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CHELSEA 73, 2002, New York, US (New York State Council on the Arts)

    An Overdue Letter to a Pimply Angel

Do you remember the smell of snow
with soot, still warm
from the chimney?
And the taste of cut fir branches?
In the morning you meekly pulled my
rusty
sled so that I, the first of the first,
would leave triumphant tracks
of winter in the yard.

In the evening you hung proudly
on the tree in pink
skirts of tissue paper high
and low.
I couldn't count you.

"Happiness is," you said, "when
you don't know how much there is of it."

One winter you sneaked
behind the Christmas tree
in lacy hoarfrost
stockings. The white girdle, your first
stocks of femininity, wouldn't leave you alone. You caressed
your thighs under the skirt
to make their material real.
You were hormonally sad from happiness.

Just like later that spring when
your first egg was
fertilized with one divine
life and swelled
in your mouth.
It stretched your bitter-salty
palate into a balloon
of hopeless December hope.
You knew all its parameters.

You still were my angel.

When you broke into limbs and fell
slowly, I didn't hand you
a wing. Forgive me.
I myself was a pimply
flightless bird.

Hail God's
Bird
from the Christmas tree
of life.

    The Fifth One

Every moment I kill one tender thought as if it were a persistent fly.
But it wants only to live.

I imagined love like a gigantic fruit fly.

I wonder who would then be the first to die the unnatural death:
I, it, or this fruit of paradise.



    Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough