howls with enthusiasm and they talk
fourteen hours without stopping, while
I, with Metka, rush to the same film:
how the snails fuck doesn’t move us, hardly
staying upright against catatonic fits
of sleep because I must save my energy
so I will wake up in the morning because then
I furiously type and sniff everything: Barbara,
if Govic rises, I will stare once more
at the muscles of the inflated Avčin
rowing, how should I be interested in
the little sex lives of insects
and robbers, and whether I truly
forgot a gift for her birthday.
The Pacific Again
Open the bread.
Oil the wound.
Throw it up, puke it, speak it.
As long as you won’t speak, it will hurt.
It will hurt, too, when you say it.
A caraway seed is a bath towel.
Chafers that fold on bones.
Puteshestveny’s bundles are clearly starving.
The hunger reflects.
From the statue, from Oregon,
south of your Mihec, who is poured
by a lotus blossom emptying.
Order a mouth.
You don’t know you can order it.
Few things are always technical.
Libero
The fan carried Liquido in his arms.
If I make him a face L will spring.
We also capitalize the countermand
and mythological monsters help us
so our apertures don’t squirt.
Crown witness, crown garden,
watch the white lamb!
Boŝtjan read me and then
died underwater.
Ophelias on hooks, I’m a statue.
I’m a statue, fairy tales rustle.
Boštjan read me and then
died underwater.
Who will be the third Saint Sebastian?
The world wants to forget.
We want to forget
the dead and youth and freedom.
In New York, After Diplomatic Training
The good sides of a siege are not also those
smudged by a horse. There’s a face
in the clause. Seven cherry trees. The notorious
seldom ever helps. He thinks mainly
about his blades. Do the smaller
and bushy help? Those seized below the deck?
The roots are to be followed to sand and sky.
The leaves rumble on them. If there’s no balance
of silver and isotope—staffs—does it mean
we, too, can be happy? Without rocks,
there is no pier. The shelter extends to the bottom.
Objects are already sorted in the womb.
The creamy pigment sticks to some.
Someone will have swelled English,
a flayed stone in Potoĉka Zijalka. White dawn
that will suit him, dark green plastic
to pile up. Ribs creak
a bit on an uneven floor. You don’t swing
your brain, you swing a dish. Once more you burn
crumbs, a face, pathos. You yellow
the black seed. I march nowhere. Honey flows
down my throat. Shed, breached, as if a machine
gets dressed. Little barrels shielded us in the spirit
of God’s eye. We poured them out as we swam.
Boiling Throats
With the screech owl the seed grows from the face.
The white vacuum pumps, the white vacuum pumps,
how you are squeezed. The cylinder is always strict.
The coil only sleeps in the clouds.
The cat and I, we scratch ourselves,
she will wreck my jacket.
She waits for fresh scales and the tone.
Clones evaporate faster.
At Fanelli’s she whispers to herself the membrane
of the pigeon mail. She waits for fresh scales
and the tone. Little onion leaves are beneath the hooves
of fallen angels. They look like sacks.
They burst because of the farewell.
Anyone who goes soft gives away his voice.
The Catalans, The Moors
Poetry is a hatchery for martyrs. The river
rinses the butter. Warum Nichts? A window
is installed in a house, a house is installed in the dawn.
A clock strikes the quarter hour. I am left behind,
I am left behind, on the beach at Menorca
I expire like a crocodile. In the region
of Ciutat (with bicycle) near the young man
in his bathing suit from the twenties,
reading Cavafy. Did he have heavy hands?
Goran has heavy hands. I’m molasses,
don’t forget that. Cat with cloudy
eyes. Voice found in the emptiness
and driving you to the precipice. Graveyards
as at Potoĉka Zijalka. Layers on layers.
Sand and Spleen Were Left in Your Nose
Blow into whales, schoolboy. The bait doesn’t hurt.
Elephants, when alarmed, no longer know
the river. They carry penicillin between
ears and ribs, and trample reeds. Chess
comes from their backs. Birds’ pecking
on a tarp is only one part of rocking. The sea
is black with fine sand. The white cork shines.
Palm trees that open beneath the robbed one
(all the checks, all the hash, two of Jure’s letters),
you watch from two levels. The Ganges can wash
away the double. Luckily the current was fast enough
and in the morning, already at sunrise,
at the ritual murders, only one sipped and reaped
and didn’t care at all to wake up.
Arm Out and Point the Way
Vigorous, disfigured mice,
tassels or bonbons. Latte (the name
of the bitch with white fur), did the wheels
overeat like the heads of memory at the ends
of wood-limbs by Deacon? They were quite
devoured. Stretched out, softened,
given and given. Slime
washes windows. Peter, as a rule,
dances. Shoe shining is coming back,
the white matrix of the Announcing Angel.
People walking along roads
is coming back, the fluttering
of overcoats and the stopping of coaches.
The rushing to work and the paying
of tolls. We’re a bunch of flowers. Napoleons
of the Bible. Worms between butter
and jam at the vaults of Inter Conti.
Ceelia Min signs.
The foam curses and counts.
A bottle is missing.
Surely it’s hidden under the coverlet.
Fallow Land and the Fates
The boy scrubs the kitchen and crushes
the dot to mom. Godfathers’ microwaves
catch fire. Snakes, Easter eggs, gray hats,
and crampon lamps flake from the pillars
on the walls. He who brews brandy
pants on screes, incantation.
Boils he who carries the mountain
and this one who unsaddles, supports yuppies.
I rotate breasts and papers. The river
makes the mesh. It’s easy to find shapes
in the profiles of stones, but in the mud
there’s the weight of the horse-collar. Sinking stools,
you can’t pierce water! Only the scattered
water can drink water. The full water twists.
Perfection
Leather without history. Strength without
rickets. From a drawer. On the hand a wire. Blood
is silk. Walk silently.
Blood is like
fruit. Here, too, is heated.
Shah’s tanks are entrenched. First we thrashed
ourselves. We roared and got excited.
Mirrors have to function as ovens. You see them
from the road. On the machines producing
dreams. Some read between. The perfect
form springs up like an ear. I know
a chiropractor who can pull out your arm.
Five centimeters out of your shoulder.
Joints crunch. No need for oil. You spin
as you please. You leave when the tool falls asleep.
Avenues
Invent a jacket for wearing out.
From a heap, a terrarium, little hairs.
From harnessed little ponies
and snorted snow.
Bitumen sits on stamps.
Whole corridors of sculpted
chewing gum underground.
Between seven and eight you can travel with a basket.
With a songbook, a flower bed, as you please.
You can dance with a puppet.
Silky hen, I stuff dollars into your mouth
to refresh the blood of your guitar.
We’re happy
and we beam when we leave work.
Dislocated, Circulating
Scrubbed hands, a goblet, a goblet,
a column and a dripped heart.
At the cross there’s a stole and a signet, agave.
When sliding as on silk, white sheets
or linen, and a rotor flutters.
A mole sags under the soil.
He completes slits in the air.
Women yell, roll up arms,
does he make up for the fall of six million bison
over the cliffs of the Grand Canyon?
How many filaments are in the blood?
Or potato blossoms, blossoms
of pumpkins, blossoms of raspberries?
Organs shout down.
The cash box is iron.
Butterflies smack when they rise up in hope chests,
shoulder to shoulder, in the dark.
Did he slide?
Did grief produce juice?
Did he leave a trail like a snail,
only he went a little faster and not so
slowly?
Where was he intercepted?
Did they bury him without humus?
“Fast,” he whispered.
“Brooklyn, this is the skin
cream.”
Car
The car is oily. Shutters in sleeves
rush. Trees crystallize, their juice
disputes the shutter. In history there are snails
and stepped-on snails. The dead and those
whose mouths we stretch. The juice costs.
The mower scores a salary. Can I catch
your tail and put you on the bus?
In big cities people don’t walk
hunched. Yesterday I saw a cab driver
shot. On Third Avenue, at
Thirty-first Street. People interrupted
their reading. The young were worried. The police
were alert, as if they would train all night.
The air in the bus turned fresh.
Odessa
You’re lazy, Fedor, stupid and godfearing.
If you look at the bottom, you don’t see crystals.
Crystals are bedsprings, they have noddles
in their robberies. As crooked as sea-
weed. It sways, sways and doesn’t go down.
The water levels it. Crystals are mouths
of sweethearts. An agave is cut down with a hatchet, too.
A stomach, a sweetheart, an artichoke.
The neighbor’s hand, clad in plastic,
cleaning up dog shit. We’re in front
of Barnes & Noble. In front of the pyramids.
Across the street you can buy wine,
and when going to JFK and changing
at Howard Beach you watch
whales or sea elephants again (fish
that flash) for which the artist drew
gold pears, beards that reach
to the airborne planes and to the depths of the sea.
Offspring and the Baptism
Canada begs one’s butter. Everyone is in
the clearing. Godfather crouches, he’s tender,
he tortures. The roost is mute. Iron shod
I come. In the conical hayracks, in the intelligent
bull. Rustling massages the sky. The cellar
squats beneath itself. Seed undulates from the sphere.
Lamb’s lightning utters the thought.
Sperm is behind the drawers, behind solace, love
is a red witness. We rented rivers
and channels and tunnels. We travel a little
stall in the wheat. I wet and splashed on you
on the raft as you daydreamed,
sheltered on the Ganges’ smooth surface.
Did I come from lime? Did I make you
juice with murders? Glue myself to the little knitted
willow-made baskets? When the basket
gently banged, language slipped
and sizzled. It leaped over fields. The water
was yellow, brown, downtrodden. The language
frayed. Does the bloom evolve? Mountains
drop into butter. A new fist
picks them up. It makes plants from rice. The snow
jumps at and batters the fields. If I didn’t
protect your mouth, the cross would rot.
Washington
No one rides on
the crest. No one stops Rembrandt.
Trousers worn down on parmesan.
On the crests of the hooved.
Dinosaurs are made of rubber,
more precisely, of green
water-soluble chewing
gum and that molasses
à la watered-down sherry.
You are drunk.
Of course I reserved two beds.
Of course I will force the door, what do I care.
The King Likes the Sun
Few of the ones he granted requested
the invention. He didn’t overlook it.
He wasn’t able to overlook it.
It opens like a patch. The empire
condenses and softens. First
there are calluses. Then the wrap
goes numb. The smell of pavement starts
to boil. The pole obtains azure,
water’s dark surface. Someone from afar
leaps, as an animal would fall
from a roof. He uses his arms to seize.
The pole bends. Icicles
sizzle in the sun, are noted.
The little bird pecked up the nest.
You are At Home Here
I study lungs. I go nowhere.
I gaze at the edge of white mountains. I want to die.
The path goes into money. Now I can occupy a calendar
of authority and give away the tent. They are twisted
into the song, the food, the sea. They are dressed
in white stories. He wasn’t hoarse, who didn’t know,
a stamp healed the window and the wound together.
The motive is beautiful. The elephant is bottomless.
It spins vases and the girls in them.
It spills itself on little cups, a coffee, an airplane
kneels in the overgrown grass. This isn’t my bread.
The bread is all yours. It adorns itself with claws.
Jump into the factory of rough flags
and stretch the edge. Fall asleep with the stretched edge.
Bites and Happiness
These are the little ribs of my patrons.
They tramp in the black residue. They stir
loam shipward, oust birds from v’s and c’s.
There are vast white plains seen
only by gargoyles
. The sun
doesn’t lessen the animals’ luster. Gnats move
with the raft on the river. Thorns cannot help
themselves with water. You retreat with the drums,
Tugo. You space out wedges and cotton wads,
forget about blunt blows and cathedral bones.
The entire temple seethes. Dwarves with lanterns
don’t depict even the first ring. Between
the dug-in hoof and the earth (graves of young
potentates) there’s not enough sturdy concentration.
Baruzza
Vendramin! Sharpen it! I tell you
to sharpen it but not so ardently
that you break it again.
You cleaned your shoes with your shawl,
what is this, Vendramin, the mediation
between Verdurin and the Misses Nardelli?
Both nailed dogs onto placards.
Take an eraser, a lamp, and a huge
hammer, they barely lifted it.
The nailing was done by servants.
The lifting was done by servants, too.
And in the time when there were no
Woods and Chalices Page 2
