Because today is Tuesday
and
your Christmas honey cookies
are the ones
that transfer some kind of warm...
because
the distance is not measured in mountains
or in Khmers...
i smile
your expression tunneling
this direction!

***

The street was empty when with a gloomy laughter
I stopped the progression of transience and mortar,
a different picture of love seeping from it.
Sleigh bells of vanity and the unarmed symmetry
were fading like new fragrances and biblical nostalgia.

At the same place I met the warmth
of her long fingers, among them,
lurking shyly, the ancient danger of arson
and that mathematically clear feeling
of similarity everyone finds so very dear.

Millions of trampled steps
on the damp and muddy sidewalk
bear witness to the only genuine past, inscribed
in the dull rock of the street, then a stereotype
shaped by every whiteness of my incidental sentence.
THE ETYMOLOGY OF NEARNESS

yves sent me a message: a girl from italy watches me under water for the third day, and i watch her. we are there, naked and alone. above we do not know each other. i replied, using our slang transcription: bi kul! stej vel! after that, his next message said he had dived again, “for it's quiet and uniquely nice down there.” i understood his cry of suffering at another, distant shore. next i dived into marguerite yourcenar's oriental stories, went to china, kotor, dubrovnik, came up again, melancholically, though now that's way out of fashion. i saw several italian, four czech, and seven pudgy hungarian girls. i saw a sunshade restless like someone’s body. i saw a pair of blue, anxious, deep-set eyes. i wanted to suppress my passion for diving, but couldn't look away, or put on my sunglasses, not at all: unable to move, i was sinking, steadily and silently, in the sand.
Holding-breath diving
Branko Čegec