Crow
Eyes of the sky dry salt pans
cried for forty days and
forty nights
after the captivity in the sand
the chase on the bone place
voice hidden in the scorpion’s path and
hair turned into serpents
after the killing and the price paid
on the left shoulder of regret
the first guilt had already perched
At Least
The statues, he said, die if you don’t look at them.
I’ve seen them numerous times fall with half-closed eyes.
They wait to see if anyone can look at them; they get up
again. Perhaps for this reason stores in the central
streets, inside and outside, or the neighbourhood tiny shops
are full of small, large, and any size mirrors. Hanging off
the walls, they vaguely shine, as if indifferently, in secret
anticipation: they mirror the bakery chimney, one loquat
tree, two women, and the cart of the small flower shop with
the empty clay flowerpots.
Late in the evening, around eight o’clock, when the stores
close, the mirrors empty at once. Each of them, clerk or
store owner, or customer, takes one mirror and gets into
his room while out in the streets, the windless vigil already
thickens.
III
In the agora’s anonymity your face vanishes behind myriad
idols floating in the blind mirror people reflecting forest
your dream seeping out amid tree trunks
your goal of creating a new world falls into foggy memory
sun-tanned skin fades like boreal winter
then burns white as great hand pushes crowd through
chlorination process masses popping out from
end of the monotonous machine whitewash dressed and
holding sweetest energy in their hearts
like grains of sugar you stand among millions of others
in a spoon of the celestial master who laughs at the commotion
winking his left eye in this anonymity of the agora your
energy mingles with the energy of others and once you fall
deep into the mouth of a hungry abyss leading
to an insatiable stomach of ever-hungry Hades
you can only remember green leaves and turtles
beautiful legs and their cosmogonic join where pleasures
and goals funnel you can have only memories of places
you traveled or didn’t from fear of flight on planes
in this anonymity of the crowd you are pushed downward
becoming soluble matter grand master digests with help of`
bile turning you into a green-yellow ornament
sometimes your energy creates future poems
other times you are just farted out with pressure releasing
agony foulness complementing hyacinths
in this impersonal agora you are salami at the master’s lunch
and your goal to create a new world becomes his burp
at the end of it all intensifying the fragrance of lilac blooms
