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Ringroad Elegy
If I could I would go. And this shadow would stay in shadow, sink into the horizon, and the ghost of distance set behind the hills, the foggy villages, iron-rolled fields, blood flowers there, everything would be left. From the corridor of leaves, the black hole, I'd be gone, I would leave the tangled nerves of traffic, the ice-covered echoing ground and all the sleepless days (as well as the hours limned by signal lights, the blinking strokes of bits). I'd break open the rusted lock and step into the garden of oblivion and metaphor (so I've been told), and no longer miss the evenings slowly setting, nor their long adjectives above the lake, nor the stories of the seer and maker, nor the words like bricks. There would be only desert: flames, electric blue, thorns. There would be also foam and water reflecting galaxies, currents carrying the salvage of wrecks, ferries roaming their routes, oily streams in the Baltic sea the moon hits when an immense wing glances the surface so I if I would go, my word would be left unfinished, snapped, splintered and fallen into the gutter, corroded in acid and stuck in mud, an arch would collapse behind me, the familiar architecture would flash in the last night's antenna light, would be exploded behind my eyed like a million dreams, megatons of dream
- associations... the whole cosmos is associations, processes breeding one another, winding chains of genes, strings of stars, silver trays of glittering allegories, all night long the sign of Pisces shines. The petal constellation unfurls, dew gathers on your forehead. And behind your forehead the fluorescent blood-drained sky glimmers, a wing-washed pane through which I see the Tallin's towers and the flickering of torches in the chambers where the ability to comprehend breaks down and sentence-structure makes deep wounds in the tissue of soul... bone marrow, where a thick echoing voice is still dropping a few parameters, analyzing a set of hypotheses: the Enlightenment is not yet over, the sea shimmers blue as it did in the time before coal and acid, the end-of-time fog is disappearing... There, on the other side of the bay she is rising into the morning, nothing is the same, everything is happening for the first time - the birds on that grainy film, the ferry and the castle island. Maybe she can remember it too, maybe not: another era is at hand, another city landed from the sky, and I am in the old world now she in the new, two possible ways of dreaming logically, strands along the dark sea. The light is an effect of what exploded in your hands once, the waitresses carry it in their arms, gently, they are teasing me with their towels and stickers,
If I would go I wouldn't leave but fall back here at the round table, at the glass disc into the kingdom of fish to interpret dreams, but there is no dream, only layers of glass, drifting of dreams along the walls and halls, they stick to your hair and the ornament, steaming in cups, they get written on surfaces
and the water splashed in between the living tissue and collarbone, the dark waters of space, the lights of distance slid in, carried the horizon into my room and slipped something into my hand.
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