Postcard from Lake Ohrid
Mrtva Sabota (Dead Saturday)
Even in a cemetery you can't eat without music. The waiter has just set down a plate of grilled meat, mushroom sauce, bottle of red wine. I'm hunched over my coat pulled tight, warming my fingers on the small sterno lamp, lips kissing a glass of rakija. Small upstairs room where the lake hews driftwood into benches, steaming cold breath. Each table its own kiosk. Each of us our own thoughts, touch wood, be a doorway. Reading poems of a poet now dead about the dead, it's not me alone who can boast of being a cemetery. The musicians are playing the old way like a secret lifted out of its broken thought. Their violins splayed open for the petals they’ll row across this murky light before looking up.
[postmarked Macedonia, 2006]
