Svetislav Basara - The Cyclist Conspiracy

After that I go home

Resolute

To read nothing at all

Sunday

Holy Sunday

Fat roasted turkeys

Fly over the streets

Greasy Sunday lunches

Swollen greasy stuffed cabbage leaves

Lazily napping

On the dead backs

Of solemn tables set for guests

In Sunday guest rooms

Fathers counsel children

I’m waiting for you in front of the butcher shop

In solemn Sunday

First person singular

And so wonderfully

I do not exist

You don’t have to come

Anyway you don’t exist

I don’t have to wait

Anyway you won’t come

Let the Earth turn aimlessly

Around its sun

I am empty

Like the universe

This Sunday afternoon is

Longer than the smooth meridian

That severs me lengthwise

Thus there exists

An eastern and western

Joseph Kowalsky

An east and west heart

An east and west hand

An east and west waiting

And all of it divided

By a thin lengthwise line

Into an eastern NOTHING

And a western NOTHING

And in the middle

Holding my breath

I wait for you frantically

(1923)

At night, as soon as I fake going to sleep so

I could rest from pretending to be awake, my red boots

would set out. They would check to see if my eyes

were closed, and if my breathing was rhythmical and then

they would go out into the street.

I would follow them barefoot and bareheaded in my nightshirt. Without success. A few streets over they would lose me and there was always a cop there who was bored and liked to ask a lot of

questions.

Who knows with whose feet they went, where they went, what they

did I never managed to find out where

they go

those boots of mine.

And still, I forgave their unfaithfulness, took them to the cobbler,

shined them with whale oil until they finally fell apart.

…

It is impossible to simultaneously feel and not feel them

How uninvited they find refuge in the shallow seas of marrow

And blood

Named after kinds of ravings

Bloated shapeless Amebas

Look… two baby Cancer amebas

In your tear duct they are weeping

Jangle the rattles of your bones

Go on let them play

Let their soft mouths chew on you

Bring them mother’s milk

Bring them yourself

In the right pocket of Cancer

…

In the left pocket is a trite emptiness

Dedicated to the waters; below the sun shatters into

Tiny boulders

Below is their home and ours

A large village of silence

And we shall

Return Cancer

The one and only Cancer

Look, two baby amebas on the corner sobbing

Break off the hands

Break off the head

Feed the insatiable hunger

Feed the amebas

Of Cancer

…

If they gently enter the whites of the eye and become cataracts

What word should you softly say so they don’t become enraged

And deform even these pitiful contours

And these pilfered shapes

And these airy constants

How do you tell them to come to their senses when they do not even

Have themselves and when they don’t know

In which direction and how far they spread

Into which of the unstable senses

Into which of the floppy ears

…

Watch out Cancer

One of them slipped unnoticed into your ear

Across your hand

Maybe it will tell you a lie

Maybe it will pierce your eardrum

Fly away, fly

…

They are at times in my outstretched palms

and again at midnight they stick to the blind window panes

all by the way from childhood to this telephone booth

in the hospital wing of the madhouse

They call on the telephone: let us into your eyes

let us into your lungs

let us into your veins

let us into your glands

let us into you

Static in the lines

They naturally are not anything but they are also not stars

they twinkle though they barely exist usually around

zero-zero

(when the senses change shifts)

They flicker on the restless boundary between

semi-darkness and…

Static in the lines

1.

I will speak about my father Witold Kowalsky. About his conversion from being an atheist into a true mystic and Cabbalist. He is in the adjoining room. His cheeks are flushed. He is drinking vodka and writing the treatise Theology and Bicyclism dedicated to His Holiness the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Until a few years ago, my father never drank. Then he suddenly grew ill and fell into his deathbed. The doctors gave him two weeks at best to live. After four weeks, my father had not died, and the director of internal medicine, Dr. Wagner, lost patience with him and threw him out of the hospital for being undisciplined, and so that he would not occupy the place of someone who had more respect for medical science, someone ready to die by the determined deadline.

2.

In his Confessions , my father commented on that episode in the following way:

“It is a lie that they threw me out because I didn’t want to die even though, according to all the findings, I was practically dead. They ousted me because, while I was sick, in a coma, I repented and returned to the saving grace of Christianity. It was not the doctors’ fault. They did so unaware. The world order is such that Christians are persecuted and they are persecuted no matter how often the official policies, history and so on, claim that the persecutions of Christians are a thing of the distant past.”

3.

Upon his discharge from the hospital, my father bought an icon of Jesus Christ and a used velocipede. He took down the picture of the Kaiser and hung the icon above the desk that he never ever worked at; at that time, he still had not started corresponding with His Holiness the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church. But, a mistake slipped by him: while making the frame, the glass-cutter put the picture-hook to the side of the symmetrical axis and therefore Jesus hung crooked, as opposed to the Kaiser who had hung perfectly, his stance at ease. My father tried, using cobbler’s paste (exceptionally hard) to bring the icon into balance. In vain. The icon hung crooked as if it wanted to let him know that it was supposed to be crooked. One day, my father burst into my room and shouted, “ Felix error! I realized what the icon wanted to tell me: Jesus is not hanging crooked, the rest of the world is; the world stands off the vertical axis of the Logos by 13°, no less…”

4.

From that day forward, my father began to be enthralled by mistakes. He said that mistakes are the steps to perfection. I did not understand him; at the time, I was not a mystic, I was a communist.

“Take the train schedule as an example,” he explained to me, “the train schedule is the thing that introduces disorder. Trains always arrive on time, whenever they can and when that meets the goals of Providence. The whim of a transportation engineer, that train number 170 must be every day at 14:03 at a certain station, makes us get an illusion of disorder if the train is late. Yes, that’s the way it is: in countries where the trains arrive exactly according to the schedule, lawlessness is greatest. In a similar, mystical way, to the way the schedule creates lateness, so does the law create crime. Listen, if you have ears…”