by Vasko Popa
Wolf Salt (1975) is made up of seven cycles and deals with the lame wolf, the old pre-Christian Serbian tribal god whose fading memory Popa resuscitates. The poems pay homage to this mythical figure of good and evil, life and death, extinction and survival. Hughes, in his introduction to the Collected Poems, compares them to psalms. The poems glorify the figure of the lame wolf and pray to him to divulge secrets about the tragic history of its people. After its appearance, the book was praised in Serbia and rebuked elsewhere in Yugoslavia. This is unfair. No nationalist in Serbia, as far as I know, ever found these poems inspiring. Popa was of mixed Serbian and Romanian ethnicity and already under suspicion. The last time I saw him in 1989 in New York City, he was in despair about what Slobodan Milošević and his followers were cooking up. “There’ll be bloodshed soon,” he told me with horror in his eyes and in his voice.
Raw Flesh (1975) and Cut (1981), his last two published books, are made up of occasional and autobiographical poems of great charm. They sound to me like magic realist anecdotes, the kind one finds in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which fantastic happenings are recounted in a matter-of-fact narrative voice and with lots of humor, as in “The Lost Red Boot”:
My great-grandmother Sultana Urošević
Sailed the sky in a wooden trough
And hunted for clouds that brought rain
With wolf-balms and other preparations
She performed many
Great and small miracles
After her death
She continued to meddle
In the affairs of the living
So they had to dig her up
To teach her manners
And bury her even deeper
She lay there rosy-cheeked
In her coffin made of oak
On one foot she wore
A little red boot
With a fresh splash of mud
As long as I live
I’ll be searching for her other boot
Popa died without completing his long-term project, a book that was to be called Iron Garden. Only one cycle, The Little Box, was finished and published in his lifetime, while parts of four others and a few isolated poems were included in a posthumous volume of his collected poems. Popa’s little box resembles the one used by magicians in their acts where things like coins disappear and reappear. Its working depends on the full engagement of our imagination: that mother of all suspense. We cannot resist its feverish activity, though it fools as often as it reveals some truth to us, as in “The Tenants of the Little Box”:
Throw into the little box
A stone
You’ll take out a bird
Throw in your shadow
You’ll take out the shirt of happiness
Throw in your father’s dick
You’ll take out the axle of the universe
The little box works for you
Throw into the little box
A mouse
You’ll take out an earthquake
Throw in your mother’s honeypot
You’ll take out a chalice of eternal life
Throw in your head
You’ll take out two
The little box works for you
As you have probably guessed by now, this former surrealist didn’t believe in automatic writing. Popa compared the poet to a miner, a pearl hunter, lighthouse keeper, or someone assembling a watch. For him the poem was an act of critical intelligence. Great poetry was the work of infinite patience. Late one night in Paris in 1972, after a great deal of wine, he described to me in ample detail his future poems. I was so surprised I assumed that this was just the wine talking, but not so. Over the next twenty years, I would see his poems come into print and they were just as he described them to me that night. Aside from that one confession, he was reluctant to talk about his work or give interviews.
Once asked about the meaning of his poems, he got angry and wrote, “Why don’t they ask an apple tree what does its fruit mean? If it could talk, the apple tree would most likely tell them: Bite into an apple and you’ll see what it means!”
—Charles Simic
In memory of Morton Marcus
White Pebble
White Pebble
With no head or limbs
It appears
Out of the mad tumult of chance
It stirs
With the shameless stride of time
Holding on to each thing
With its passionate inner embrace
A white smooth virgin body
Smiling with the eyebrow of the moon
Heart of the Pebble
They played with the pebble
Pebble like any pebble
Played with them as though it had no heart
They got mad at the pebble
Smashed it in the grass
And startled they saw its heart
They opened the heart of the pebble
And in it they found a snake
A sleeping coil without dreams
They woke up the snake
The snake spurted upward
And made them run away
They watched from far away
The snake coil round the horizon
And swallow it like an egg
They came back where they started
No snake no grass no pebble
No trace of anything in the circle
They looked at each other and smiled
And then both winked
Dream of the Pebble
A hand rises out of the earth
And throws a pebble in the air
Where did the pebble go
It didn’t fall back to earth
Nor did it rise up to heaven
What happened to the pebble
Did the heights swallow it
Did it turn into a bird
Look there’s the pebble
It stayed stubbornly inside itself
Not on earth nor in heaven
Listening only to itself
A world among worlds
Love of the Pebble
It stares into the beautiful
Round and blue-eyed
Featherbrained forever
It has turned itself
Into the white of her eye
Only she understands it
Only her embrace
Has the shape of its desire
Dumb and bottomless
All her shadows
It traps within itself
Blindly in love
So that it notices
No other kinds of beauty
Except the one
It will pay for with its head
Adventure of the Pebble
Bored with the circle
The perfect circle around itself
It paused
The burden was heavy
Its own burden within
So it let it fall
The stone grew hard
The stone it was made of
So it left it behind
Cramped within itself
In its own body
So it went out of it
Hid itself from itself
In its own shadow
Secret of the Pebble
It filled itself with itself
Didn’t it gorge on its own tough meat
Is it feeling nauseous
Ask it don’t be afraid
It’s not pleading for bread
Turned to stone in an ecstatic cramp
Is it perhaps pregnant
Will it give birth to a stone
Or a beast or a streak of lightning
Go and ask all you want
Don’t expect an answer
Hope for a bump on the head
A second nose or a third eye
Or who knows what
Two Pebbles
Mutely they stare at each other
Two pebbles looking
Two sweets of yesterday
On the tongue of eternity
Two stone-tears of today
On the eyelid of the unknown
Two sand flies of tomorrow
In the ears of the deaf
Two happy dimples of tomorrow
On the cheeks of the day
Two victims of a little joke
Dumb joke without a joker
They stare at each other mutely
With their backsides they look
Speaking out of their bellies
Against the wind
1951–1954
Bone to Bone
I. At the Beginning
This is much better
We ditched the flesh
Now we’ll do what we’ll do
Tell me something
Would you like to be
The backbone of lightning
Say something else
What shall I tell you
Pelvis of a storm
Say something else
That’s all I know
Heaven’s ribs
We’re nobody’s bones
Say something else
II. After the Beginning
What do we do now
Yes what do we do
Now we’ll dine on our marrow
We had marrow for lunch
A feeling of emptiness nags at me
Then let’s make music
We love music
What do we do when dogs come
They love bones
Then we’ll stick in their throats
And have a ball
III. In the Sun
It’s nice to sunbathe naked
I never cared much for the flesh
Those rags never fooled me either
I go crazy seeing you naked
Don’t let the sun caress you
It’s better we love each other
Only please not here in the sun
Where everything can be seen my dear
IV. Under the Earth
Muscle of darkness muscle of flesh
It’s all the same
What do we do now
We’ll summon the bones of all ages
We’ll climb all way to the sun
What then
Then we’ll grow pure
And keep growing as we please
What will we do after
Nothing we’ll roam here and there
We’ll be deathless beings of bone
Just wait for the earth to yawn
V. In the Moonlight
What’s up now
It’s as if flesh snow like flesh
Is beginning to stick to me
Don’t know what it is
It’s as if marrow flows through me
A bone-chilling marrow
I don’t know either
It’s as if everything is starting again
With an even more terrifying beginning
You know what
Can you bark
VI. Before the End
Where shall we go now
Where could two nowheres
End up somewhere
What do we do there
There forever and a day
We are eagerly awaited
By no one and its wife nothing
What do they want us for
They are old and have no bones
We’ll be like their own daughters
VII. At the End
I’m a bone you’re a bone
Why did you swallow me
I can’t see myself anymore
What’s wrong with you
It’s you who swallowed me
I can’t see myself either
Where am I now
Now no one knows any more
Who is who or who is where
It’s all a nightmare dust dreamed
Can you hear me
I can hear both you and me
And the cockspur within us crow
1956
Games
Before the Game
Shut one eye then the other
Peek into every corner of yourself
Check that there are no nails or thieves
No cuckoo’s eggs
Then shut the other eye
Squat and then jump
Jump high high high
On top of yourself
Then fall with all your weight
Fall for days on end deep deep deep
To the bottom of your chasm
Who doesn’t break into pieces
Who stays whole and gets up whole
Plays
Nail
One is the nail another is pliers
The rest are carpenters
The pliers grab the nail by the head
With their teeth and hands they grab it
And keep pulling and pulling
Pulling it out of the floor
Usually they just wring its head off
It’s hard work pulling a nail out of the floor
The carpenters then say
These pliers are no good
They crush its jaws break its arms
And throw them out of the window
Someone else then becomes a nail
Someone else is pliers
The rest are carpenters
Hide-and-Seek
Someone hides from someone
Hides under his tongue
The other looks for him under the earth
He hides on his forehead
The other looks for him in heaven
He hides in his forgetfulness
The other looks for him in the grass
Looks for him looks
There’s no place he doesn’t look
And looking he loses himself
Seducer
One strokes the leg of a chair
Till the chair stirs
And gives him a love sign with its leg
Another kisses a keyhole
Kisses it oh how he kisses it
Till the keyhole returns his kiss
A third stands to the side
Stares at the other two
Shaking and shaking his head
Until it falls off
Wedding
Everyone strips off his own skin
Everyone strips off his own constellation
That has never seen the night
Everyone fills his skin with rocks
And plays with it
Lit by his own stars
Who doesn’t stop playing till dawn
Who doesn’t bat an eyelid or drop
Earns his own skin
(This game is rarely played)
Rose Thieves
Someone is a rose bush
Some are daughters of the wind
Some are rose thieves
The rose thieves sneak up to a rose
One of them steals it
And hides it in his heart
The wind’s daughters appear
See the picked beauty
And run after the thieves
They open their hearts one by one
In one they find a heart
In another God help me nothing
They open and open their breasts
Until they find a heart
And in that heart the stolen rose
Between Games
Nobody rests
This one constantly rolls his eyes
Sticks them on his back
And whether he wants it or not walks backwards
He sticks them on the soles of his feet
And whether he wants it or not walks on his head
This one turns into an ear
Hears things that can’t be heard
But he grows bored
Longs to become himself again
But without eyes he can’t see how
That one bares all his faces
One after the other he throws them over the roof
The last one he throws at
his feet
And sinks his head into his hands
This one stretches his gaze
Stretches it from thumb to thumb
And walks over it walks
First slowly then faster
Faster and faster
That one plays with his head
And tosses it in the air
Catches it on a forefinger
Or doesn’t bother to catch it
Nobody rests
Race
Some bite off from the others
An arm or a leg whatever they can
Stick it between their teeth
Run as fast as they can
To bury it in the earth
The others scatter everywhere
Sniff look sniff look
Dig up the whole earth
If they are lucky and find their arm
Leg or whatever
It’s their turn to bite
The game continues at a lively pace
As long as there are arms
As long as there are legs
As long as there is anything left
Seeds
Someone plants someone else
Plants him in his head
Stamps the earth well
Waits for the seed to sprout
The seed that empties his head
Turns it into a mouse hole
The mice eat the seed
And drop dead on the spot
The wind moves into an empty head
And gives birth to its own motley winds
Leap Frog
Each to each a stone over the heart
Stone like a house
No one is to budge under that stone
Both of them struggle
Just to lift a finger
Click their tongues twitch their ears
