the train whistles die out,
the buffalo-clouds of smoke turn into white, fluffy puppies.
And the sleeves of the fathers’ never-worn cloaks
point out a north and a south
equally impossible.
METAMORPHOSIS
Summer draws near.
With it, a yearning for life
even though you’re still alive. Here’s another chance
to get closer to …
get closer to whom? To what?
You can’t even name it.
When you were a child, you used to draw a square
with a chimney puffing blue smoke, and you’d call it home.
A yellow ball—the sun, a red circle with a tail you’d call an apple,
and a squashed apple, the heart.
Once upon a time, everything was simple.
Objects are still the same—we’ve only added
the names of things the way we give intimate nicknames
to streets and corners in a city we’ve lived in for years,
unable to make it our own.
And later, in the absence of hope,
we turn objects back into abstract forms,
into what they once were
in their original state:
a house puffing blue smoke, a blinding yellow ball,
an apple and a heart.
When there’s no hope left,
we turn objects into art—
a sermon we leave behind
for the generations to come.
JANUARY 1, DAWN
After the celebrations,
people, TV channels, telephones,
the year’s recently-corrected digit
finally falls asleep.
Between the final night and the first dawn
a jagged piece of sky
as if viewed from the open mouth of a whale.
Inside her belly and inside the belly of time,
there’s no point worrying.
You glide gently along. She knows her course.
Inside her, you are digested slowly, painlessly.
And if you’re lucky, like Jonah,
at some point she’ll spit you out on dry land
along with heaps of inorganic waste.
Everything sleeps. A sweet hypothermic sleep.
But those few still awake
might hear the melancholy creaking of a wheelbarrow,
someone stealing stones from a ruin
to build new walls just a few feet away.
AGING
It approaches. I can feel it without seeing it,
like feeling the presence of waves nearby.
All the world’s rivers spill into the sea
even your own, even the sweet waters
that in a few seconds turn salty
and bitter as hell in the deep.
Every day the mirror wakes up in a bad mood.
An endless field of frost glistens
on the cabbages beyond the window.
It’s the late harvest and nothing more.
You’re alarmed:
Do you have enough food to survive the winter?
Enough to chew on, enough memories?
Although you’ll need a strong stomach
for some of them.
Ask your mother what she knows about aging.
Ask the elderly women of your family
lined up so beautifully
like silver cutlery in a cardboard box
waiting for a dinner that may never happen …
Ask them, how did they manage it?
Perhaps they will give you advice.
Or extend a hand to you,
that same warm, clammy, deceiving reach
that once pierced your ear as a child:
“It doesn’t hurt a bit. Just a little sting.”
They have nothing to give.
Aging is too personal
like the handkerchief, the razor, a pair of dentures.
They don’t know that the elderly once had their own god, Saturn,
who looked after them during their free time
after the harvest, a meditation on time and feasts.
It approaches … It will go on for a long while, leisurely,
like a symphony that fills a radio channel in the late-night hours,
rarely interrupted by brief news,
unapologetic, then continuing on again
where it left off, at Toccata and Fugue,
played by a solo flute.
FISHERMEN’S VILLAGE
Squinty, salt-dusted windows face the distance.
They all look seaward.
Every third person here has the same name:
perhaps the name of a godparent
who cut her first lock of hair
before the wind thickened it,
or a stranger’s name …
The locals, by the way, welcome the strangers,
because they were told
that one of them who once walked barefoot on water
used to load the sardine boats
with swift hands.
Foreigners are easily identified;
unlike the locals, their clothes are white, blue, jet black.
And sometimes,
they make you a gift of rosaries or cigars.
Once, one of them
left a pair of shoes behind
and the whole village gathered to play the lottery.
When someone with an already good pair of shoes won,
the young men who had been keenly following the show
kicked the sand in anger,
“What the hell? It’s not fair!”
Sand everywhere. All day long,
overturned boats on the shore
eat sand. Night stars feed on the sand.
The boats beached here since the last war
people remember brought
Omega watches strapped
to soldiers’ wrists, and herpes
that spread from flesh to flesh
faster than wind
and faster than famine.
Cats purr behind doors.
Streets reek of fish and yet there are no fish.
Noontime, a man dozes on a sofa in the yard.
His wife sits at his feet, mending
the net with needle and thread,
which she cuts with her teeth.
Eyes half-open, he gazes at her
realizing here is the real cause: the large hole in the net,
a hole first torn two thousand years ago after a prosperous fishing night,
when things were sorted out much like they are today:
some cursed with luck and some blessed with mercy.
COMMIT TO MEMORY
These words are carved on the gravestone
of a Roman woman from 135 B.C.:
“Her parents named her Claudia.
She loved her husband dearly.
She bore two sons.
Was charming in conversation, and patient.
Kept a good house. Spun wool.”
The women I’ve known
can be described just as plainly with a single line:
M. who shined her copper pots and pans with sand.
L. who dreamed so much about her sons she was punished with a short life.
S. who made the best pickles.
H. who wouldn’t shut up about her brother’s mysterious death.
K. who used to peel fuzz off of faces with an egg-and-sugar mask.
F. the first to discover that a white dress goes best with yellow roses.
D. who ironed a perfect line on her husband’s sleeves,
even when she knew he was going out with another woman.
P. who got along well with her mother-in-law.
S. who had an abortion every six months.
T. with a sweet laugh and always a run on her stockings.
N. who roasted good coffee when she had any.
R. who secretly used to sell her own blood.
Z. who picked up her son’s guts with her own hands
the day he was hit by a freight train.
With a brief single line
like an old telegram, twenty cents a word,
and full of typing errors made by the post office staff.
As if that were the only way to remember them.
With a single, uninterrupted line
like Don Quixote in Picasso’s hands.
You think it’s that easy?
CITIES
Cities are more or less the same:
lights, garbage, broken windows on the second floor of the music school,
street vendors, banks with red marble staircases,
bus stops, the smell of freshly baked bread equalizing all,
bridges, women who age in their eyes and men who wither in their voices,
billboards, grudges that rot in vegetable cases on street markets,
rain staining roof tiles and bleaching graves,
a municipal band that’s been playing “The March of the Tartars” for thirty years,
the clocktower with its head in the clouds like a dervish in a trance, fresh lemonade,
and an ambulance parked between two worlds.
From the center, gradually, my house and everyone else’s
shifts to the periphery,
toward the city’s limbs, its hands
not needing a language
to point out where it hurts or itches.
Each city taught you something:
the first about death at a train station—in broad daylight;
the second, how to live;
and the third,
the agnostic respite between the two.
You conquered the first one at night, in the dark;
the tame snakes on pharmacy walls
showed you the way.
The other, much earlier, without buttoning yourself.
A new accent split your face in two
like the line that parts your hair.
Each city left you with a scar:
The first a scratch on your eyebrow;
the second your hardened shoulders;
and the third, some logical gaps in your syntax.
But you left no mark on them.
Cities don’t recognize you until the moment you flee,
when you escape in a hurry
and leave behind a single shoe,
abandoning the magic trick halfway through.
ANATOMICAL CUT
Rexhep’s knife is razor sharp. He’s a third-generation butcher.
Effortlessly, with its fine tip, he separates flesh from bone,
thigh from shoulder, heart from ribs,
a kosher day from another “it could have been worse”
through an anatomical cut.
An unsold calf head hanging on a hook
acts as a pledge between the living and the dead
until evening.
Some clients show no respect, demanding, “Take out the fat!”
the same way you would ask someone
to wipe their shoes carefully before entering the house.
Others simply love to chat.
From his father he learned how to cut without losses
and other small secrets of the trade,
secrets stolen but not mentioned
like how to slam meat on the scale, fast and hard.
A small deceit; just an ounce. No big deal.
His life is simple, made up of speed and knives,
knives sharpened with care each morning
so that, later in heaven, it will be easier
to piece the past back together on Judgment Day.
But when he returns home
with his hands and the status quo washed of blood,
he calculates the finances for studies
his son has no wish to complete;
he plans to buy a house where the stench of meat
won’t conjure crows in his dreams,
and, before sleeping, forcefully pulls his wife’s hips toward him,
just her hips, and the hand on the scale points to an ounce of excess.
Small secrets of self-deceit no one ever talks about—
not even a father who knows the world better than anyone else,
from inside-out, entrails and all.
SELF-PORTRAIT IN WOVEN FABRICS
My life is a wardrobe
where the clothes are picked out
with a quick glance and hardly
ever with the slightest touch.
This never-worn silk shirt
wants a man’s jacket over its shoulders
to end its flowering moment.
It hasn’t bloomed yet and never will.
Throw it away, don’t think twice!
This décolleté acrylic blouse
matches a smile twice my size
and front teeth with impeccable enamel.
Years ago, the opposite was true.
Toss it, it’s useless.
And this dress was worn only once—
to a romantic dinner.
Another date like that
won’t happen for a thousand years,
and by then, the dress will be out of fashion anyway.
Dump it, it’s just taking up space.
This white cardigan is pure nostalgia for the past;
the blue one looks to the future.
They suck the oxygen out of the room at night.
Get rid of both of them!
This black corduroy jacket, cheap
threads from a second-hand store. Keep it!
It’s always easier to hide behind someone else’s skin.
This eccentric shirt with its black-and-white lines—
an alibi for finding yourself in two places at once.
Keep it! Too late to change your style!
This coat, heavy like inland fog,
two sizes too big, too expensive,
bought in a hurry for a ceremony,
hung only in hallways.
I’m still paying for it. Let it be!
These classic high-heel shoes
just have no instinct to return. Out they go!
Throw out these fine boots, too—
they only brought you bad luck from the start.
Sailors are right in saying,
“Don’t put on new shoes when crossing unknown seas!”
And here are the gray clothes, my favorites, one after the other …
Without them, I’m exposed, like a drooling dog!
They’re old, but must be kept!
And this scarf in bold colors
like a humid, crowded, and chaotic city
is a gift from someone who
wanted to get lost somewhere through me.
Throw it away! There’s no space for it!
And this small purse that holds almost nothing:
a handkerchief, a phone number, a tube of foot cream.
Keep it, this spare alter ego—
it might come in handy one day.
And red … what’s a red sweater doing in my drawer?
Looking for a fight?
Throw it out, what are you waiting for?
And finally, wrinkle-free, everyday
comfortable clothes that never disappoint.
A string of compromises that have taken the shape of my body.
Keep them for sure—you’re not allowed to toss these!
On the floor, the discarded clothes evaporate, a gigantic
womb that held a woman’s fantasies, now miscarried.
And the few items left
can finally move their elbows freely in the dresser
like gondoliers on a perfect strip of water.
But to this day I haven’t understood
if my mother was complaining or making excuses
when she mumbled, “It’s pure wool, hand-made,”
&
nbsp; whenever she cleaned her only suit with a few drops of gasoline.
WATER AND CARBON
1.
Revelation came to you on a September day,
not on top of a barren mountain but in the chemistry lab
during the last class period when you were starving,
when, after Hamlet’s monologue and equations with two unknowns,
it became clear there was nothing more to learn.
“Human beings are simply made of water and carbon,” he declared,
and drew a long formula with many holes on the chalkboard
that looked like a metal trap for rabbits.
He was the messenger, St. John the Chemistry Teacher,
drenched in sweat, his belt buckled tight.
Face cleanly shaved, hair trimmed and parted flat with Figaro oil …
Wasn’t he supposed to look a little more miserable?
Wasn’t he supposed to have a long beard?
Wasn’t a bush nearby supposed to have burst into flames?
“Simply water and carbon!
Maybe even a little magnesium, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus …
In short, little choice involved.”
And he chucked the chalk into the air
as if a key to a door without hinges.
He clasped his hands. Mission accomplished!
The last words already spoken.
Now disperse and spread the good news!
Or go to hell—who cares!
A bitter relief in the air, the scent of freshly cut grass.
Suddenly, we no longer knew who we were;
suddenly we were all the same.
So why the eternal worry on my mother’s face?
And what sort of chemical compounds
were Adler and Schopenhauer talking about in the other classroom
from which only a thin wall separated us
or was it an entire existence?
2.
Water and carbon. Measurable.
When you’re born they measure your weight, your height and heartbeat;
they encase and stamp you with a belly button like a leaden seal
you have no authority to open! (You have no authority over yourself.)
They measure your temperature, in the shade of course,
your sugar levels, albumen, iron, reflexes on your knees,
your tongue, twice, before and after a meal.
(What does this have to do with speaking?!)
They measure the circumference of your head
to fit you with a hat so you can think with a cool brain,
and your chest for a suit, the tailor’s
icy cold hands tickling your armpits and ribs,
and making you nervous.
They fill your clothes with padding
so no one can hear what’s going on inside you.
Double-breasted, single-breasted, spare buttons, fake pockets on your pants.
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