A TREE AND A SPARROW Poem by Uroš Zupan

Yesterday the dark sea began to come.
I heard it rise, displacing air,
I heard it grow over the canopy.
The rabbits in coops twitched nervously in their sleep.
Their closed eyes glowed in the dark, the shutters
banged and the steps of my forgotten body
glided through the deserted rooms. I am alone.
The silence in my skull has become thick like clay.
It shines into the distant rooms. Everyone has gone.
Sudden deaths and farewells. Slow deaths
and farewells. Farewells like death. Does it make
a difference anyway? And then the long bending over
the buzzing in the receiver. Countless impulses of silence.
The family disperse, go their separate ways, vanish
like music in the room. People disperse,
go their separate ways, vanish like light
when you switch it off. I sleep ever less.
That might be a cure for a longer life.
Sleep is nothing but the imitation of death.
I keep tossing and turning between the sheets. My lungs
are ebbing and flowing like the sea.
But I'm no longer conscious of it. I'm ever lighter
and ever more contracted. I need ever less room.
I displace ever less air. Ever more do I feel that
I'm beginning to resemble a sparrow.
The night wind is constantly bringing yellow dust
into my wakefulness. From it I assemble a woman's cry,
which I have buried at the bottom of the ocean,
which I have heard between the huts
on the border between life and death.
I didn't know her language,
yet the flight of her voice told me she is asking for light.
Then I didn't understand. Now I do.
Even my highest plea is a plea for light.
Solitude is milder in the light.
False is the belief that eyes can rest
in the dark. Only light brings them real rest,
illuminated beds on objects.
Animals are awake and flowers open.
We can exchange messages.
I can give them life. I can rear them
and water them with love that once
I gave to those closest to me. The neighbours
who pass by my house chat with me.
Talking to them I forget about everything.
Talking to myself I remember it all.
The shutters are banging and the sea salt is snowing over the meadows.
The night birds are beginning to speak the language of fish.
The hand onto which the angels of destruction
have burnt a mark is breaking the dusk.
There in the end-room, before sleep, it'll find
itself pulling the blanket up to her child eyes.
The further I go along the circle of time
the closer I come to my beginning.
The dimensions of my body are also ever more
like those from the beginning. There
in the end-room I might meet
a stranger whose mind quivers and sings.
He will offer his hand, trudge his way across the river
and take me to the other side. Why do I ever drift around?
I'm just imagining it all. The polar night
stretches deep into the day. Although I can hear
the blood filling my veins I cannot find
the way out from wakefulness. If you get up at night,
glide to the kitchen and there meet
the one who grew in your belly,
then you know there is still hope,
then you know that through him you move into the future.
Yet everyone has gone.
Although at times it seems to me that they have left
a trace behind like on postcards
they had written from big cities,
on which the streets remain intertwined
with headlights long after the cars
have all gone. The voices
are coming back to the birds. Soon dawn will break.
My plea will be heard once more.
I will get up and go into the garden.
I will look into the coop to see if the dark sea
has taken a rabbit instead of me.
I always think that I was given so many years
because they had been taken away from others.
I ask myself, isn't there an average of years
someone is playing around with, someone
who cannot calculate, who has no sense of
harmony and balance. And since, like some people,
I do not know of any other means of avenging the mortal's hand,
I will, at one point in the future, when the time is ripe,
touch the only tree in the garden on which
the sparrows always sit, and become what I have
always been. A solitary tree.
Its bark will be my skin.
When now and then the people will return,
their children will drowse in my shade.
And if I sleep, I will sleep like a tree.
And if I travel, I will travel like a sparrow
that always stays close to its nest
and never flies south.