Without Anesthesia, Aleš Debeljak

,

.

Things are empty. Nothing’s in them. As if they’re the fruit

of a failed plan. The landscape lies in water, greened

by a certain plant. It is eclipsed by the horizon line.

Filled with emptiness, which frightens everyone.

This morning smells perhaps of jasmine tea. But this still

does not mean that it has some sense. You can continue

with walks by the shore, it changes nothing. All

that captures your gaze is no more than a bitter mirage.

Which recalls snapshots of experiences you already know.

In no way do you want to find a place for things. Which last

longer than your fantasy, hopes, secrets. You are surrounded

by things. This isn’t so bad. Only they are reliable. Only they.

Powerless like flatlands, which never drown

at the horizon, and now still more: like for instance

water in the lake, which worries about evening

and does not spill over the bank. Powerless, you long

for death, you wait, watch, breathing secretly. Or what?

The expected figure does not appear in the shallows. Not

for a second, perhaps less. Seeing and hearing are too much:

under the surface of the gathered water is little depth,

like in the memory of a calm motion of a pregnant woman

one morning on your street. The force of gravity

is enough, you realize. And the names, days, and nights,

the lives of unknown generations. It’s all too much.

It is time. Say what was once already said.

So that there will be no misunderstanding. Begin

where you want. More than now you won’t tolerate.

In a bird’s takeoff from the water’s surface, there’s

already a fall. You too will lose nothing. You keep

as much as you give. Fleeing in a foreign tongue

is longing for silence. Whose bodies do not fray,

because you know them from the inside.

Because only people die, not their silence.

But flocks of starlings returning home are loud.

You’ll have to raise your voice. Speak now! Say

how you keep quiet and become the breath of all people.

Enough words. Better to doze off. Above me wild geese,

dry cough and embers in me. —A gust of wind spins

the weathervane. In the end I stayed. Really it is already

time that I become the acoustics of silence, a secret

ongoing dialogue. I won’t be anybody’s cry anymore,

crystallized in amber. The stars are cold, people

turn on lights in flats. Night’s ultrasound goes across

the world. What can I still expect, what can I still give?

I remembered the rhythm of physical pain with which

the world begins every day. I know the illusion of images

and old texts, I would like to be alone again.

Like the baby crying when separated from his mother.

narrow stairways: the desolate sky repeats this despair

on thin ice, spread bluish across a puddle. Worthless

shapes of clouds, so little love! With lips more timid

than you think, you slip reluctantly across the stillness

of things. And the pulsing of blood does not disturb the silence,

you still endure it alone. Like your pain that you don’t want

to be what you are: the things that last without you.

For them you are already as dead as a crumpled rose.

The hardly discernible flickering of air, mimosa fields,

incredible scent of a certain root, the glow of the lamp,

she holds in a raised hand: what noise does she hear

now around her head, half vanished in the evening twilight?

A cold sweat flows over her forehead and runs into open eyes.

Burned by the salty fluid. Her view darkens. More and more,

the silence grows. A fire from dry grasses is lit beneath

her feet. In an instant she will need to forget pleasant days.

On her lips, too, you will not discern the dry print of sorrow

that gathers. The earth still spins ahead, possibly nothing

happened. The forest quiet, all the paths are still in front of her.

She stands quiet and listens to the sound of emptiness.

Damp asphalt. And the placid, timeless stream of minerals

in the hill and valley. Unknown to you, casually silent

like lichens in the forests of distant northern regions.

An ordinary phrase from a conversation that lasts forever.

And contains four, five words. Which perhaps only the melody of love

drowns out. —The dial on the phosphorescent clock glows. The date

of your helplessness. Long ago you predicted that you’d never find

the right translation for it. —If you could invent a language

without verbs, you could live longer, perhaps. And would lay down

all the weight of passing in a never-spoken touch. Thus it will boil

in the skull and somewhere else. The face will fossilize.

And on the retina of the eye, a blind spot leaving only Moby Dick.