Twilight conceals the defects of our souls;
evening is simmering in the kitchen
like a pot of cherry varnish
to mend crippled violins.
Turn down the light and simply watch:
the world dilates
like a pupil.
A green lampshade,
an eerily lit aquarium,
the lilac semidarkness – it's all we need
to let the soul transcend the body,
to make the words step with confidence,
insolently,
like Mowgli who saw an evening town
for the first time in his life.
Sometimes silence is a form of sound,
sometimes darkness is a form of light,
and our silence coils around the unsaid words,
we are two twilight planets.
Embracing you in the dusk, I wash my name off,
throw off all the price tags, all the angular formulas.
There are too many traps for an intelligent beast,
too many glass kennels inside.
When the night extinguishes the lights of consciousness
in the greenish-bronze candelabra of bodies,
for a few minutes, we become those who
the God wanted us to be –
free islands without clear-cut shores
hovering in the double twilight of the sky and the sea;
as free as an invisible man in the rain.
This feeling has been accumulated for centuries,
when we were lying in caves on lice-ridden animal hides,
and a toothed sheen of fire warmed us,
replete, sleepy,
ashes peppered our bodies,
and silence bloomed on the stalks of breathing –
flowers of orange dark.
this is the power of shadows and whisper,
when you can hear music inside the veins and cartilages,
inside the kisses and the face bones;
these are cherries on the meat cake of a predator,
and our embrace is a sign of something bigger than
just an instinct of reproduction,
or pleasure.
We're like a mongoose that listens to a flute melody
leaking from a half-open window,
and for a moment,
forgets about the snakes.
Dmitry Blizniuk is an author from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in The Pinch, Press53, Dream Catcher, Magma, Sheila Na Gig, Adelaide, The Nassau Review, Havik, Saint Katherine Review, Star 82, Pif Magazine, Naugatuck River, Lighthouse, The Gutter, Palm Beach Poetry Festival and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of "The Red Fоrest" (Fowlpox Press, 2018). He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine.