Originally published in PLEASURE 2013
Dorota Czerner
Dunes
“...i gdy żółte kutry wypływają z brzucha zatoki, rozsnuwając za sobą mleczne tarlisko zmierzchu...“ [1]
The yellow dragons gobble up the waters in a flicker passing the trawlers forever calling to each other in a dark spillout from the belly of the bay, entangled in a milky foghorn song together. Some of them will vanish without a reason overnight some will turn into serpents whose thoughts push other thoughts in reverse unorganized motion the serpents shaking, summoned by the sun to fight the waterlogged dragons.
Their return to the shore and the incessant rain of the dragons who are fighting back unhindered flying and tearing away pieces of the sky ignite the air. Pebbles. Rubies fly. Flint against the rock. Pebbles. Bronze. A spire of the church as myself in sleep wrapped in the progression of dunes. Absorbing some allowing some blackness to play in the lost windows like a heavy backbone of this land into which it now sends its roots with lingering light. Color. Color and light. More color washed into transparency by the seacurrents.

An infinity within an hour spent walking up the hill, odor of the pine-scented path, meandering among hoary tufts of the sea-holly and grass, where the time-cob is slowly emptied from its density and images lying inside each seed are scurried away — the need, to get over the crest of what needs to be said over to be over with, or be itself extracted from every small turbulence to which its duration belonged in the old life, over and down to the beach finally silent, the body reclaimed. Please, if not directly, please please......“as if I can feed on her music alone, as if touch itself is eyesight,” as if as if
weightlessness
„parami latają po niebie rozdzierając“
Hit by a heavy red fish another skiff goes under the waves pressed against the froth, lifted into a lack of substance it spins its tail fainting with a sudden stir of tenderness soothed with an image of the own being-not being, past the first distinction, suspended
“as if the touch itself is eyesight“ [2]
an admiration fielding fascination, embodying the release
Women abducted by the waterdragons elope with the worshippers of the sun, their breasts ripen then fall to the soft surface of the sea. Slowly the boat penetrates them with an idea of the photon journey slowly the keel spreads the folds on the tissue of the darkness, takes away the form, the distance of the women’s lips from the extreme center of the pupil — here a structure here each grain parts with an imprint each is streaming sand through a gap in the wet weave. The dragon is angry.
The dragon is angry.
inkblot
spelling the lake’s shiny grammar
on the way to the bay: „żółte. kutry. wypływają.
o zmierzchu“. — the yellow boats
go out at night tearing down the spawning paths
we find one another
in a shallow sleep in cloudless listening losing myself
to me, surviving the ambiguities of which shadow is whose face, above mine, smiling
an amber globe bursting with new snakes. Saltmarshes and heather.
It is a surreal transmutation, bead after bead of pain, the identical body
of fish dancing on a coruscated wire leaving a hole where it had been, in me, through
me, an eye caught in my eye, turned into a shiny knot
an Eel grows bright
“and things grow in number
faces back
to their place slowly you flap
netted inside me
like a big white fish” [3]
luring the sound deeper and deeper into the room as my ear took possession of their song, a heavy wooden pitch or a hungry howl of the metal vessels, I could always tell the collective blaszanki from drewniaki, or “Łby“ — “the animal-heads” and the speed at which they advanced, writing their lines, out ...
ŁEBA ON THE BALTIC 1972/WOODSTOCK 2012
NOTES
[1] Slowinski National Park preserves a part of the Baltic southern coast with the largest sandy dunes in Europe, which migrate under the influence of strong stormy winds. The park takes its name from an old ethnic group Slowincy - a Slav progeny - who once inhabited this area. My mind put in a resonance cage of that magic place, where every July I returned to with my family for our summer vacation, — with the smell of peat-bog, lyme and beach grasses, of pine and cloudberry still deeply remembered, of yellow fishing boats still heard — radiates, echoes, calls back to events of the past laced with images of the sea mythology once read, or maybe only imagined in the dark, now inseparably bound together... “dunes” (here in a fragment) is a tender song of remembering.
[2] Cf. Peteris Cedrins, from the Penetralium.
[3] Tadeusz Różewicz, Nocna Zmaza (Wetdream, transl. D.C.), in: Opowiadanie Traumatyczne— Duszyczka, Kraków, 1979.