DUNES Poem by Taja Kramberger

Allí
donde mi presencia es esperada me hago realidad.

(Jorge Pimentel, Balada para un Caballo)


I.

No heavenly body nor an earthly one,
no gliding between them.
No sleepless head drooping above or below the bed.
No abdication of territory or status - not a chance.

Your real hand leading to the origin of mine,
this very chair here you and I in turn sit on - is enough:
tout à sa place.

Here you are, here I am, here is all
we need,
here are
two large dunes that fold into one,
and then rain and then passion and then the ground beneath our feet.

Two large dunes from all that is familiar, but from four very concrete
and independent hands, four eyes, ten toes and fingers.

Two dunes out of a myriad sand granules touching
each other, each of them communicating with all the rest.

Dunes, two curves closed into a circle by a gentle embrace of love.
Dunes, two inner worlds seeping into one in a gentle embrace of love.



II.

And then you come and reveal yourself in all that you are.
And then you come and read me where I have never
hoped to be read. Not in this life.

The landscape vibrato which binds us is what
has brought you to me.
The landscape vibrato which opens in reading
and is in itself a landscape -
once it was yours, once it was mine.

How, when away
from each other, though never apart,
we piled and shifted,
each his own solitary sand dune,
and how with each passing year
lonely shrieks multiplied.

Can you substract them, the useless
years of your life;
substract from what? You who have never shut out
another's voice on account of your own.

And then love: a delicate seam
stitched afresh in the crease of the old landscape;
precisely where
many others, whom I can barely still
recall, tried threading
their blunt bodkins with short life-span yarns.

What luck it was to meet you in this desert, you say.
What immense luck it was to be met, I say.
And then the silence against which you fully lean your ear.

Nobody's palms, except yours, can reach my body.
Nobody's voice, except yours, can reach the tone of my key.


III.

And here, where the journey normally ends and
a vast glade of immovable stone emerges,
we are flying across the waters, the ocean
beleaguered by kisses;
we are travelling across the glade
whose edge we have already walked, this time
like tiny flowers carried on the gust of wind.

We travel each to himself and both together
across thousand small bends on the curve of our together dune
incessantly sliding from one end to the other;
the dune that soaks up every drop of dew,
small mirrors to our naked bodies.

And see here now a thin relief line in the landscape,
a thread separating and binding our bodies,
a signpost to establish the direction of the desert wind:
it can never turn into an impenetrable border.

And only ours are these empty hands, which
desert palms cast across the sand.
And only ours are these words
which draw dew from stone
and crumble rocks
we see everywhere and everywhere is our home.


IV.

And drawing parallels from the world we know is
complete nonsense. And Braco, my love, today Danube
flows into itself and I am thinking of you
and of our two kitchen plants, which, you say,
have in the meantime perked up.

And there is no love outside the great dune if
each and every smallest part does not feel it.

And even here, in the north of the neighbouring country,
by the open vein of the sky-blue river leading the waters and fleets,
I can distinctly make out the tall, vigilant arch of our dune,
a wave turned to stone, having endured all the salt -
and is never shaken:

give it up
you'll be back
. . . impossible even to consider -
and then, naturally, there's rain, then passion
and the ground beneath our feet.