“To get together and talk …”

“She’s fifteen, sells flowers …”

On a village street …”

“To get together and talk …”
To get together and talk—let’s start with what’s most difficult.
Let’s start with the madness of getting used to the night
uncoiling across the sheets.

The river, like a dress lifted over your head,
still remembers the warmth,
still replies to the heart beating
closer to morning, when the poetics
of exhaustion realigned.

Here we are—shouted into the night,
faded like ceramics under the sun.
With a language like birdsquawk.
With voices like animals calling to each other
when fire encircles them.

People from breathless borderlands get together.
Butchers whose bloody fingers have stiffened
as though covered with ink get together.
Eternal drovers bearing the Easter spirit
of the slaughterhouse get together.

Books that smell of grass and milk.
Icons printed on the same press
as futurist manifestos.

The animals smell the sweet language of dawn.
They study the orthography of June fogs
hiding their killers.

Let’s start our march across a green emptiness,
the motherland in twilight,
let’s drive the sacrificial cattle
through the wheat choir tuning up.
Let’s start, all of us who saw
how the quail of souls hide in a field,
who stepped into the water
to dispel its ice-cold anxiety
with a sunburn.

Let’s start with what’s most difficult—with singing
and quenching the fires emerging from the night.

Let’s start by whispering the names,
let’s weave together the vocabulary of death.

To stand and talk about the night.
Stand and listen to the voices
of shepherds in the fog
incanting over every single
lost soul.

“She’s fifteen, sells flowers …”
She’s fifteen, sells flowers at the train station.
Sun and berries sweeten the oxygen beyond the mines.
Trains stop for a moment, move further on.
Soldiers go to the East, soldiers go to the West.

Nobody stays in her city.
Nobody wants to take her with them.
She thinks, standing in the morning at her spot,
even this territory, it turns out, may be desirable, dear.

It turns out, you don’t want to leave it for a long time,
in fact, you want to hold on to it for dear life,
it turns out, this old train station and an empty
summer panorama is enough for love.

Nobody gives her a good reason for this.
Nobody brings flowers to her older brother’s grave.
In a dream, you hear that the motherland forms in darkness,
like the spine of a teenager living in a boarding house.

Light and darkness are formed, take shape together.
Summer sun flows into winter.
Everything that happens today, to everyone, is called time.
The main thing is understanding that all this happens to them.

Her memory is being formed, consolation formed.
Everyone she knows was born in this city.
At night she recalls everyone who left this place.
When there is no one left to remember, she falls asleep.

On a village street …”
On a village street
a gas pipeline has ruptured.
A place of accident, a place of danger.

Emergency services won’t come—
no one wants to drive under shelling.
When you call them—they’re silent,
say nothing,
as if they don’t understand you.

At the store, along with day-old bread,
they sell funeral wreaths.
There’s no one on the street—
almost everyone has gone.

No lines.
Neither for bread,
nor for wreaths.