Ivan Dobnik
LIGHTHOUSE
For Marko Cestnik
Translucence of horizon, waves that hurl forward,
postcard’s message, quivering flame of the sun’s last gaze:
»I devote time to myself, I remain, I remain
with evening light which purifies river
and human soul, the uncertain
repository of unrepeatable states,
wherever I am.« Pemaquid Point Lighthouse,
New Harbor, Maine. Sun already setting,
you, with salty feet, explore
wind, memory, and the still living presence
of your dead father, you write me that summer’s at its zenith.
Places where I’ve been, caresses of sweet-scented rooms,
Besançon, 1996. I breathe you, I think you,
I dream and drink you. Even car noise
on highway Ljubljana-Maribor is music,
new temples of our time are a gift
to books. Ripening fruit. Landscape,
as it was forty years ago, the smell of horses
in a pasture, of the painter’s unfinished canvases
of rustic nudes, autumns were chilly then,
the stars silent, I was still, charmed,
filled with a warmth that glowed from the wilderness.
Cities fill with blood, time and again,
with violence, no one listens to dreams, which as a rule
we know not what to do with, here as gifts
for the wakeful. And the lake which hides the voice,
the slinking leopard’s gait on suburbia’s
playground, wherever, surfaces change,
snow falls, seagulls on the Île de Molene have returned
safely from the Channel. I look back to the continent,
silent, biblical, heathen,
from calm of the Yellow House. I do not dream
during intense sleep. Fiercest reality
returns me to birth, self, so that I may
love you with the labour of silence, gaze,
weightlessness. From night’s distant glint
of lighthouses. Then, simplicity of the Mediterranean,
on a Greek island: even there, among the ruins
of a great people, where you sought dark eyes
and the sky, to lift you up, to levitate.
Here summer ends. I will not depart.
Nor will you, living on a shore that spills over.
To depart, to return, all
that remains certain: our words,
notes, letters, taste of smoked
tea in the forest, sunrises
that warm our airy friends.
Vintgar. Grapa: the eye of light
in which we write, these are condensations of our complete
surrender, a path so branched
it ramifies out into the past, inhabits
a vastness traversed
only by writing, for the wave of emotion
cannot settle in one form,
nor can all words fulfill
desire for the Moment: we sail for the sake of sailing.
Live long. The apple trees in the orchard are
gone, the riverbeds, pheasants’ hiding places,
buried in the soil. The blue sky, so absent.
Here, where everything seems larger, it is August.
Everything. Nothing I have is mine. It vanishes
for numerous notebooks, for the fleetness
which dispossesses us of the material, therefore,
of the stuff dreams are made, to keep us pure for the future.
It is afternoon. Lull. Sunbeams flicker:
where does the voice take me? I shall remain where I am,
omnipresent. »A shore, so picturesque!«, you say.
Rustle of Ocean, of jumbling visions, amazement,
the long letter, a seaworn pebble in the palm,
what transforms shapes, opens up sinewy
trackless expanses. And above all this, a lighthouse.
(Translation by Mia Dintinjana)
