By the way of all spheres,
on steep rocks overgrown with segments of color,
covered with chalk that children have broken,
we watch fragments
that keep rising,
compressed as if under the weight of water,
their slow takeoff: a signpost,
white curtains raised.

There is no hardship in breathing
precisely here, in this circle,
no hardship in breathing,
and also onward, ahead, it seems
as if balance is built in, unbreakable;
each time widening caves,
widening and narrowing,
like the activity of an unknown (unimaginable)
respiratory system, magnified under a microscope.

Invalid are nostalgia, night, melancholy,
laughter falling as snow,
everything parallel, everything there that can be
reached from here, all "the way" in between.

We are watching the reactions to this condition,
slowly, step by step, the outer leaves of the artichoke
float away.
We can imprint optional memories of notions.

There was a circle.
There was one just because we could not
use it.

Whatever the notion, they are all concentrically
disposed, far and near.
A freckle that was once an elevator
is a priori a ray, secured by intangibility.
Initiation is incredibly slow work,
similar to the turning of summer, winter, and stars.

Is this about how we have eaten?
Did we make a meal each time?

Enough so that in the process a tiny crack is left
and everything regenerates incredibly fast, and therefore now is.

You who keep a diary of growth and victims,
look!
Maybe many of them can read it,
light falls around,
only here of course nothing falls, it gets out.
The center, the source of energy watched by us
during this procedure, is empty. The cosmos makes the locus vanish,
eats it up. Energy, not consciousness, jumps across, (is)
in the negative. Therefore everything is in something,
what roughly, because of a notion, can be described
as a grain of sand, all space the remainder,
like dust after sawing wood.

On one cubic micron there are endless
galaxies, and each this enormous
space, nights, moons, suns, with constellations
that confound us, compressing our membrane.
The intergalactic and, of course, these
‘injected' communications, too, are only oppression.

Along this window, in this window
there are innumerable other civilizations,
innumerable other cosmological systems.
Thus suffering does not matter,
layers do.
This is what I show here.

Translation: Phillis Levin and Tomaž Šalamun