Out

You get up in the morning
And remember you don't know where you left your eyes.
One, you forget you left at home,
The other dripped from a tap in silence.
Then you remember that you are only awake
And everything happened devoid of eyelids.
The conditions ripen
And respect flows like a cataract over that one-time skull.
You seem to have been harvesting
Lucerne forever and
A gentle sacrifice full of the smell of chlorophyll
Ploughs your farm-boy illusions.
A lucid childhood,
Lived normally and without regret,
Like all useful things, without which
There would be no ellipses or metaphysics,
No flights and crashes, no losses
Of Liburnian galleys
In the limp and practical body of man...

Present neglect and past oblivion,
How well they suit on e another.

1992

[Jashtë, from the volume Rrethinat e Atlantidës,
Tirana 2002, p. 65. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]