remains far colder than out here.
After Such Past, What Future?

With all the past's weight,
we have become so light
we may simply disappear.

All history seems an epitaph,
our seed so long suppressed
its roots grow numb…

Some other time or place,
perhaps, we'll see the trigger
pulled, the anchor cast away,

and we might root in earth,
to spring up like janissaries
at our neighbors' throats...

Right straight through the earth,
like antipodes or enemies,
like exotic plants whose tendrils

have escaped the potted boundaries
they had been planted in and planned for.
The clay is cracked...

the earth is scorched
and cleansed,
again.

After such pasts, what sort of future?