Salamander in the sun
I am a lizard in the sun
in a sea of other lizards,
hypnotized by you.
I lose myself in your Instagram pictures.
I watch you getting ready for the night out,
watch you slip into one of your many faces.
Your smile is hell for us mortals,
a fire through which prodigal sons must pass.
Your breasts are a pyre
where salamanders beneath the sun are consumed.
Show your legs once more —
Aphrodite in an evening gown.
Break the monotony.
Kill the savage within me.
Smile one more time
so that nothing of me remains this time.
Show the gods
how Mars itself burns for you.
The third time I speak to you of love
The third time I speak to you of love before your birthday.
An ordinary, deaf February night.
The cranes retreat before the ice-cut shore.
Hidden among the ferns, I feel no love for aristocracy.
T. S. Eliot lies dead in my hands.
I try to revive the clash of frontal bones
while the carnival of mediocrity marches beneath your window.
New arts repeat themselves in fractured words.
Spiders, crabs, and worms in paintings.
Ariadne helped Theseus escape the labyrinth
when his voice echoed through the sandy bathhouse,
and she did not remain mute as you do now upon the shores of Crete.
I gather years, searches, granite cliffs…
I never deceive myself into believing I am the one you await
upon the precipices.
To drown out all unbearable drafts. The claim that someone is free.
he one without a mark.
The one arranged according to the limits of his own understanding.
An archivist. That is a lie!
Every craft of memory is copied pain upon an empty papyrus.
In the wind flutters silk from Smyrna,
and the Greek god Ares threatens to sever the horror of sleep…
The third time I speak to you of love before your birthday…
Can you not hear it?…
About the Author
Pavle Gligorović (1988, Montenegro) is an author of three poetry collections. His work is published in literary magazines and poetry anthologies in Montenegro and Balkan region. He is a member of the Association of Writers and Literary Translators of Montenegro. His poetry has been translated into Hungarian. Italian and English.
