s w i f t s  &  s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings

 Your Place
Ron Morosan & Pavel Srut

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Causa Mortalis

(In memory of Jiří Pištora)

Wildly and silently arguing with yourself
You realized you’d never trust anything
Of your own to someone else
Instead you regard what’s behind you
The desert’s exquisite windblown dunes
While before you it’s the reverse
Once you wildly and silently made your peace
Part fish part bird
You flew to the deep dark spring

The Pond’s Vein, Coated

with soft fat, moss
and scum, barely
creeps.  Under

the ex-ray’s light
a bone blows. Now
light as a feather, it blows
towards the reeds.  I’ll tell lies-

I won’t. I must
speak forever
for as long the words bloom
under my tongue.

It’s Far No Matter Where You Turn

A low sky, a ceiling
above the ceiling. Far
beyond reach, you.

Surrounded by the still salty
marsh reeds of summer. You run
but there’s only a yoke
on your coat of arms.  Your goblins

Have overgrown their mouse
holes. They’re no longer yours,
the marsh reeds snow in
from under door at your place.

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Drawings by Ron Morosan.  Poetry by Pavel Šrut from Worm-Eaten Time, Poems from a Life Under Normalization 1968-1989,  published by Phoneme Media and translated from the Czech by Deborah Garfinkle.

Pavel Šrut was an award-winning poet, essayist, writer, rock lyricist, and translator who belongs to the generation of post-war Czech writers  whose voices gained prominence in the flowering of Prague Spring, voices silenced by censorship in the aftermath of the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Šrut earned the Jaroslav Seifert Award in 2000 and the Czech PEN Club’s Karel Capek Prize for lifetime achievement in literature in 2012.

Ron Morosan is an artist, writer, and curator. He has shown his work internationally at the American Pavilion of The Venice Biennale and the Circulo De Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain. In the US he has shown at the New Museum and had a one-person exhibition at the New Jersey State Museum, and at numerous galleries in New York. He curated the Robert Dowd exhibition, Subversive Pop, at Center Galleries in Detroit, as well as Denotation, Connotation, Implication at Eisner Gallery, City University of New York. He has written catalogues for many artists, including Enid Sanford, Tom Parish, Robert Dowd, and others. In the 1990’s he started and ran B4A Gallery in Soho, New York, writing press releases, articles, and catalogues.