at non effugies meos iambos

If I were to wipe away the constellations from the sky,
You alone would shine,
There in that,
Devoid of all the light,
Which too often clutters
Your radiance and your mind.

And lightheartedly I say this,
While scrawling desires on yellowing pages,
Which I hand out at random
(et ad absurdum).
And throwing little glances,
Lost in endless distance
Or translation.

There is a grand complexity to sight and sound
Which I with my inherent limitations
Fail to grasp.
Depictions wrought by my hands
Could never do the forms of these things
Proper justice.
And instead of facsimile
They become ruined.

And so I blur the lines
Between the real and perceived
As done with paltry sketches,
When the artist has no more good to do,
And so becomes not a bearer of beauty
But a butcher.

I write dis
Jointed poesy
With you in mind.  
(No better subject could I find.)

And fill the lines,
And fatten the meter out
With syllables and sibyls
With diacritical marks and dieresis
And critical remarks
By means of
Playing knucklebones with words.  

But I’m no Anacreon,
Or Tibullus,
Or Sappho.
And though I may be just a boy reading Catullus,
Anachronistically,
My poems are just as good
Had I been
A wordsmith
Like Wordsworth.
(at non effugies meos iambos)

My Thracian filly,
Why do you stare at me askance?
Casting such a scornful glance,
When I only seek to fix the bridle and the bit?
And thereby win with winged words,
Whom auspicious gods above gave chance.
That I may do so is no such crime,
Merely only now give way,
To him who rolls the dice now cast,
And wishing only a wicked kiss.
Be tender, be soft – hold not fast,
For here, forlorn, I do but stand,
And extend but only a weakening hand.
So now with steady hands,
Let me unhook the belt which holds you so chaste,
And if not, return to wretched lands,
Where this bittersweet memory may be erased.

I must have fallen in love a thousand times,
By glancing at every pretty girl,
Who passes me by,
On the sidewalk or the subway.
Whose tender glances and fleeting eyes,
Leave me rapt in utter ecstasy.
Those whom I wish I could entice,
With poetic words, or feeble attempts,
At honest love-making.
Those ignorant ones, whose ****** motions,
Are like those motions of the heavenly bodies.
Whose swayings and turnings,
And peripheral lookings,
Leave me catatonic, and in a silent admiration.
Those whom I wish I could flatter,
With poetic words or tender little love bites,
Or perhaps leave, as they have often left me,
Charmed, enchanted, and with heart burning.
Whose very hearts, hearts I wish that I myself could unlock.
And yet I do nothing.
Whose flaxen, raven, or curled hair, I wish I could entwine with the nimble figures of my hand,
And smooth over or fashion,
As if like an artisan, tying the knots of my shy love.
Whose batted eyelashes,
More so often than not,
Batter me, as if they were Borealic winds.
Whose eyes; green, blue, brown – or a mysterious black,
I wish I could gaze into, endlessly,
And drown in their luster.
So, yes, I’ve fallen in love a thousand times,
With sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers;
Like that sweet-sounding Hungarian girl in Podgorica,
And that German lass,
Wo weilest du jetzt?
Half of my own blood,
Whom I encountered in Ulcinj.
Ajo që ka sytë si në qiell.
And the plethora of ones I’ve never met,
Nor will ever truly meet,
But view longingly from the periphery of my vision.
I love them all fruitlessly.

In the town of Višegrad,
Where he was born and raised,
From cradle to grave,
He took no respite,
In the disdainful looks
From the villagers and common folk.

It was they who spoke,
In hushed whispers and behind closed doors,
That he was not of their ilk,  
Half of some other blood,
Born from a land of scimitar and silk.

The janissary’s ******* son,
Conceived one night in the shepherd’s pasture,
Was one with dark ram’s hair,
And eyes akin to muddied alabaster.

One who delighted in the towering minarets,
Looming over the stone and brick in the Old City,
He hated the stench of pipes and cigarettes,
And thought Persian crimson quite pretty.

The calls of Qur’anic prayer in midday,
He thought of at morning mass,
Amid the cross, the hymns and prayers to saints,
Staring intently at the stained glass.

He brewed his coffee in kettles brass,
And supped it atop the kapiyah at night,
Dreaming fondly of a likewise dark-eyed lass,
Whose face made him blush at the sight.

He often wished to travel to Eastern lands,
And of these he wrote in poems short,
Those where he could find repose in shaded sands,
And in no Serb or Greek tongue find retort.

I looked down upon the humdrum of my life and thought of you.

I looked at the towers of red-brick and mortar,
Which stood outside my window,
And the cracks that pervaded their foundations,
And the stairs where we used to sit in the evening,
Lit up by light of fireflies suspended on metal beams,

And the roses in my garden that grew against iron gates,
And weeds that grew up through the cracks in the sidewalk.

I looked on the books that lay scattered across the floor of my room,
Those I’d never read, the ones I’d sworn that I’d pick  up,
And those I’d read so often that even now their pages
Turned with a well-worn fold, as if on hinges.
The ones I’d quote verbatim in order that I might
See a blush run across your face.

I looked upon the thoughts that flickered about my mind,
Watching them as they raced to and fro,
Darting every which way with solutions or conundrums in hand,
And thought of you.
I looked at the specific and the general,
The frighteningly absurd and the congenially memorable,
And all of things which bore your semblance and all those things
Doubtless which were foreign to me,

And in each thing you drew closer to me,
In such a way that your eyes shone brightly
And the words you had spoken to me felt just as heavy as they once did,
Falling upon me and enveloping me in their caress,
Running soft-tipped fingers around my heart,
Or washing over my soul as waves do.

I looked on each thing that I had known, those things I now know, and those things
I will come to know,
And in each of them you are.

And then I looked at myself,
And in myself,
I saw you.

Someday I will write a story worth telling.
Someday I will compile a little set of memoirs,
Someday someone, somewhere and somehow will stumble upon it;
Perhaps they will gloss over the pages,
Read the words that I myself once wrote –
Thinking to themselves much the same thoughts that
Dripped like water from stalactites onto the moist earth of
The cavernous hollows of my mind,
Or perhaps they’ll listen carefully to the voices echoing throughout.

Maybe.

Maybe they’ll find all of these visions grand,
Or think these encounters simply happenstance,
Happening one after the other with no particular rhyme or reason.
Perhaps they’ll find some profundity in my words,
That’s what I’d like them to do –
That profundity I myself couldn’t find.

They’ll read poems like this,
And attempt to read between the narrow lines,
Stretching the spaces between the words,
Wondering why it was that I wrote them
- In such a way,
- At such a time.
Maybe they’ll see the world through my unopened eyes.
Hopefully they’ll make peace with the past,
Embrace the present,
Look longingly and with undying flame toward the future.

They’ll take me along with them;
I’ll burden them
Weighing down the bottom of their knapsacks,
As they try and juggle everything I’ve said
And everything I’ve been silent upon.

I hope they realize the importance of stories.
Do you think they’d think me some great author,
Some gifted storyteller,
Able to wring from the cloth of time,
Little murky water droplets of my experiences?

And, who knows,
Maybe they’ll remember me when they write their own stories.

And if none of that,
I’ll be forgotten.

All the better,
As with each day comes a little of my forgetting of the world,
And with each the world becomes a little moreso forgetful of me.

Kin die,
Friends die,
Cattle die;
I know only of one thing that does not die,
And that is the deeds
Of a dead man.

I remember you,
Do you still remember me?