| —Translated from Slovenian, from The Book of Bodies (2010) |
The word waiting
The word waiting
Under the harrow.
The earth is waiting
For the grain
To be sown.
It sprouts.
The wheat is waiting
For the moons.
Grinding
The flour for weeks
For the yeast.
One, two days
And the mouth
Goes back on its word.
A musty gold coin
In the bread.
The teeth
Stop grinding
For a moment.
The hidden
Shadow of a mountain
Reveals the field.
It is a secret
Why
The waiting is slower
For the fall
Into silence
As one
Climbs up
The word.
Hungry and thirsty,
It arrives
Unannounced.
Its story
About its adventures
Is food
For the wind.
The word tatters
The word tatters.
Weathered pieces
Of old
Melodies,
Quotations,
Folded
Inside the pockets
Of new, oh,
Always new
Words.
They get worn out.
Destroyed by
Moths,
Revolutions,
Poets.
A still
Unspoken
Noun
Of action
Of future
Verb tense
Is already mending.
Like the impression
Of bodies
In the soil,
A word
Decays
In the powerlessness
Of space,
The shape of a word,
Never definitively
Remembered,
Definitively
Saved language.
Someone takes a step.
Some nobody
Who will
Once again
Mend
The echoes
Of faded footsteps
Into departure.
This tomorrow’s “when”
Without utopia
And place
Is the song
Of today’s
Dissolution.
The word end
The word end
At all ends
And places
So you
Become more and more
An archive.
The word end,
The word unready,
An incision that requires
Trust.
Without a trace,
Like drowning
In a vanishing sentence
During
Quiet lovemaking.
The end of a poem.
Not a place,
Indeterminacy,
A body,
Not mine
Not yours,
The body of a relic.
It pierces us
Like a needle,
Like the word needle.
It sewed nothing,
Unraveled nothing.
The word pricks,
The body moans,
Extends a tongue,
Though nothing
Happens,
Everything
Has once again
Concluded.
From an end
Two hands
Grow.
A body,
Everywhere
Open
On all sides
Of a place
That only
Can be
Circumvented,
A name
That is missing
And has abolished
Every beginning.