When you put a wild cat out the door
skyscrapers will be waiting for you.
They veil their eyes.
The doors are just heavy enough to shut you in.
When the meadow is being torn open, white milk
drops over the earth’s feet.
What can you understand from utterly other worlds
other than destruction?
Smile circles locked in a straight line walk right
into you like puffs of smoke –
When he’s not curled up, the cat’s
tail barely touches them.
Hands, getting up in the night
and shutting the cats out,
rub images out of dreams.
The story is under the sun.
You pay for what somebody was doing for you
yesterday, today and tomorrow.
You pay for weightlessness.
You’ve been too long on the train and your straw hat
is shielding some other person’s head.
You travel into extended time.
Every morning you sleep too long.
The more the years draw out their shadows, the shorter
the visits. The cat is going crazy without you and your
cushions. Turned on its back
it is falling off the silk bedcover – thirteen
days of sliding, of bodies locked into fights
– but its claw leaves
a long gash – a wound in the pillow. Should I have
shooed it right off, walked sumptuous libraries
with a calmer step?
To wrestle for sleep as if for a chunk of meat !
To wrestle with cats for prestige
can end badly, you are left with a bruise,
with a divide splitting your home
in two. The other half
of your home groans like an artificial leg.
A cushion of darkness comes tumbling down
on bodies that cannot understand.
The skyscraper sadly bends down to the cat.
It’s hard to live split in half. Until now
that’s the only thing you’ve understood about otherness.
Translated by Ana Jelnikar & Stephen Watts