The Syntax of Skin, the Sintax of Moonlight Poem by Branko Čegec

The triumph of numbers comes off the screen.
I slow down, powerless and silent.
As if renewed
in the belated philosophy of language and wine
I acquiesce
to every pathetic slalom
though the girl from the dial
fell asleep in the arms of insomniac nights
and fishermen's objections
the idyllic history of literature
oozes stickily from.

An essay is then
the impenetrable circle of danger:
new explanations arrive
for spent words, for exiting images
and frames from a borrowed movie:
the plane's boom and the cellar's dust
left their mark on your damp palm:
lovely, joyous, and tame
you crawled again into the odor of my skin,
the enchanted solar glue
from which there is no return, where nobody's the same,
which we find about from the newspapers
and the legends of deluded butterflies
on the window that vanishes
in the deep, fathomless dark.

I tell you: get into my mirror
and take me in the cold remembrance
to warm up, to fall asleep smiling
as if I were oblivion,
the calm sea, and Polic Kamov
in the lottery in Barcelona.
Ships and lady pianists
with long legs and laser fingers
wave to me as in every campaign
of innovations and death:
the stereo booms only with the rhythm of your touch,
followed by a tremulous flash of the skin
in the moonlight near the embankment, in spring,
when the winds are still very young,
and the night doesn't end, just like a manuscript,
writing out the ellipsis of a small letter 'l'
to infinity.

1992

Translated by Mario Suško