Just before the war, a foreign film crew burst into Ruža’s village
and turned the country idyll into chaos: prefabricated shacks
appeared, houses were quickly painted and skilled foreigners

When the National Library burned for three days in August,
the town was choked with snow. Those days I could not find
a single pencil in the house, and even when I grabbed one

At the beginning of the war, the streets resembled a promenade
of the most beautiful dogs, abandoned by their masters
who had run away from the burning town. Behind them remained

greener than Eden, a shock of bliss to see
just past the stew and suck of reeking waters,
the earth ate sunshine under the olive trees.

The mouths of her shadows are pursed by time
to suck sun-lit memories from the wood.
Freezing damp and candle-smut have raised

Strollers, diapers, bottles overwhelm
the young mother in the nether reaches
of life after birth no one told her about,

The burnt-red fox darts in front
of the car’s path late at night,
and I’d like to call this an encounter,

Actually, it was sweet and heavy with juice
and we passed it back and forth, a river
of nectar running down her chin and mine

And spring once more, the sun made its rounds
over the mountainside
above our drafty house where the weak had lain

All day, we loitered at the throat of the penny arcade
to hear how the fisherman’s cast had taken the eye of Vilas
Puchomsky, a pain radiating down to the sexual curve.