of strings across seas
my body moves through space
but knows no space as home
occupied
to occupying
soil is always thick
home is holding her tea cup
but my hand is still a visitor
how many missed mornings of mist
coffee, cigarettes
her hand in mine
as we share a fever
weep for the dry eyes
of our mothers
chests
full of villages
in 1969
we had no bananas
when i saw a banana
for the first time
i thought
what perfect baby food
now bananas
will taste
like baby food
forever
the wall came down
and we had as much tropical fruit
as we wanted
my uncle says
you must eat fruit
that is grown in your climate
tropical fruit in winter
is poison
time is counted
in markets
my aunt married to flee the curtain
he brought a suitcase of clothing
to leave with my grandmother
i was the only one with three blazers
she said as we caress the silk
of a thousand soft shirts
at the second hand market
what do you want to eat
i will go to Kaufland
they have anything
you can dream of
we drove our Trabant
to Budapest
for the fabric
and the baths
we came back
with colours
no one else had
bras were one size
one shape
pointy
grey
my mother wore no bra
and went to church as protest
while police stood at the door
and remembered your face
my mother sewed
topless by the window
flowing skirts
soft shirts
my grandmother opens her chest
of leopard clothing
reveals her drawer
of folded scarves
now, i allow myself
gluten-free klobasa
and pineapples
a hundred watches
at the Vietnamese market
we watch time change
at the market
they smuggled mustard
in crates to Germany
when they crashed on the autobahn
thick yellow mustard
splayed the cement
stories are thick
who saw the police
stare at the yellow
at the scene
depends on who
tells the story
you are going to the market
how will you get there
take the 8 train, take bags
change at the church
two stops on the 25
the stop is
market
How many lives had he lived with his back turned looking at the street.
He’d once received a phone call while he was picking mushrooms in flip flops that informed him hat the ball joint was in but the mechanics were in Predibice looking to arrange a fire place for Jaromir’s mother for a good price.
He had worn a suit to look down the village road just in case Maria would walk by on her way to get morning bread to feed Adela and Marian or maybe walk down the road to Klašterska to have a beer with Pepík at his pub or keep walking to another village where maybe they had a hall where in the night someone pulled out a Kytar and Violin and everyone would sing and eat fire cooked sausage and then in a shining drunk he’d go out under the moonlight and keep walking and keep walking.
He’d taken the train to school with his little brother and two slabs of bread. They would walk along the road to the station conspiring how to out smart the train. They would throw rocks and exclaim that they would make a replica of their uncle’s Trabant and race the train to school. In the city, the cars don’t race trains. They follow lines and stop at lights so that old men can cross.
He’s gone to the pub to watch the game. After nine beers he staggered home but she didn’t let him back in. He stumbled around for three days until he stopped and focused his eyes on a bus stop at a woman in red pants who looked like his mother when she dragged him from the Principal’s office that time he threw a paper plane at Ela.
The squash was a full arm span. We had to round up the neighbours to move it into the apartment. Once we pulled it in and it was sitting on the table, we had no idea how to cut it open.
On top of it, the day before we had gone to Maria’s and she had so much squash they were rotting all over the yard. We packed away two full bags and it hardly made a dent.
The apartment had squash on every surface, the giant squash was in half taking up the entire kitchen floor, and the news was saying that it was a bad year for growing.
set himself on fire
for the demoralization of
Czechoslovakians,
the suppression
of free speech
“people in the street,
the multitude of people in the street,
silent,
with sad eyes,
serious faces,
which when you looked
at those people
you understood
that everyone understands,
that all the decent people
were on the verge
of making
compromises.”
the státní bezpečnost state police
dug up his body in the night
laid an anonymous dead woman’s body
in his grave
sent his cremated remains to his mother
told her she could not bury them until 1974
because his grave was becoming
a national shrine
on the twentieth anniversary of Palach’s death
protests escalated into what was called
Palach Week
Palach week is considered
a catalyst
communism fell
in Czechoslovakia
ten months later
8.09.68 Ryzard Swiec, 59 Poland’s participation in Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
5.11.68 Vasyl Makukh, 40 Ukraine
16.01.69 Jan Palach, 20 ČSSR (Czechoslovak Socialist Republic)
20.01.69 Sándor Bauer, 17 Hungary
25.02.69 Jan Zajíc, 19 ČSSR
2.04.69 Evžen Plocek, 39 ČSSR
9.02.69 Eliyahu Rips, 20 ČSSR
13.09.70 Márton Moyses, 28 Romania
14.05.72 Romas Kalanta, 19 Lithuania
10.08.76 Antanas Kalinauskas, 19 Lithuania
10.22.76 Oskar Brüsewitz, 46 East Germany
01.21.78 Oleska Hirnyk, 65 Ukraine
06.23.78 Musa Mamut, 46 Crimea
03.02.89 Livia Cornel Babes, 47 Romania
03.02.89 Vytautas Vičiulis, 37 Lithuania
04.26.90 Stanislovas Žemaitis, 52 Lithuania
05.09.90 Rimantas Daugintis, 55 Lithuania
An idea fell into my head.
I’ll walk you below the street, we’ll look at the buildings from under the cobblestones, and if we call it history, it won’t be strange.
My grandfather’s first and third wives had their daughters on the same day, with the same man, fourteen years apart.
They spent hours smoking cigarette after cigarette while five black cats roamed the apartment.
A burglar broke into my grandfather’s first wife’s apartment, gave her a blow to the head with an iron, and took nothing.
Three weeks later she had a stroke while boiling an egg and caught on fire. The following week, my grandfather’s first wife’s fourth husband, her only true love, joined her in an unexplained plane crash.
My grandfather died a year later of lung cancer and within a month his daughter with his third wife, my mother, fled the country to join her half-sister, from her father’s first marriage, in Canada.
My grandfather’s third wife stood by the window smoking cigarette after cigarette while a single black cat roamed the apartment waiting for her brother to return from prison.
My great uncle smuggled gold in his shoes until he couldn’t grasp time, and when he got caught, all he had was time. Seventeen years.
Suitcases of calculators to India. Heroin in his body. A vision of grapefruits once saved his life from a gunshot to the chest. He got through a decade of prison in India by studying Yoga.
My grandmother brews medicinal creams on the stove in the apartment she’s lived in for fifty five years between trips to the basement to gather herb. My great uncle chain smokes in the kitchen and drinks half a liter of herbal tea twice a day.
I was born in the war, he said. I hear a plane and feel a bomb. I have a shower and feel gas. I don’t go to Berlin. I listen to Bach.
Every city has a ghost, said my great uncle as he rolled tobacco. Paris is proud, New York is loud, but Berlin, Berlin has no ghost.
This time it will be worse than WWII, said my great uncle. We live in a world with drones. We are able to kill from a desk. The war is here.
We smoke with the TV on silent.
The Russians are in the business of controlling information, he said. They change the information on TV to make you hate your life.
There is no evil, he said. Only percentages of ignorance, passion, and goodness. He says the only thing the body does without the mind is decay after death.
He once kissed his great niece’s ex-husband’s mother, my grandmother, in her cabin in the mountains while my grandfather slept.
I’ve been spontaneous too, said my grandmother in a car of folk dancers. I moved in with a man who killed a man. But I believed in him. And in the end, it turned out not so bad.
He killed his sister’s husband who sent her near death to the hospital three times, the police did nothing.
He’s been stunted ever since he got out of jail, said my grandmother. He thinks he is a young man and young women want him. He is always yearning.
Men think that if they want him, she wants him too, my grandmother said as we drive past her lovers house. It doesn’t occur to them what she wants.
She leaned over, a wrinkle in her eye, and whispered, but if you let someone shit on your head, they will keep shitting on your head.
If he asked me to get him a beer, I’d smash it over his jaw, she laughed to the folk dancers.
We are mountain people, said the driver in her kroje. We don’t turn on the TV, we get together and drink. We know how to have a good life.
My great grandmother predicted that in the future people would be able to see each other while talking on the telephone.
My aunt came to Canada and cut all of our telephone cables. They’re watching, she said. My aunt is wanted by Interpol, but instead she’s slow cooking rabbit in the Bohemian hills.
I can’t work a regular job, said my aunt. It drives me crazy. We laugh because no one with our blood can.
My grandmother’s great grandfather played the violin and died on stage after he said, the song is over.
Walk me below the street, look at the buildings from under the cobblestones, and if we call it history, it won’t be strange.
18.11.55
Where the eye reaches
The sky is in a blue mood.
It is evening, in a while the Milky Way
Will trickle down his chin.
It is evening, Fish from Africa
In sweet pink costumes
Beneath the umbrellas
That serve ice cream here.
After they walk in pairs, two by two
Tender like children’s trains.
And like paper weathervanes
Emerge from behind the clouds.
Then the lights of the ice cream stand are turned off
And the decorations will fill the baskets.
And Mr. Jeronymus Bosch mixes colours for a good sleep.
18.11.55
Kam oko sahá
Nebe je v modré náladě.
Je večer, za chvíli Mléčná dráha
Bude mu stékat po bradě.
Je večer. Ryby z Afriky
V růžově sladkém kostýmu
Pod slunečníky
Tu prodávají zmrzlinu.
Potom jdou v párech, dvě a dvě
Něžné jak dětské vláčky.
A jako papírové korouhve
Zapadnou za obláčky.
Potom se zhasne v zmrzlinářském stánku
A dekorací bude plný koš.
A jiné barvy namíchá ti k spánku
Pan Jeronymus Bosch.
20.11.55
LIGHTS beneath the snow —
It is a doe in the quiet woods of ztichlém
And tear rivulets
Beneath frozen waterfall
Nativity of legends
That you put your heart in
And a life in sleep
And childhood in adulthood
Lights beneath the snow!
What can words say
The astonishment changes
All the land in Bethlehem?
And Christmas will be
And the night of the three kings…
How long do I know you,
lights beneath the snow!
Oh don’t you get frost bite?
And aren’t you cold?
Only the stars may know
How to shake time and shade.
In one of those lights
as I once at home
20.11.55
SVĚTÝLKA pod sněhem –
To je laň v ztichlém lese
A slza potůčku
Pod zmrzlým vodopádem
Jesličky z pověsti
Do nichž své srdce kladem
A život ve spícím
A dětství v dospělém
Světýlka pod sněhem!
Cožpal lze říci slovy
Ten úžas měnící
Celou zem v Betlehém?
A budou Vánoce
A Večer Třĺíkrálový…
Jak dlouho už vás znám,
Světýkla pod sněhem!
Ach nespálí vás mráz?
A není vám tam zima?
Jen hvězdy znají snad
Setřásat čas a stín.
V jednom z těch světýlek
Jako já kdysi doma
22.1.54
BEHIND THE HOOKED branches
The moon hangs
The woodstove ignites
By someone’s hand
Landscape of pale morning
The sound smoldering with tin
The dairy arrives
With a white horse
And the moon cold and white
Rings in her jug
Me with my paw in my mother’s palm
Already dreaming of love
The carriage jolts
And dawns the day
With the milk and the love
Today I am again intoxicated
22.1.54
ZA KLINKYHÁKY větví
Měsíc visí
V kamnech zatápí
Ruka čísi
Krajinu bledé ráno
Cínuje hliníkem
To mlékařka přijíždívá
S bílým koníkem
A měsíc chladný a bílý
Zvoní jí bandasce
Já s tlapkou v maminčinĕ dlani
Sníval už o lásce
Pak vozík odkodracal
A rozednil se den
Tím mlékem a tou láskou
Dnes zas jsem opojen