from MOSS & SILVER

3.

From the dark scarlet cone
in the brain,
shining with an
inner light all its own,
stars fall
through the breast
sinking into murky depths
without faces.


















19.

Spinning in my thoughts
are valleys laden
with rocks rolling down
with rivers in
their beds.


















25.
IN MEMORY OF A POEM BY PRIMOŽ PISKERNIK
I sense
that Primož,
who is now so far
away from me,
sees what
in me is
indestructible
in the vastness
of my
ecstasy
aroused by
the cry
of a gull
crying in
the same
vastness of
its own ecstasy
when it flies
over the ship
on which I travel.


















32.

Just as in the memory of the uniform universe
the solitary spark that slides in the brain
opens into poeticized space: the horizontal
where once the never-to-be-repeated gull
floated in an amorphous mixture of dusk and dawn—
so, too, only in love, Georg Trakl,
are enchanted paths unleashed into dream.


















37.

With tiny talons
the siskin clutches
a smooth branch
growing from a bush
right above the place where
brightly foaming water
roars over the rounded cliff—
a bent branch
swinging through vast
blue.

















43.

In an image projected onto a flat
plain everywhere between the rutted
path and the gray-brown horizon
veiled by fog and by nightfall:

and in a holy vertical
deeper than underground interweavings
that sprout up through a flat, empty surface
into tiny tufts of greenery:

roots of an
eternal
tree

for the nests
of future
centuries.