There are mice crawling everywhere here

In this house

There were four birds, or were there six,

Or seagulls rather, that flew through the Russian sky

And they were always there or will be forever

Alone in that sky, or with each other

White birds that fly through a white expanse

Of an airy feel like snow or semen

Or milk, holywater that flows from the heavens.

I have decided to be an alien, or to live alone

On a spaceship with lifeforms that escape me

By their many years ahead of me.

Still, it is not midnight yet, but this poem is very old

And I do that, write poems that are very old, much older than me

Even though I am at this moment decomposing into nothingness

Like the rotting flower that God meant for my body

Woman in the green bathroom, who descends the bathtub

Because it is her time to haunt

Or it is rather, she can’t get out of there

The way the birds can’t ever get out of that painting

The way Emily Dickinson is in that house, whether she likes it or not, for all of history

Her brown hair surrounding her face in the same white bed

The grapes in the small silver bowl next to her, not rotting but frozen for all eternity

In mid-gasp

Things are like that, whether they escape (and I mean escape) into the bloody footprints of hell

Or they go down like saints, with children at their bedside.

It is all frozen in time, like a static shot of bloody leaves

All along the baseboard of my mind.

Still, the saddest movie in the world shouldn’t scare us

Don’t be scared of the saddest movie in the world that is your favorite

You are not fixed in their story, that is theirs

And when you leave this earth, it will be of your own free will

To go into that snowy plain that you have understood completely

And when I said that the sublime is only the beginning I meant that too

That to be one bird in snow is to know you have nothing left to lose

So the fullness of life is right upon you

The tomatoes, the tomatoes, the lemons

The orange fruits, the lemons, upon you, wandering in the dark forest

Is not the loneliness of life, but only the idea of love

Still soaring above us in the wind