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The Eyes of Keyholes
SUMMER OF 1993
Dedicated to M.V.
For years I’ve been thinking about the temptation
of memories - about you, no one’s bird in the besieged
city, your willingness to share the suffering, and my
own choice of exile. I remembered the place at last:
a wintry olive grove in the Žanjic resort, a small café
under a grapevine, where words chatter like glasses
on trays and where one’s soul is indiscernible in the
arrangement of crickets. I’d like us to go there sometime,
perhaps getting off the same boat at the appointed time,
sizing each other up with squinting eyes. There I wish
we’d recognize each other at last, at a secret table.
Like you, a bird belonging to no one in the besieged day,
I also am alone in my city, lowered from somewhere
in space into an anthill of squares like into a postage stamp.
Under the watchful eyes of mannequins in shop windows
I walk the world - I kiss little children. But even such as
we are we serve the universal darkness. And it doesn’t
matter where you go or where you stay - I see no escape
for anyone. Like grains in an hourglass, we pour ourselves
from one madness into the next.