Marko Tomaš
Translated from the Croatian by Rachael Daum
A Pointless Poem
It wasn’t easy to leave you and go.
I went then into the unknown.
It wasn’t easy to leave
without any of the trips we planned to take,
without our banal, everyday trifles,
without occasion for phrases planned out ahead of time,
without the body I’d learned to rouse with the soft touch of a finger.
It wasn’t easy.
Outside it was February and it was raining hard,
you looked across me toward the wet rooftops
like you were listening to a terminal prognosis,
it wasn’t easy for me with you repeating:
but, Marko, it’s raining outside!
You were right, I left
and I had nowhere to go.
The rain poured for days,
in some other room
I didn’t answer your persistent calls.
You wrote how you were crying and going mad.
I didn’t just brush it off.
I drank without stopping and then sobered up a long time.
That’s what I do when I have nowhere to go,
I act like a brat.
It wasn’t easy to leave you and go,
no music suited my mood,
no consolation in anything.
My window looked
out onto a bleak, muddy courtyard.
After the rain
a tabby cat wandered into it
and stretched itself long.
Its proud indifference made me laugh.
I made myself coffee and watched it circle the puddles.
I know, you’ll never understand how it goes
but I left because I had nowhere to go.
How the Morning Starts
The sound of the first trolley on the Youth Bridge.
The reflection of the round paper chandelier
on the dirty window
serene as a mandarin
on the dark surface of the kitchen table.
Under the bridge the river glitters,
over it the bent necks of the street lights.
I live in a tired world,
the remnants of a night that dawns in the growling of automobiles.
Pleasant winter sleepiness reaches out from the radiator.
I can thank
my own prespectiveless craft
for the pleasure I take in it.
There’s a good chance this poem
won’t lead anyone anywhere
and it’s hard to imagine a possible destination.
My sentimentality is a form of mockery,
I’d prefer to be sad than serious.
On the edges of the streets and screens
Christmas ads flicker indifferently.
Over the rails and roads, the reflectors
illuminate a massive drumstick.
If Christ were alive, he’d be almost 2,020 years old.
He’d detest all this jubilation
and remain the loneliest man in the world.
Imitation
Now more than faith in God
I need to believe in the atmosphere
I tried to create
filling the room with tobacco smoke,
turning on the table lamps, tuning in
to exceptionally old-fashioned radio stations
where in great detail
they announce classical music numbers
in the even, serious voices
used only late at night,
for that—to a few—special occasion
or to announce the end of the world.
Maybe the problem is that I’m drinking water
but I don’t feel like I’m in the right place
to utter something like the truth,
something close to life.
I feel like I’m imitating myself
what wouldn’t I give to scrape by without consequences
to the better times promised by
the epidemiologists and politicians.
It’s happened too many times already
that with a face pale as a mountain path
you come out of the study
and announce the death of somebody close to us.
At the base of your nose your tears cluster,
two little transparent blackberries
sliding onto the parquet
and I try to summon
how I ought to feel after such news,
I’m trying to remember what I ought to say
in this, and the next moment.
For too long already I’ve been in a dark corner
I can’t give directions to,
myself out of reach, astonished, without a plan,
an empty bit of skin
like my father’s slippers
in the corridor of an abandoned house.