A Name Poem by Zvonko Maković

Of course I keep you secret:
I quickly make up lies
with which I would spur the memories
of the time when we were nothing but words,
words that were swelling and swelling
changing us into a supple mass
of cruel sincerity.
It is cold,
I feel helpless
and besides very dumb
while I boast with a kind of love for myself.
Then
in the most expressionless movement
I recognize signs
of a desperate wish for closeness without contradiction,
for fruitful silence
that changes uncertainty into inconstant bravery.
I can hardly define
the state when we were
neither completely sad, nor deprived of a rebellious
fear.
When we wandered around printing the faces
of death into things.
I shiver in the milky light
and listen to the morning
that is coming very slowly:
like a breath,
like fluent rising.
When eyes are closed
out of the memory there flow pictures of cities
printed on the hillocks,
lined with the blue of Umbria.
These will sooner be the nests in which we store
suddenly recognized shame.
These are loose memories
that connect us into an uninterrupted system
of fine deceit.
I am the one who shouted
from the deep of the street as from a dream.
I am the one who drew out the moral
out of patience
and understood the wild devotion
as the most sacred law.
Absurd, indeed, but inevitable.
You know well from what a dense nexus of relations
I can bring these words
out into the daylight.
Leaves quite lazily fall from the tree
in front of the window.
This laziness suddenly becomes a metaphor
for a higher condition.
This is not only stating a fact like:
I am re-reading Pavese.
Little moves on the scale of uncertainty,
this is what I want to say,
in conclusion.
But somebody says:
- Our blood is in the oak, -
thinking in the meantime how it is possible
to resist inexplicable lies.
I cannot keep this sentence secret by any means
and I take it, full of persistent simplicity.
I still reach for the glass in which
the remaining drop
glitters like a grain of hatred.
Is the day breaking?
You are leaving, but only for a while.
Little steps reveal bravery.
I understand them as the signs of clear indications,
as an undoubted decision.
From the emptiness of the paper there stream new faces
that we could possess together.
share them
like slices of ripe fruit,
like gushes of dark scent.
Share them like sentences,
like eager words of which we once
knitted a crystal clear
skin
under which we can not escape
without consequences.
All we can say is that
we observe things
that always stay outside,
always unreachable.
That we listen to our own breathing,
we maybe hear sentences of third persons
and experience all that
as a unique object
which is enriched with special meanings
even by bare duration.
And then?
Then -
one slowly starts to remember life.

Translation: Miljenko Kovacicek