You came into my life

like a fog.

So sudden, unexpected,

carefree and innocent.

So… that, had I looked 

out the window a little later,

you would have dissolved into the new day,

and I would never have known

that I existed with you simultaneously

at this time, this hour, this moment…

in the same space.

And you sprawled on the ground,

like a mother sheltering her children

from the explosions of grenades and bombs;

smiling you wandered among the birch trees,

drinking their sap.

My gaze all over you, shrugged like Atlas,

like a painting by Degas or Matisse

triumphantly crucified on museum walls.

And it is as if it is autumn again, and the mestizo 

leaves fall like the guillotined head of a king,

who has realized what democracy means.

Once again something has happened in Burma.

Unable to find rhymes

for “courage”, “youth”, “life”.

We’re not even 30, but it’s like our bones are aching.

And Homer walks by

on his way to Osiris,

arguing with Charon about something

which,

like a crown fallen from a king on his throne,

glistens in the blood of others.

The poet walks past and sees

us.

This is how he composes The Odyssey:

watching me enter you,

like heaven… I try to take you in my hands,

like flowers, but a sudden

gust of wind carries you away like a memory of old times,

like mushroom spores,

spreading all over the continent,

infecting the ants with a death wish.

Ah, somewhere out there, another argument 

is heard between men,

and like a voyeur I’m widening a gap

between that other world(?) and ours

to see the light… Yes, it’s you.

I see you now

in every poem I write, new and old.

You wander somewhere among my lines,

a well-traveled path.

Or maybe it is me

who wants to see you there.

You turn into night – you take shape,

growing like a rhythm, and in front of me –

the silhouette of a man, black as a hole.

And in that hole you die with the tail of a comet,

with all the advice that 

you left me as a dowry.

I come to you, I put my hands out in front of me

like a blind man who’s lost his cane.

I point my hands toward you, and like a needle.

They pierce your sternum, which I then

tear, break like an orange peel. As hard as you could,

you kept quiet, you smiled.

But it hurts, doesn’t it?

And you just sang, struggling to hit an “A”.

And I kept breaking your sternum,

I kept tearing pieces off, 

as if

hoping to create a human being.

Now your rib is my feather,

and I use it to chew my way through.

I’m trying to hurt you,

as if to find my soul.

I will suffer for the grief I’ve committed

and thereby enter heaven with you.

Only those who suffer go to heaven,

don’t they, God? You are one, and that’s probably why there is

one syllable in You. To make it easier

to call You without interrupting Your thoughts.

That’s it… the barrier is broken. I’m pushing your space aside,

as if entering a tent, its awnings.

I have entered, and you are night. Your heart is up there somewhere.

It’s the moon, it’s an unexploded grenade,

for there is no difference between them.

Someday, slowed down, the moon 

will come too close to us,

and it will be torn apart by the Earth’s gravity.

I guess that’s what they mean

when they talk about love. And so I’m wandering around

in this incomprehensible something,

in this darkness. The smell of Chanel everywhere

on your body like an overcoat,

protecting you from the cold of other people’s

gazes and bodies. There are meadows and wind everywhere.

So empty, like in Platonov’s The Foundation Pit,

and yet it looks terribly new,

beautiful… I’m coming to you, holding out my hands

in a kind of vulgar

gesture,

and you look at me like a border guard, 

as if I hadn’t paid the toll…

You look at me with mirrored eyes –

in them I see, “Don’t touch me,”

written in red capillary hairs.

So I lower my hand and let it fall,

stick to my body like snow to asphalt.

I think there’s a kind of moralizing in all of this,

some kind of self-condemnation, and it’s like Maugham 

only in reverse –

suddenly what you want at the beginning you don’t want at the end,

and I know what they mean by

“being stuck Inside of Mobile

with the Memphis Blues Again.” But the night goes by –

I still ac(know)ledge you.

You’re looking at me… or should I describe it

the other way around? That you looking at me

is me looking at you? And your eyes are on fire,

like two huge black coals.

You run like a primitive man,

like the wind through the cracks

and keyholes in giant hearts,

and carry those two black coals onward

into another cave, into another tribe,

and bury them in the brushwood

to give birth to a new life. This is how, without even

trying to rip out someone’s rib,

you disappear like forests, time, lakes,

mind, memory, warmth, generations, smile,

cold, fear, and leave me all alone.