And you, who are you | Gazmend Krasniqi

GAZMEND KRASNIQI

 

And you, who are

Translated by Albanian Ukë Buçpapaj

 

HISTORY

 

We fall silent when the reflections on the panes

of time, where we pass our rickety days, try to persuade us

they still resemble their former selves –

say, a silhouette, a nervous tic.

The small things can’t possibly know if something happened

at night, while we were sleeping: if somewhere in an experiment

they mixed us up with others in the universe – or else,

which comes to the same, they mixed up our world.

Nor can they console themselves with the notion

that the present is only a technical glitch in the universe.

All we can do for them is behave

as if all this were only an art lesson:

when you’re close you leap, excited; when you’re far,

you stand aside, heart in hand, and write,

saying you know what you’re doing with your fate –

a generous heart with a miser’s hand,

in this world where trees may mock gravity

but cannot enter history as we do.

 

IF WE KNOW EVERYTHING, WHY DO WE STILL SPEAK

 

The summer’s road roller slid past, yet left us breathless.

No time – and then the very first thought

seizes the mind: the heroes step out

from the thicket of night; for the glory of the dead gods,

they display the first fruits, the must,

rust-coloured in the goblet of the sky,

and the army of trees sends word to the city:

‘I’ve come!’ No time – whoever drinks

the nectar of the gods, even dead, thinks, ‘It is true:

the autumn river, pounding on the banks,

in the mirrors of shadows and stars, in the words

of images, so fleeting, like islands

of sound and light.’ Until

another silence blows through the world, where

a man sits and asks, ‘If we know everything,

why do we still speak?’ His eyes – two cubs –

invent enchantment.

 

IN THE MANNER OF G. K.

 

Eternity, don’t leave this day

that suits me so well,

where now the cicada’s song

drowns the concrete mixer’s roar –

then it’s the other way round.

We drowned them both

when we sang while making pancakes

and, heroically,

added a little cheese,

but it isn’t the clash of heroes

out there – just a tin

cheering on the meagre raindrops.

Only an apathetic ant bears witness

that I sat at this table.

 

Eternity, don’t leave this day,

that’s cut to my measure.

In the TV window: microbes, quakes,

accidents and nuclear provocations.

In the room’s window: clouds and birds.

In the window of the self, a man

closes the ledger of lost fluids

and paves the road along which dreams arrive,

where suddenly he meets the old tax collector

for a moment only,

so that we recall,

once again,

for just a moment,

how the true heart beats in the chest.

 

IN AN AESTHETIC HOUR

 

I cannot tell for whom the new grave in the heart

is a victory, where the sudden scent

of the rose of sadness reddens

and cooks the final meal: melancholy.

 

No one knows where the perfect crime

kept in reserve for me lies hidden, quick

as a drag on a cigarette, as only God

would strip away the words – that fortress

where I so trustfully hid from the world.

 

Yet, God willing, I can speak of the place

where each is pleased with his own night in his hands,

unfolding in the shape of life, until

the star of fate comes to rest

in that small, pathetic, poetic plate.

 

With the music of faith, the tide of illusion

also withdraws: why must the heart’s questions

always be raised by martyr memory –

so many children of sleeping with the nights –

 

when we seemed such a good invention that next time

we would fly a few metres, body as flag,

to that very cry: ‘It is he!’,

which poets hear in sleep

ever since Plato’s day.

 

Yet perhaps it is good that things

vanish: eternity can be rediscovered, where

two parts are made for the day’s metaphor; you can scent

the lack of something in karmic traces, as they burn

the weight of words on a thread thinner than forgetting –

 

a thread that can keep me tied to the place the world

calls empty, until the like-hearted bind it to their hearts.

Most beautiful will be the day when I sort,

in aesthetic books, both the places where I was

and the places where I was not mad.

 

TO THE HAPPY FEW

 

We have heard the gong for the performance.

The order ‘Stand easy!’ has gone out

to the words with epaulettes, so they can save themselves

from the virus of their own history.

The order ‘Attention!’ has gone out

to lucid minds: this is the hour

when they clutch at ideas.

 

They like to say that ‘King Lear’

was written by a man called Shakespeare,

as a challenge to the words ‘fear’, ‘panic’,

and, above all, ‘quarantine’.

Others dismiss it as gossip.

What is true is this: until yesterday,

death sat in the front row.

 

Or rather, when the play begins, I should say:

I was the one who held my own heart

at the edge of the jealous sky

for the happy few.

 

NOW THAT THE BARBARIANS DIDN’T COME

 

Now that the barbarians didn’t come,

the sleeping decisions come to life for us,

without official garments,

without occasional speeches,

to show me the places where the papers and coffee were,

the milk

and the umbrellas – now made less of wood

and more of memory’s stuff.

Look at the Earth’s invisible vapours,

like sparks of God’s humour,

even if the fingers of the Over-Light

are not yet our roof.

Call this song, too, the pies

of her goodwill,

for before the heart deserts us, they may yet take us

beyond the mountain of voices,

where the life that never happened is measured by the hymn

of god-slaying on the pentagram

of seven vowels, like the clapper of the tick-tock –

this is the moment to save

at least one catachresis – the watch on the lifeless hand,

until the barbarians,

who always remain as the solution,

arrive with their metaphors.

 

LINES THROWN DOWN HURRIEDLY

 

You’ve seen it: even the wind’s last ship dissolves

and begins to turn into memory. In its glassy memory

a five-thousand-year-old city that once saw us

wedges in the winter of white

letters a peach-scented summer drew from the heart;

then – the scent of quinces; then – the smell of stone in the sun.

And it wedges in for ever the shipwrecked one,

full of doubts about where the line should break, who,

just after he wrote, ‘Brother Whitman,

we studied all the masters; now if only they would study us,’

was told to sign for the broken chair.

 

Yet still, somewhere, something unbelievable,

waiting to be made known, watches as flags

of fresh moisture rise from the earth; it seeks

the abyss of routine, where words grow wise

and find their order more easily. As for melancholy –

I’ve just tossed the newspaper aside. And Migjeni,

whom I suddenly remember, I still don’t know

if he’s a good sign or a bad one

in this pocket out of reach of the failure

of daily political discourse: even today Silence

is the language of God; the rest – a doubtful translation,

like these lines thrown down hurriedly.