How sweet time feelswhen it’s too late and you don’t have to followher swinging hips all the way intoyour dying imagination
(Leonard Cohen)
When it’s too late it is too late for everything.
Too late to tell her how much you love her. How much you loved to see her move between the kitchen table and the stove, [...]
For R.
It’s four in the morning. The square is empty; the snow lies untouched. I see your breath: a white glow that almost enfolds me. Your hand warms my hand. I look up, from the green-moulded statue of Jan Hus, past the chimneys on the rooftops and the spires of the cathedral, to the low [...]
Rebirth is a bitch. It hurts like Hell and it would be quite simply the most humiliating thing that could ever happen to a person, were it not for the fact that it gets worse with each new incarnation. There is, quite frankly, nothing worse than being reborn.
What was that you said? Death? You think [...]
(For Renata)
“Come.”
I can hear you but I am so far away…
(…I am Columbus on the foredeck, listening to the sound of an unfamiliar surf. Seagulls draw lazy circles in the sky. I think of all the things that are so far away from here and from this moment:
the carts that moaned under the [...]
The elders were inside, deep down in their bunkers. They couldn’t bear to watch the sky during this week. However broad and deep this new sky was, all eyes would always travel to that one small pinpoint of bright light: the latest star to join the endless, silent choir of night’s bright passengers.
The children called [...]
First came the wind, carrying the smell of spices.
The boy, still asleep, saw his grandmother, standing in the kitchen, while she bruised the roasted cardamom and other seeds in the mortar, adding olive oil, then thyme and rosemary, then garlic, more oil.
Sometimes, at this stage, his grandmother would call him inside and watch approvingly [...]
He watches them from the room’s only window, late in the evening, or when he wakes up from a dream in the middle of the night.
The dreams are clear and show the past: a wife, children, a job, a house. When he wakes up the veil comes down again, quiet and intangible, unbeatable. Then the [...]
It was ten o’ clock in the morning and I was sitting in my local, at the bar, a bottle of beer in front of me. Next to me sat a man who was drinking coffee and cognac. I had just finished another night’s work and was not in the mood for conversation. So, when [...]
First the dolphins arrive: vague grey shapes that can hardly be distinguished from the waves. The foot of my bed changes into a far dune. The ceiling dissolves. Above me, sea-gulls fly through the mist. I can hear the creaking of the ship that slowly moves away, leaving me behind. The headache is almost unbearable [...]
I write this window. I write the light that falls through the curtains. Behind the curtains must be a room, where you sit at a table: a pen in your hand, a notebook before you.
You write me. In my dreams you write me.
You have no name - not yet. You have no age, no colour [...]
The man next to me was very drunk. He had first tried to talk to the barmaid but she’d been too busy. Now he was trying to start a conversation with me. I wasn’t really paying attention, so I was slightly surprised when I suddenly heard the words:
“In a perfect world slot machines would drink [...]
It was a competition and a carnival: each tower a candidate and a cacophony of blue. The whole city watched while the twenty carts, each one representing a tower, held their annual race. In the weeks before the race, every morning, streams of people left town through the six gates and late in the evening [...]
Why?
I remember now. Like a match struck in some prehistoric cave reveals the scratchy figures of hunters and prey, I remember. You were always asking me why and I could never find an answer. Now though, I see clearer. I see everything much clearer now. This - this is Paris, yes, some twenty years ago [...]
Three years ago the car had come round the corner. Three years ago it had been a Wednesday afternoon. All the children had gone to the park; most of them with their parents, or in the company of friends. She had been at work though and her daughter, who was six years’ old at the [...]
So you ask me why. Okay, let’s see. It is Paris and it is winter and it is raining. The old and rounded stones are slick with oil and mud and the millions of burnt corpses of abandoned cigarettes. Head down, I cross the street: hurried but still haunted by the spectre of that old [...]
Por qué una negra noche se acumula en la boca? (Pablo Neruda)
“Another beer?” the barmaid asks.
The man doesn’t answer; he just looks at her. Moments later a glass of beer is placed in front of him. He doesn’t seem to be in a hurry; he stares into space. This is a man of deep [...]
It is an old building, held up and half-hidden by scaffolding. I’ve never been able to find it by day. It seems to rise up with the night, when Vinohrady shakes off the rest of Prague. The parks become forests; the soft slope streets turn into mountain paths. Then every detour leads to this house.
Above [...]
In this dream I have become the fingers that pluck the last words from the dying soldiers’ lips. Above me, around me are the hills of yellow and rust-brown gas, the short white flares of explosions and the sounds that make craters in the night. Within me the fingers, the dead lips, the collection of [...]
Each morning, after breakfast, he walked to the sea. She stayed behind, in bed, reeking of fish and distant waves, and a great forgetting. She lay in the dark, as under deep water.
He didn’t go out to sea anymore. His boat was now manned by the youngest son of his brother. In exchange he got [...]
The whole idea had always been that one first had to be killed in a reasonably gruesome way. One didn’t become a ghost just like that. If one hadn’t been drawn and quartered or publicly beheaded, one didn’t stand much of a chance.
Unfortunately - and like those horrible people who can’t sing but still do [...]