On Returning a Book to a Public Library Poem by Marjan Strojan

I make this short. Days always surprise me,
so when I'm returning a book to a library
it doesn't mean I have finished it or had no
intention of reading it on. It only means that
despite of its extension the library lease had
expired and that the times and places and
the extravagant fortunes of men together
with the traditions of various schools and
institutions of knowledge, secret societies
and writings of all ages, collected and arranged

into chapters or classified according to their
alphabetical order, had found themselves
locked behind doors of inscrutable hallways,
the keys flung as liberally away as if they
were seeds of dandelion. No doubt they go on
along the corridors of some cerebral Hades
weaving their lives, quite independent of those
which time and again I capture in my
scattered glimpses or overhear in pieces of
fragmented conversation, however inadequate.

So, in the cobwebs of Sanct-Petersburg's
Railway Station (in snow) still waits Madame
Karenina to throw herself under a train,
and I'll probably never find out what Vronsky
could do at the time, if anything. Tatiana had
never finished her letter, though I presume
that she had turned down the poet, who ages
ago had been scribbling into his notebook
in his small neat hand the names of his lovers.
And Doctor Rieux, even he - what did he,

after the danger has passed, say to a writer
whose fast-travelling ladies clatter around
Bois de Boulogne in their carriages- if, indeed,
he survived the ordeal? Is this important?
I don't know; take the book I was bringing
back this afternoon. I can't for the sake of me
remember who wrote it; even his middle name,
a common and well known one, evades me
completely. A tiny collection of verse, like
scenes of renaissance architecture of triangles

and elegant stairways in precise, condensed light
of the colour of salt. It was a book of poems,
which now, when forgotten, seem even better,
compact in the language of its vague, unruly
translation, opening new and unexpected prospects
to each of its metaphors - sharp and twofold -
like pillars and horse. There was an air of something
conquering, something victorious in far away
places about them, like a clang of a sword drawn
from a scabbard: Vincente Cortázar Paladio.

translated by Alasdair MacKinnon