مختارات الحديقة ............Taja Kramberger

Now That We Are No More For the painter Alenka Koderman
Now that we are no more,
Does the sky still part its hair,
Is it snug and serene,
Is it willing and decanting in its expectation?
Do the glowing faces still wash themselves in its bubble bath?
Are the cones coated carefully with resin,
Is the north wind favourable, does it anoint the sails going south?
Is the sea still salty, does it smell of love?
What a polished storm,
Hidden in the sharpness of a chiselling knife,
Which during the exhibition creeps into the
Shell of its skeleton!
Are the titles known,
Lined up, do the colours of the woods drip out of them
Into the endless convex seals of love
As blood drips out of mortal wound? Do grapes of tears,
Captured from the surface of a pond, reflect an aquamarine?
Do pads of an avalanche lie hidden beneath the leaves,
Weaving and unweaving the night beneath the white feathers of the surface?
Is a leaf,
Having wintered entirely and all by itself, aware
Of all the weight of its impression on the canvas?
The cosmic explosions of Jan Breughel’s bouquet
Give birth, eject Ross Bleckner’s Hot House.
Unbearable are the throes of water, drying out the pain.
Yet still the canvas is lighter than the raft
Which takes you safely to the shore.
The millstone of the body has to endure us, even
If the heart gone wild invents explosive units, shorter than a second,
Or else the bread images do not hold us, and crumble,
Evaporate into the ether,
The muffins –
Weightless as bivalent ferric iron.
Now that we are no more,
Does a jet of light at the Prvomajska 8 still exchange
A kiss with the cherry-wood table at 18.36 and a minute
Later tickle the back of literary lovers?
Do the colours of the early Hrastovlje spring blaze out, and
Are they sucked in by the sun as if they were Schweppes?
Is the Shoemakers’ Bridge weary
Of lying on its back, has it turned on its stomach? Do the reasons of
Ecstasy, dear poets, keep hidden and lap the opposite shore of the
Trieste Gulf; do they return refreshed,
Carried by the sea streams?
Now that we are no more, we seem
To be more present than ever. The wind, having
Evaded the old centenaries
Through the eye-let of the millennium half ajar,
Has seated us behind the table of an ancient spring:
With the dew – eye to eye.
Are we to be completed by the snow?
Is our image to be finished by the crickets lying hidden
In the acoustics of a rainspout?
Are we repeated by gestures of the poplars?
Are we to be exterminated by Cooper Light, which eats away
Our endeavour and denudation
To depilate the past
To shave the beard of the present
To trim the hedge of the future.
Now that we are no more;
Perhaps now the infinite succession of poets
May be drawing a line of trees on the cover of some mute folder.