Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

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.

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