Radek Štěpánek, Erosion

I. Between the Drops

Water strikes stone,

but the blades of rain will not blunt,

disparate worlds churn,

fingertips touch,

never understanding one another:

Everything is impermeable, water and stone

remain water and stone.

The fragmenting of time gives rise to another time of murmuring,

murmuring gives rise to another time of chirping,

the flock of starlings, shot to pieces, disperses around the world,

everything just fragments, rearranges, and comes together again,

the oleanders drink after a two-month thirst,

and people dance between the drops,

as angular as sugar cubes,

burdened with premonitions of the wane,

within reach of the incessant extinction of life,

face to face with the trickling of sand.

Waning implies waxing,

though always elsewhere and another time.

Thin strips of silver flutter in the wind,

each gust reaffirming the covenant

that the trees have made with the world,

the full moon shines on the olive grove.

A long vigil awaits us

before the arid wasteland will transform

into a land of a thousand streams,

each of which we will have to cross.

We will stand at the end as at the beginning,

both places becoming one.

And every place, all the living and all the dead

will be the answer that cannot be sought,

only found.

II. Inside the Whale

We pray within the bowels of the rocks,

we listen to the rumble of thunder inside the stone whale,

and we almost hope to go deaf,

golden veins of lightning shining in our closed eyes.

We burst from within,

light entering us through every crack,

in a nameless void

where the stone and the turtle are gods.

We must speak their language,

we must speak the language of the mute,

we press ourselves into an alcove in the rock,

wretched, helpless, we plead for mercy,

with no concept of time and space,

three days and three nights in twenty minutes,

three days and three nights for an entire life,

we watch as a new time is created

in our present:

water washes away the stone that was once the seabed

and deposits its dust on the bottom of today’s sea,

the blades will not dull,

disparate worlds churn and fingertips touch,

stone remains stone, god a turtle, and the storm does not abate,

the bay fills with ochre from the surrounding hills.

Today’s mountains will become valleys,

to rise again in the lowlands.

Everything easy will become difficult,

and everything difficult will be easy, but nothing will disappear,

waning implies waxing.

We were escaping from something,

something drove us here,

in the adjacent alcove, light shines from the crumbling stone,

the jaws of a dead fox.

We wait for the stones to move,

we will raise our eyes, and we will be giants in a time of giants,

just as we are now still men.

We stare at the bones washed up by the rain:

light entering us through every crack,

stone is stone, turtle is turtle, and going astray

means finally finding the path.

We will raise our eyes, and we will be snakes making love in the desert,

we will be lightning and we will be thunder,

fanned by wind and fear

in the eternal fire.

We lie in ashes, silently speaking

the language of the mute, without borders or pleas,

we speak wordlessly,

we will, we will, we will

be enclosed in the womb of the underworld,

in the heart of the storm.

Heaven and earth have changed places.

V. Fragments of Insomnia

The cat purrs the thread of the evening

that spilled over into night and continues till morning.

Within reach of the shore, I taste the monstrosity of loneliness.

Awake for hours already, completely alone,

a black current rolls hypnotically through the room

and settles in the corners.

You speak of earthquakes, of the collapsing of walls,

of cities razed to their foundations.

I stand at the epicenter, and I don’t know

which wall to cling to: my drunkenness

or my sobriety, the past or the future?

The fragmenting of truth gives rise to another truth of fragmenting,

I see the ruins of a city from an ancient empire

swallowed by the sea and left to the mercy of the wind,

the jumble of bones from which we divine our own fate:

today’s mountains will become valleys,

to rise again in the lowlands,

everything easy will become difficult,

and everything difficult will be easy.

You breathe, you roll over,

you break down the constructed walls with every movement,

every sound breaches the borders,

the crumbling sets in motion armies of millions,

everything rearranges, churns, and settles again.

I don’t know which wall to cling to,

the fragmenting of truth gives rise to another truth of fragmenting.

Reefs value their teeth:

smash against them,

find your terra firma at last.

Every place, all the living and all the dead are the answer,

the cat purrs the thread of the evening from sheep’s wool.

I worm my way into the flock along their backs,

I see the ruins of a city and sheep,

huddled in the only shade to be had

by the last wall above the surface of the sea.

I see the saucers of a gecko’s eyes beyond the stucco,

a sea urchin transforms into a hedgehog,

snuffling beneath the open window,

the murmur of rain dilutes human voices,

the smoke takes the shape of bodies, I am startled,

and I flee from night into night,

I roll over onto my other side

in order to delay the dawn

burning through my closed eyelids:

I am the epicenter in the age of fragmenting.