#j. bernlef

On the edge of the newspaper he sketches skelet tries to cry but that ancient feeling evaporates in the loud headline of the sun - instead he makes some coffee in the bitter realization the world wants to know nothing of his dying He crawls out of his watch into his clothes shaves and sees in the mirror someone rubbing his hands together ready to strike, to intervene in constellations and charts.

Dutch author J. Bernlef

Under the library and above the subway slender and quiet as the letter T, he stood reading on stage Defender of footnote names of that which disappeared but left behind traces: unplayed music, words no longer read Underneath him silent passengers going by above him the endless rows of books Archaeologist, slowly crushed between layers of earth, expressing himself as fine-toothed as a fern in stone.

Winter dismantles its dead now fish appear just beneath the ice white, belly up and bent Shyly they are adored like some parting gift of the receding frost How come they can’t melt along with the rest so they could thaw from being frozen stiff and swim again, swim away really hard the little kid holding my hand asks: could they do that? A lot can be done in spring (ask the trees) but no I say: dead is dead; bread is bread the child echoes, red is red; that rhymes. And I nod.

The photo-shopped girls in bus shelters I really am hard pressed to imagine how they must have been before being retouched and nondescript, they’re hiding something somewhere, their own history which though it cannot be seen, is at best guesswork The eye cannot get a hold on the too cosmetic slithering along their superficial surfaces this beauty is only for sale, not to behold. So let beauty disfigure its face again let the flaws in the weaving of the fabric return the slight deviations in the pattern of the cloth. Back to the original, back to time that does its work writing history on the skin so I can again read them for what they really are these scentless girls that sing the praises of perfumes behind the double glazed glass of bus shelters.

The first swallows high in the empty sky, can probably read it they follow other routes.