AN IMAGE

(To Amir Brka, after reading his book ”The Antichrist in Language”)

The war is over and the Dead sit in bars.

My friend the poet (a bearded, sturdy, rebellious countenance) tells me that language is a tall tower, that ”nothing lurks in language”, that language is a mere calliper with which the Chosen measure the cosmos of Nothing.

I suppose my friend the nihilist, I say, has gone to an Extreme, obviously he is too much under the impression of Nietzsche, so now he is exactly as crazy as is necessary for a poet to be extraordinary.

Then again, I find it difficult to admit that I actually envy him, it is just such insanity I long for, and to write a poem, to describe an image in which no image will be, no colours, no soundings, no words…, but that it’s still both a poem, and an image, and a picture!

I admit, once methought myself a poet, for I had summers an insufficient number, so few that for death itself I wished: suicide seemed an ingenious pose, and to paint a morning I wished, me – a slave of the visual. And the scent of twilight grasses, and the bursting of stars. I was so young that I came up with little really, barely enough to fabricate a female body in three baroque books.

Now I leave everything unsaid.

If Everything can be called everything, and if Silence can really say nothing.

In Bosnia it is summer, and we are all dismally solar. The War is over, the current Peace wisely signed, and the Dead sit in bars.

Zenica, July 1999

Translated by Ulvija Tanović

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