December Sketches

I.

These are desolate dark weeks when nature,
in its barrenness, equals the stupidity of man.
It’s hard to climb along the backs of leftover hours.
Night falls in the middle of the day. Morning
and evening swap fingerprints. Nowhere to be
seen are those light dance steps, gliding and skipping
in the direction of fleeting clouds, when the floor
suddenly disappears and the feet must find
solid ground in the air.

II.

A thimbleful of hope remains.
A slightly open door that lets in a slender sheath of light.
Voices in another room.
Voices in another language that sounds like the sea.
A long walk through the forest that washes
the soot of dark thoughts from a man.
A sudden thaw that surprises an empty park—
the end of March in the middle of December.
A thimbleful of hope remains.
Developing black-and-white negatives
that will never become photographs.

III.

A cat slowly retreats across a snowy meadow.
The whiteness is huge, my gaze can hardly
measure it, and if I wanted to walk across it,
I would need the whole of December.

IV.

It’s still dark. Minor chords, a thread
of rain, tunnels through the fog, greedy
clouds hunting down their victims in the
lowlands. I write a letter to the child
I left behind. But he still clings to me,
everyday he extends his hand from the dusk,
reaching out to me. I write a letter to the young
man sitting beside the road somewhere.
And I hand my load of virtues and vices to the man now grown.
The three of us take turns guiding the way.
It’s still dark.

V.

An empty room and an empty sheet of paper
both filled by the rhythmic pounding of the sea.

VI.

There’s a kind of glow around words.
An invisible warmth.
If I put them on the top of the snow,
they drop down toward the soil
and press their ears to the ground
and listen.
That’s my way of summoning the spring.

Uroš Zupan

Translated from the Slovenian by Erica Johnson Debeljak