THE TIME BEFORE LANGUAGE (selection)

PROPOSITION CONCERNING NEST

Morning swaddles our breath with mist

and goes down the electric river,

demanding that we warm his trampled fingers,                     

lend him the tree’s grace or day’s roundness            

And out back behind the forest of infallible oak grows

and loud moss within which north reflects

Out back bold foxes’ offspring wait for darkness to open its eyes,

for unfinished sentences to ambush us and form a circle of us

For there is always something grows behind your back preparing silence,

always someone somewhere turning painlessly in sleep

on his own wings and having forgotten he can fly

someone somewhere dying notwithstanding that he lived

like a chair unused that had been ripped out from its beech heart

For there is always someone multiplying silence,

someone filling days with waiting, and                     

who suddenly, like an oblivious butterfly,    

full speed gets right up face first in glass

and wrecking a galaxy with a glance decides to love

PROPOSITION CONCERNING THE ATTEMPT TO IMPOSE UPON YOU LIGHT’S SHAPE

To whom I shall give recognition:

we only held insomnia in common,

not lessening each other beside each other

and what now if your hand too quickly disappears through mine

It’s all the same to us, we sort the trash,

we spoil the full fruit as it bursts with ripeness,

we give it, calm as we’ve made it, to others, to learn

from them about the bees that came before them

we eavesdrop sparrows, allow parks settle our lungs,

we love in man his childhood

Embracing trees our arms become their rings

and none of the destruction arrived in line with the routine

according to which we gathered embracings from the bed

like wood for kindling

Behind us all remaining is that light

about which you and I have never spoken:

I watched your grief the way I’ve watched my children

and bandaged its wrists

All remaining is the learned resolve

upon the face I show to human beings

and I pretend that I can speak everything that must be said

PROPOSITION CONCERNING ENCOUNTER

Those people that we were before

someone else came in collisioning our heads

before we shook up universe and universe

and cast across the table panicked planets

which we’ve been living on as all already do,

believing there be easier burdens tomorrow

which time slows through; which time speeds through,

believing there be someone in us surely

saying something in time sufficiently loud

to rouse us from slumber earth to space

of everything there is that can possibly happen

to those that are sufficiently incautious

We were growing old in each our own

small situation buried in appointments

situations that in fact were vast

that honestly conversed kilometers

but we’d not wanted much to know at all

about the surfaces of continents

When a one pain drowned another out,

we have wanted to escape the closeness

which would cast us out from what is real

So docile and so timid we

would have no use for one more world

which we aren’t ready for

Übersetzt von Robert Isaf

Original: Monika Herceg: „Vrijeme prije jezika“. Zaprešić: Fraktura 2020.