Dionysus

Somewhere, suspended in facetless space,
the vine is spiralling, shown in the distance, with loosened hair:
the farther the eye is, the smoother, the faster it is moving,
as if all this length is bestowing on it the result
and the encouraging memory of the way, done and forgotten for good.

Distance, as well as time, has this passion to swell and to lace
things, to disguise them, to make them not nicer, but – rarer…
Like a girl with all her bracelets, all chains and embroidery, hovering
in the mellow breeze of the room, waiting for these anchors to drown her, to melt
in dark, ardent and prosperous silence her body – the flower of the day’s mood.

The distance is changing, the most changeable of all substances,
constantly gaining its goals, exhausted by the easiest victories.
Little pulsating veins of this marble are filtering it and releasing,
pure again, for time to start all anew. What could be found
harder than to seek for so long and to strike the same target.

You seem not to know what a terrible distance it is
that is making your tresses curl, round and whisper your knees.
You are bending the bud of your head, and this age is approaching, seizing
the traces of perfume and dew left in the air, like a sound
in the wood of a horn, a brazen stem of pursuit. Clouds drag it

upwards, to the boiling disaster of blue. Pine-trees draw it
to their lamps, sucking out dim gold from the depth. Now you rise
your wavy hand, a fleshy brush with a cluster of fingers and somewhere above
a little skylark repeats these frail motions, exactly the same,
and its tiny dappled wing is pressed between the wings of hot wind.

For a purposeless march, the flawless seasons are stretching their row, lit
and lost, lit and lost: a spot of the sun is thus twinkling through branches.
We don’t lose when we lose, we are lost ourselves. Brief, shy jingling
of a rusted small bell on the roof of a century. Your pale, luminous face,
a crying planet that had trespassed its orb. Down these ivory shoulders flows

evening, a stream of midday, here slow, there swift.
Your palms are two halves of a fruit, cloven for autumnal praise.
The belly, like a dream, that is completely remembered, to live and to move
long after all others are sold and betrayed. The distance, dying without a claim
for a short while, and then resurrecting and holding your mind

within the limits of this particular forest, and this non-returnable gift.
As if you are condemned to shine here, like our childhood, a few inches
below the level of blood, is condemned to remain calling, aching,
as if time no longer has the quality of reassuring, retrieving the space
and our loss will return. The inky mist now softens and sews

with the needle of a long astray ray a glowing pattern of midnight.
If it’s true that each circle will close, and each moment will meet face to face
with his own reflection in the lake of his pain, why are we
so eager to start all once more? As if a slow return is our goal.
As if patience no longer is pregnant with ravelling rage.

A shred of dark cloud is flagging on the top of a pine: the knot is tight.
Other clouds are flowing and spreading their portable maze.
The heavy bead of the moon toils to tear its chain, but this hardly could be:
like a spiralling fume, moving tiptoe, your remembering soul
comes and leans over you, touching the flowering bars of your cage.

Вланес, 2005

Сертификат Поэзия.ру: серия 790 № 32344 от 28.02.2005

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