In Some Long-Forgotten Midnight

by Lillian Nećakov

In some long-forgotten midnight, Vasko Popa sits, wilted, on a wooden chair, in his tiny room in Skadarlija. The world falls into hip lap, it is too much, he thinks, too much. When he was five the world was flat, now, this world, a howlingly heavy orb pressed against his thighs, no larger than an egg. He rotates it this way and there is the wild Atlantic, that way a hysterical wind tearing across the Pacific. He begins to peel back the layers of this new world, the crust, the mantle, the yolk and there, finally, in its center, the blood and the dirt and his mother and his father and inside his mother and his father some deep winter. And cradled deep inside the winter’s memory a miniature Vasko digging a hole for guilt for worship for their souls. It is too much.

In the street below there is music and cigarette smoke and a future. He polishes and shines his shoes and joins the living. What light there is in those stars he thinks, what light.