Dear Comrade,

Your words arrived, freeing themselves From the labyrinth called you. I had read somewhere that a woman’s Thought is as mysterious as the heart Of a sea. Perhaps I am making This up as I go, a nonsensical metaphor.

I had re learnt how to fashion metaphors - Out of stars, waves, Madonna floating In a boat of candles, a song in Spanish Hearing which a man and a woman Enter into each other’s arms as naturally as the wind Enters a bell and makes it ring -

On the faithful wheel of words this evening, Sitting at the feet of Don Pablo. You are a metaphor too, why for example I can allow you to stand for that evening When winter surfaced with sudden heat Forgetting its natural state or a mystery I occasionally attempt to fathom in my ignorance.

"And the truth?", I hear you ask. How should I answer? The finger that points to the moon is, sometimes, also yours!

Sashi

Another evening, sunlight slowly fading. You keep looking at the horizon to see the universe at play, playing the same old game of color and shadow. It is March and spring. You are exhilarated by that very fact and try to be grateful for it. Earlier during the day you had read a poem, drunk perhaps is the more accurate verb here. It was as an artesian well is to a thirsty sheep in the arid outback. That poem arose in the poet from a glimpse of a clothesline hung with chemises drying and became a meditation on love and women.

You arrive at the corner, as you think of the poem, the corner where a Japanese magnolia is blooming. You bend down a branch and pluck a bud to take home with you. You say to yourself, wishfully, how nice it would be if you could take this home to someone who will receive it joyfully, as if it was, as it is, a star, a meteor, the wing of an angel. But this wish too shall pass, you say to yourself. You remember the refrain of another poem. This one is by Adam Zagajewski.

You sing shout that line - ‘you should praise the mutilated world’ as you stop at the creek and gather twigs of blooming quince. You have been the object of mutilations – most of them self-inflicted, but now let this evening, this executioner of this day, be a time of renewal. Array those bloody memories you hide inside your form as ikebana, as you will arrange this quince when you return on your desk. Look at them and rejoice. Raise your cup to what has gone, what is already available in this splendiferous spring and what will arrive.

These are the words you tell yourself. The struggle however is not during this moments of long quite into which only an occasional roosting birdcall intrudes. It is when you struggle with your own doubtful lust - desire you have realized is misused and overused – and the perpetual hunger of such a state. There are many such moments in the day too. Yesterday you escaped - a much easier thing to do rather than confronting it, rather that becoming still - into music. You listened to music for many hours, till that breach was dammed and the flood subsided.

You come down the hill and see the sky attain the exact tinge of red as that of a pear tree framing it. You have a impulse to walk down to the golf course where the road curves twice up another hill beyond which the sun can be seen exiting, an actor who keeps coming back for repeated encores even though his performance is very rarely greeted by the applause he deserves – another sign of the holy fool. The Sufis call it being ‘mustt’ – intoxicated. Surely that also explains these lives of quite despair – devoid of poetry, devoid of singing, devoid of anything that pulls one beyond oneself, takes one beyond the self absorption this strange world seems to demand and require!

You suddenly grin broadly because you suddenly see in front of what you were thinking of replenishing – a neatly stacked pile of bamboo waiting for the trash man! Since you have discovered the beauty of bamboo as a receptacle for flowers, pens, coins etc, you have made and given many pieces away. You select two richly browned long sections along with a smaller green section. You drag them a mile home full of gladness, whistling and smiling at others you encounter, running and walking the opposite direction. The tune ‘dum mustt qulandar mustt mustt’ - drunk is this pilgrim, fully drunk!

A dozen girls’ chemises drying on a line, floral lace at the breast like rose windows in a Gothic cathedral.

Lord, shield Thou me from all evil.

A dozen girls’ chemises, that’s love, innocent girls’ games on a sunlit lawn, the thirteenth, a man’s shirt, that’s marriage, ending in adultery and a pistol shot.

The wind that’s streaming through the chemises, that’s love, our earth embraced by its sweet breezes: a dozen airy bodies.

Those dozen girls made of light air are dancing on the green lawn, gently the wind is modelling their bodies, breasts, hips, a dimple on the belly there -- open fast, oh my eyes.

Not wishing to disturb their dance I softly slipped under the chemises’ knees, and when any of them fell I greedily inhaled it through my teeth and bit its breast.

Love, which we inhale and feed on, disenchanted, love that our dreams are keyed on, love, that dogs our rise and fall: nothing yet the sum of all.

In our all-electric age nightclubs not christenings are the rage and love is pumped into our tyres. My sinful Magdalen, don’t cry: Romantic love has spent its fires. Faith, motorbikes, and hope.

Translated from Czech by Edward Osers