In that book you haven't written,
there was one who kept repeating,
"get lost through the back door."

You thought to yourself of extinction.
There's a streak of goodness in you, after all!

But did you see the sparks flittering through the deadwood last night?
Like bullets amid the branches?
Whole streams,
transits through the various storeys like between tunnels
or freeway overpasses. In the air vents of the frontier
effulgent lines
disclosed the leakiness, the fragility of the whole construction.
The fire branching out, escaping
via the branching-out of wood.
The drawing of the fire ticking off
the drawing of the wood.
It rushed through like blood through veins.

At night you saw approaching
a pair of legs and a belly illuminated by a flashlight.

And elsewhere
as if just a part of the ship were sunk.
The unveiling of loopholes, where the sight used to
bump into the wall.
Open space, obstacles disappearing,
a temporary waft of air.
From the storeys hang
thousands of torn-up cables, ducts, covering flitches.
A sort of
white shredded body.
You observe the pigeons alighting on torn-through concrete storeys
as on a cliff,
nature immediately occupying new formations, immediately recognising them,
though they're fresh, created yesterday or today by the force
of tearing machines.

A fin torn out of you:
it's time to loosen the fish's.

And elsewhere
the same, only smaller. Walls
broken in half,
you catch a glimpse of wallpaper and where the table used to stand.
The wind blows through the unfinished house, all storeys
and a bare staircase.
You get off round the corner in order to get back there.
There'll be a shredded fence,
a burst-through fabric and an uprooted column.
When you crawl inside and meet someone in the corridor,
you baulk. Until you find out,
he's baulked as well.
Neither of you
has got any business being there.

You walk past each other like two opaque ones.
However, when exiting, you translucently
trace all the footprints backwards

as if there's no longer meant to be

any
out
or blowing-out.

From Czech by David Vichnar