With Closed Eyes Poem by Aleš Šteger

When you close your eyes you see a poem.
It is emptied of the firmness of all things you secretly desire.
It reminds you of a white room freshly painted
Where summer forgot to close the windows and doors.
But this too is only an insufficient allusion to forms of the physical world.
Entrances and exits do not exist in this poem.
This poem consists only in vaporousness.
The figures floating in it, the metaphors
Hanging on its walls a galactic draft could
dispel and recombine as something else.
Two naked clouds, about to make love,
Are dissolved and exhaled by stars as a cloud
Of a slaughtered wild boar encircled by grey smoke
From the cigarette of a father, who, hidden
In a dark corner of the poem, watches everything. Most likely
He is the true author of all poems. You cannot see him
In the dark until he chooses to appear,
Soundlessly, from behind, playfully covering with his hands your eyes,
Asking: Who am I? Will you kill me? Are you mine?

Translated by W. Martin with the author