SILVER Poem by Uroš Zupan

Silver are the bellies of fish bargaining with their weight,
trying to discard it in the pawnshops of th sky,
Silver are the backs of waves, telling the rocks where
they've come from, and what they've experienced on the way,
but they never finish the story; because, short of breath,
sentences fall apart again and again on formations of salt,
Silver is the kindness of olive tress unlocking their shadows
and placing them in three tone levels of braying,
Silver is the scent of rosemary, that with the same care
pastes the juice from a wound on a baked fish, and on a gradual
leave-taking of the day,
Silver is noon, ordering everyone to keep still,
to measure the volume of their happiness with slow breathing,
to journey in their thoughts to the harbor
from which their childhood sailed away in a distant dawn,
Silver is the wind, adding to every hour of oblivion
three additional hours of oblivion, the hours that constantly
happen in the present,
Silver are sails, which in truth are white, and are silvery
because of the imagination's needs, and because of the
celebration of their inaudible movement,
Silver is the stillness of the afternoon, fastening its warmth
to the earth and then refusing to give
the seat to the approaching evening,
Silver are the traces of clouds, buildings cities in the air,
where we are invited when, after lunch,
we are buried under the avalanche of sleep,
Silver are the snow-drifts of algae, which have emerged
from the night waves to succumb on the silent indifference of
gravel in the morning,
Silver are the shouts of people who love their bodies,
Silver are the treetops of cypresses etching fugitive letters
on the flexible skin of summer,
Silver are vineyards, where the restless pheasants are preparing
for the shipwreck of the southern wind,
Silver is the flight of a seagull, stitching together the spoken
and the unspoken, making a lasting truce with the banging
of evening bells,
Silver is the movements of dry grass, having forgotten
the true life of the previous spring, and now
its ghosts wrestle day after day with the empty sleeves of wind,
Silver is the ring of moonlight which I place
on your ring-finger as you leave your body and urge
the night to return to you, prematurely dead,
Silver is the moon's rain, stopping
to caress the two of us when we are melting, silvered from
summer sweat,
And silver are the downy seeds
I watch lying on my back,
with eyes etched in the azures of the sky,
watching them falling from nowhere, disappearing to who
knows where.

Silver, the color of my mind!