for Marija Čudina
Just because
not enough snow had fallen
Lacan never got to find his way
into the Castle.
There are only two who
at perfectly divided intervals donate life
no question asked:
God and oblivion.
That’s how it was written on the blackboard.
A castle can trick a sleeper for a second.
That morning
he being the first to wake up
dreamily observes the endless white fields.
Trees in a grove
cracking loudly from winter
like dead bones
in nylon sacks.
It’s not yet time to get up
though the scene with the Castle
shall not return with the next sleep.
The shallow tracks in the snow, the invisible
little wounds on the tongue. Silence.
In the restaurant
chairs turned upside-down sleep on the tables
on blue chequered tablecloths.
The portrait of a man with a bowed head.
It’s warm in the stables.
The frozen little branches
in a migratory bird’s half-ravaged nest
are the heart of a lonesome gnosis.
Angel of death
– so the legend I invented just for you says –
has a voice resembling the jingle-bells
of a lonely sleigh in the night
when the draw-bridge at the entrance to the Castle
is lowering.
You haven’t asked who I am for quite a while now.
The bats hidden in a decrepit belfry
sleep their winter sleep
hanging from the sky like holy letters
tno one knows how to read.
When they rise again
you won’t even know that there it was written
if there was a path to the Castle
or not.