Translated by the poet and Skye Lavin


In The Evening Sadness Comes. . .

In the evening sadness comes
         and stands by the door, his face
Is hidden, from the dying sun
         he took some colors and painted his body
The sadness comes in the evening,
I stretched my hand and he caught my wrist,
         in an iron-hard clasp
He caught me out from my room, his face
Is black, he is ahead of me and I follow him
I crossed from the evening to the night,
      from the night to the dawn,
        then the morning, the noon, the day, the month
Crossing water, tree, boat, city, hill
Crossing blows, stumbling, poison, suspicions, jealousy,
         graves, genocide, the bones and ribs of civilization,
                     swamp and grass
Then crossing my own death,
          death after death, going on and on
The bony fingers holding nothing but a pen
Nothing...

Translated by the poet and Skye Lavin


One Man

Suspicion comes and sits on his shoulder one morning,
Slowly with long, thin beak, it cleans his ear,
When his eye closed with pleasure— suspicion —
                               with a tweet entered
    into the hollow of his ear,
         and he did not notice.

Since then always the sound of the bird
                   beating its wings in his skull,
When he tried to hear someone instead
         he heard that sound,
When he looked in someone's eye
        he always saw the eye of the bird,
Waking up every morning he cut off one friendship,
In the night when he lay beside his sleeping wife,
        checking his own body
He wants to examine it to be sure
        that his wife is not sleeping with anybody else.

Translated by the poet and Skye Lavin


The Burning Bird Drops

Sizzling sound in the water
My sleep broken
A billion years of sleep

Over whose head
The hole of the sky, the iron cloud, and
Under that, circling, the silence of sinking earth

Translated by the poet and Skye Lavin


Narrator

Ash moves in the room, printed in darkness
Paper, book, cover, painting,
          the call of dead birds—
Ashes moving in the room,
            what is suppressed in the room
One trunk of stories wants to rise up from the floor

You have nothing to do:
you are the narrator
because once you took part in that story.
By pressing your own throat
    you strangled many times the shout of delight
You restrained the shout of delight
     when death was near.....

Are you dead? Or not?
Death appears, comes near, nearer, then disappears
This heart-breaking stress of pleasure,
       peculiar and unknown to you
Such a whip you have never felt before

What happened at last? After a torturous wait for her
     and your death-sucking lip
Overflowed the limit and the sky broke open.
Out rolled the storm of the destroyed
The storm of distress rolling onto the floor

But you are still restless,
     where there is no peace, none—
Fire does not descend, fire does not bow his head!
Where do you throw the flames, where should you,
With that thought the cloud bangs his head, sky! sky!

Where is the tree? Who can take the flames?
You have burnt tree after tree after tree,
With that test, in the burned out darkness
Ash moves in the room, paper, book, painting....

Cover upon book--- inside the call of dead birds
Lightning flies, says, ‘will you be my dream tree?’
Oh? Again? The floor of the room cracks—
Void—

One trunk of fiction emerging from the void, poet!

Translated by the poet and Skye Lavin


Hieroglyph

Dead peacock in the dream
The moonlight fell upon his body

Cactus in the veranda
Room besides the roof

Dried-up old birds
Pierced by a skewer

In their voice
The hissing wind

The dead peacock is standing
In his body the firefly glittering

Moon is hanging on chain
Black pendulum

The slanting tree besides
Melting wooden house

Dead peacock in the dream
His clear eyes open


Translated by the poet and Skye Lavin