for Martin and Tomaz
Our memories of ruin fail to make it through customs. The
helicopters rave, make no sense; somehow they know what
they’re doing
But go back, thoughts, to laughter and neurotic running around
a European city. An exchange of books through a third
party. There is one friend in these cases that takes on a huge
debt. The newspaper columns write themselves, they are writers
of a generation, they
were implicated in the mistakes that everyone made. To not
enforce them in an obit would itself be betrayal. White
spaces indicate hospital, erect letters represent love. We were
way too tired to think of going on with
life as it was. There was no room for projects of small ambition
of mere example. The appropriate would go on being perpetrated
but not by
us. In the Slovene city, the tea house drips with rust from
the local trees. The trace of poetry in the air only with
the mention of the dead’s name. It was a year of change here
too. A white sea eagle in a too small tree foretold of knowledge
disappearing; a blue-faced honeyeater would forever be our
bird of mourning. The surety of a line paired
with the thrusting of translation; unlabelled orange juice
I’m drunk. Perhaps we still have grave dirt on our hands
The city rumbles
This close to the centre, the lights never go out, lovers and
starers-into-rivers mean the bridges are never clear. As our
friends
knew, a lot of loss can inhere in a year. A whole town can
be wiped out. A habitat, a type of mole or fly. We have their
recorded voices of course. We can turn our backs on what
we have and let it disappear like we’re asleep. In our
dreams we’re being hunted in a forest that is itself endangered
We’re passengers in a car, joking at each enjambment we
survive