Novak A. Boris:
Coronation

1.

Memory has two wings: the first is past, the second is future.

Within us a poppy smelling grave is growing.

Where a space is too narrow to accept a step

Only voice can dwell in a dead bird’s nest.

Our destiny is a freedom of language,

A high spell, a living blood from the time well.

The deep snow of centuries is waiting for us,

Dark of soot, washed out like a fragrant linen.

I am beginning the chant with a great praise to the milk.

A language of milk is whiter than absence.

Word is a womb of the human world.

This poem is beyond power and weakness: only a whisper

Kisses the mouth where the river is bound for:

A luxury that hurts, a name of the silence.

2.

A luxury that hurts: a name of the silence.

There are fires and eyes burning everywhere.

Irrevocably alone, lost in a sweet confusion,

I am kissing hands to all the people; let it pass.

Let this luxury of the blue pass.

It is enough to be here once, at the edge

Between day and night, tracing signs of death.

The world is rich. I feel like dying of grace.

I have a left and a right hand.

With them I am building a nest for the shapes

of your body which is a sea and deep.

The ear is a shell of sounds and silence

In the sand of time sliding through my fingers.

Only dreams can weave time with water.

3.

Only dreams can weave time with water.

When everything familiar had strangely changed

A beautiful woman has thrown her shoes into a precipice

Tearing apart a night cobweb with her naked body.

A skirt is a wing shining lonely out of the deep.

(Who’s traveling and where to? - Who’s asking?)

The beginning of the end. And the end itself? Here it is:

A frightful poem, sister of the primordial silence.

Destiny is fulfilled exactly as light

In the morning and in the evening. And birds

Fleeing to the south pierce the presence.

Never more. Nowhere. Only little seeds,

Seemingly dead, call the future time,

A magical mirror, a distant face of milk.

4.

A magical mirror: a distant face of milk,

Scarcely visible under the magnifying glass.

Sacred waters which haven’t broken yet

Shield the fire with a silence of high priests.

When a woman’s labor begins a laundress comes

To wash the sky in the light that streams away.

Blood has the strength of steel.

All things support each other like stairs.

The universe is open with a birth scream!

The body is a field - the wheat and sickle of the reaper.

Watch: a grain is growing into the highest image.

A trifling grain, smaller than the pupil of the eye,

The same in its desire for the name: the little is great.

Truth is always being born at the edge.

5.

Truth is always being born at the edge

Where an utterly sensitive seam

- The mouth of a river kissing a sea -

Is sewn with an invisible thread of the new language.

A prudent palm is making a childbed, celebrating

The body in the rhythm of a dream weaver.

Life is strained like the string on a bow -

On the spin of a sacred woman in labor.

Giving birth is a terrible gift for a woman.

But each and every thing is a tiny thread of a rug

That unites us all into the whole.

Only death undoes our weaving, making a hole

With scissors of emptiness. Under the earth our blood is green.

A child is building the whole world out of clay.

6.

A child is building the whole world out of clay.

For him the door is not just a birth of space -

It is the native space itself: the child has to

Open it to become a prince of the wide.

No wall can break time and space.

And the window is not just a bottomless eye

Of the wall - it is the precipice itself which has to

Be open by each child, each prince of the near…

The wardrobe hides an ancient treasure: childhood.

Hidden in folds of skirts, this fragrant,

Tiny, thrilling god will never die.

I’ve opened the door of my dusty homeland:

Magical tears. - Being grown up I am so poor.

A sand castle is stronger than emptiness.

7.

A sand castle is stronger than emptiness.

Invented and ruined by the movement of the moment,

Eternally ancient, it is being renewed and wasted again and again

Under fingers of each and every child, like a fruit.

An immense world is dripping through sensual sieves.

The nearest universe is open to be touched,

A mysterious skin drinking air and sobbing

And hearing only the language of the moist and warm.

Senses wake up to play with colors and sounds.

A fateful bird of birth is nesting in time,

Filling an empty fist with a palmy kiss.

I am eating the world with an appetite of the spoonful.

The eyes of children are starving for things.

A mother eagle is shielding calls of the weak ones.

8.

A mother eagle is shielding calls of the weak ones.

Tender games of the beak with a fledgling

Are eternal rites at the peak of the mountain

Where earth rises high, high - to the knees of air.

When a woman carries a sunny seed of the message,

I’m just a man, confused and silent, witnessing

The creation of everything from a crack of nothing.

Her sex is the neck of a broken bottle.

With my palms I am trying to close the burning wound,

The utter sacrifice of the woman’s body.

Her skin was never so naked!

Birth is a farewell hurting a child to scream!

We are beings of a bright, native solitude.

Anguish opens like a curtain.

9.

Anguish opens like a curtain.

This poem is a moment of silence before a storm

Gathering debris of the world torn apart.

Shielded by a wild rhythm I am dancing away from terror.

Mysterious memory is rising higher and higher,

A cypress above the open grave of history.

The sky is enlightened by falling stars,

Wheels of fire, nightmares from the dark childhood of time.

Look, a bulldog with a mouth full of bloody saliva!

When morning begins to mourn and the poem is a curse

And a city is a tower of glass and brass without pity,

Only a child rescues the space with his fresh eyes.

The child is a holiday, a day born out of a hole.

The child is a crown. I crown you, my life.

10.

The child is a crown. I crown you, my life.

The whole world is a modest throne for the infant king.

His smile is everything: the greatest hand of light,

Snow for us who are melting snowmen.

The child is created twice: by birth and by milk.

Breasts are sanctuaries of milky rituals nursing the universe,

The mouth of a sea into a new-born river.

The milk is a pure will, a living water of creation.

Being little the child is living near secrets: he knows by heart

Each and every wrinkle on the wooden face of the furniture.

For him every day is a birthday. A new continent to be discovered.

Only the corner of the eye is sensitive enough to see the     weakest

Stars: when you watch them directly they vanish into

The densest moment - terrible is the gold of the body.

11.

The densest moment: terrible is the gold of the body,

An ore radiating into nothing, a grain in the flood.

How can a bow still find the color of the sound

Locked deep in the memory of the ear.

After the fire the darkness is still darker.

Future days, all those prophetic lights and lies,

Will collapse under the weight of the triumphal arch.

How to rescue a cradle from the earthquake.

A bloody rain will wipe out chalk marks on the blackboard.

A snowman will kill himself melting away.

Only poems still keep the word,

Drawing wings for children to fly.

How to build a house with the mere strength of the eye.

The blooming of the world demands a serene vigil.

12.

The blooming of the world demands a serene vigil.

In a poem I am someone who’s always missing.

To make a verse sound perfect, I am silent.

To make a flower be perfect, I am fading away.

I am subtracted from the total of everything. - Time is friction. -

The result of the calculation is zero, without a remainder:

The body is a mortal weapon and a mortal wound. Vanishing,

My face is spellbound into the pure vibration of my voice.

I am withdrawing. Now you can watch the field through my ribs.

Nothingness makes me dangerous and vulnerable.

Every fist is full of a terrible will, so I make it a palm.

A change: step here, into the spell of our farewell,

Where I stand. I am no longer there. Instead of me there’s a universe.

Here, my child, I bequeath to you all the wonders.

13.

Here, my child, I bequeath to you all the wonders.

I, a king of the language, am resigning to the rhymes

Of a royal insensibility, being hurt

By the word. The poem is a body of the body.

I am leaving to you all the eyes and strength of the tree,

Laps blossoming in the middle of winter,

Secrets to hide yourself and call me: I am not here,

Treasures of sounds and this key of the ear.

I am writing to you with the blue ink of the deep

Where waters of time fall down in a foam.

Don’t be afraid. I am a bridge over the fear of heights.

But every peak is a slippery threshold into emptiness.

Don’t be afraid - I won’t let the world crash the silence of

The knees where I cradle you into floating.

14.

The knees where I cradle you into floating

Are flourishing, full of milk, full of nothing.

The lullaby is a soft, sonorous lid

Slowly covering your dreams. Go away, fears.

Learning to rise you’re bigger than life.

And you fall down. An immense river always washes away

The world while you’re running to become a man

In order to stop the spinning of the earth.

But between yourself and death there is my body

Guarding you. When birds are bound to burn

Only man is free to sing.

Absence will drink out all my eyes.

When you grow up, whisper to this poem: You are mine.

Memory has two wings: the first is past, the second is future.