Sketches, Arabesques & Translations
1
- Who do you think you are?
- I am a grasshopper from another planet.
2
I am my own private cat with six thousand feet and ten thousand eyes.
3
Delusions have power.
Egyptian Days
Waking early in a washed yellow room, with a glassful of water and a silent clock on the table
next to the bed.
Performing ablutions in a special closet, imitating the rain, which brings numbness and boggles
the mind with its faucets and pipes.
Giving canned food to the cat, which she nimbly devours like a sumptuous prey, while skim milk, fruit and cereal nourish the watching party.
Dressing for occasions prescribed by unseen gods -- the mirror double smiles to show off their approval.
Noticing their absence from billboards and shop windows: only dogs pollute the streets in the open, betraying their favor with the divine.
Riding in a four-wheel colored bin, sitting occupants who have similar clothes and calm faces
yet regard you with naked suspicion as if the spy of an alien race.
Becoming one with a trade that turns time into musty eternity even during eight hours of one's life, as in its posthumous recollection, - the remaining moments drinking with friends at the bar or climbing the trunk of some warm, trembling body.
Living with a hopeless desire for someone who will find you hundreds of years from now underneath the playground of changed habitats, the banal human relics among a few cherished artifacts of the day.
5
Transformations
We are given no time for sleep, that sweet slumber gently seizing the minds of children, on the quick film of fever showing them shaggy, colorful slides from paradise, speaking in ancient tongues, driving them to the brink of mortal danger, but later to find them anew, transparent in the intricate works of great literature. Even the dreams, now growing more from wakeful soil, stir us up and bind us firmly to the saddle of reality. Since the mirrors broke, toil has become a measure, clarity a caress. The days have waxed beastly halcyon and the nights Tartarian sable - to announce our presence.
* * *
A lover innocently makes propositions which threaten to reverse the course of blood in your veins - and yet, you have to do it... To jump from the sidewalk on a boat which doesn't exist, to blow off your head and reappear behind the corner with an armful of flowers. Each relationship within a short period transmutes into a universal crisis as if we were standing wondrous over a blue void.
6
Only an arrow can cure the dead: one morning awaking with a feathered splinter in your side and walking away through the bushes of Eden, mindless of the archer.
7
The city breathes like a dragon and pulverizes all true desire - its particles left in a thousand rooms, from there carried outward, shuddering on the clothes of unwary strangers as a sacrifice to this beast. (I wish I could hold it away by its tail.) You walk without feeling, immune to the sound and grime in the air, while the object of your desire grows dimmer and fades in the distance like hopes of consumptive patients, like a dream of a dragon slayer, like a star above city crowds, concealed by the glare of artificial light.
8
My love for you is like an American flag, a simple rag, yet unfurled every so often over each house and square in this country.
9
Long ago, when the world was my oyster and I played in the hospital ward with a toy helicopter, the doctors said that my case was incurable. It was chronic pneumonia - an inverted bouquet of inflamed alveoli and phlegm, the congested mimosas my mother had carried before in her lungs: in my country a cause for romance. So my father had flown her away to the dry steppes of Asia and infused mare's milk with his love to reverse her x-rays back to health. This was how I was born - eleven years after my brother - in a region so covered with snow, or drowned in mud, it could hardly be shown on the maps. Life was windy and cold outside as I was sitting in a hospital bed. My hand brought the huey off a window sill and carved loops over treacherous folds of the blanket on a mission to rescue survivors, yet unversed in the mock-up pursuits of war.
Then, despite gloomy predictions, my father again proved the medicine wrong. We had traveled by train to the south, playing card games with strangers and seeing the country. My brother was reading aloud from Bakunin: 'Russia is endless plains on which run herds of wild horses and women...,' though they lined up for us at the stations, selling crayfish and pears. We lived by the sea where a mountain's blackened flame looked across barren foothills to its beckoning scaly mirror, in which we couldn't find ourselves. Every day on the beach I was buried up to my chin in hot sand, like a sphinx child, and left prone in this posture for hours, a natural speck on the landscape, an enigma to the free-moving clouds, as it were, till my coughing had completely stopped.
From that moment I took to the sea and swam with the dolphins.
10
The Last Supper
When we die, at the end of this overdrawn introduction to a dream, each of us would have many stories to share, and I imagine the hereafter as one babbling feast where all will be like Jesus and the apostles: some at long last telling their truth, others scratching the back of their heads, yet the third serving up their phantom blood and flesh. Only a few quiet dreamers, like myself, will sneak out and hang themselves.
11
The earth is flat with tall trees.
