treetops, trembling

April 2017

 

Our contributor Viktorija Bogdanova recently started her PhD research in Ljubljana. Hereby, one of her poem-drawings, telling about the city.

 

In Ljubograd,

built most perturbedly

is the love among the birds.

They beautify the invisible

in each rising sun,

because they have a home,

otherworldly preserved,

organically untouched.

Here, sublimity is being created

by every chanting being

who is pierced by northern rays,

up, above the human breasts,

above their intermingled

shells and heartlands.

 

The contemplation

towards the pedestrian silences,

towards the human scales

and carnal placements,

creates peace,

-spontaneously, unobtrusively.

Concordance is being born

through the water touch;

the sublime

-through the unearthly poem.

 

Quivering pieces of translucent light

are floating in the river as

tranquil disorders of the cityness;

with the same precarious instantaneity

-piano keys are howling through windows

of schools musical and schools inner,

and so are the clouds-lively intertwined with heavenly silence,

and so are the birds-inhabited in everything above-grounded,

weak, frail, quiet, fragilely alive, waywardly truthful.

 

Treetop-city, it’s the name of this air

inhaled through each part of the self,

treetop-of clouds, of waters, of mountains,

treetop in verticalities settled,

treetop-awakened kindliness,

wakeful through winds, wakeful through silences,

adept in decently homeless dwelling…

Here, the city is not readable through walls and windows,

but through gates, treetops and chimneys!

Because the silence is being concieved in the entrance,

in the ascent and evaporation,

in the abandonment, displacement and re-creation.

Here, the chimneys are converging verticalities,

but the wind continiously returns them to solitude.

Treetops are chanting for the attics,

but deaf are the winged inhabitants

-trapped by the habit

they bury their wings below commodity.

Thus, loneliness reaches melancholy

even when the treetop exhorts

through chanting, most joyfully.

 

And even in cruelest winter,

when the snow revelry

is being erased in the name of patency,

only treetops bear witness to this joy,

filled by naturalness,

filled by bleach,

filled by embroidered stories

in weightlessness.

Their trembling presence

preserves and embraces

the snow as well as the sun,

it builds the urban breathing

and the urban corporeality.

 

Ljubljana, 20.2.2017