The Blue Tower

by Tomaz Salamun

  only daughter, my mother described all of that in the

  New York Times in August.

  You don’t know my mother and you say you saw

  me. The two of us have been together for a whole

  eternity. Paul is having Terry over, why don’t you

  come too. When I parked beneath that wall—out of 40,000

  cars three go over every day, on average—

  my car wasn’t hit, my car got hit by a

  kangaroo that was instantly killed. Me too,

  man, when I finally smuggled the hash under my

  gums (in Singapore they hang you, that made it

  more exciting) and got it nice and ready before

  breakfast, I always use it to celebrate when

  I get to someplace new and I add the country’s name

  for the benefit of philistines, since even philistines

  are part of democracy and etiquette. Only the prince-bishop commands

  where to sow cabbage. Bodies jutting out, bugs

  rasping, water running short and the pen is black.

  Nature is beaten down into a concave gloss.

  Because my father didn’t lash any Jews, I’m

  protected. Whiteness from a dark cup. Coffee

  from a quiet street. Frescoes have a smell. The head

  is Sirah’s body. For three centuries we’ve been living

  off matches. I chain a kleptomaniac to a

  pear. The chain can’t slip off because the

  pear gets fat toward the bottom. I invented a pane

  with three cantons and used a periscope like Živko.

  I’ll bet not just the picture from Marezige, I’ll bet

  you even have my Lujo statue in your cellar. What will you do

  when the hunter’s horn starts poking its way through your

  soul? What will you do when you find out Snežnik isn’t

  yours anymore? What will you do when you encounter a bear,

  grumbling, looking around for a pair of slippers. Take them off so they don’t

  give you blisters. Lower your periscope. And the canoe, the falls,

  the kayak, all those rubber deals, so you bounce gently,

  pull in your knees, pull in your knees, Živko!

  of course I’ll shove into your Postojna

  Cave through a quiver. Putin learned from me

  to poison before a hand even touches the trigger.

  Diran doesn’t have his black belt and I’m not

  forbidden to say his name. I prize human

  beings. In the clay they’re lovable creatures. In Venice

  I fell in love twice: with a fifteen-year-old girl in a

  fur, on the Ponte dell’Accademia, and with a

  seventeen-year-old boy who constantly

  put on and took off his sweater in front of me at the Bacon

  retrospective. All the attainable ones, wings of a dove,

  I’ve brought along with me. Dunk the

  veil. Made out of fox lairs, sleeps

  blissful dreams. The horse climbs up on four

  legs. I leave my driver. I leave my bike.

  The joints pale and go rusty. Honor beats the bags.

  THE GENTLEMAN IS A BIT INCLINED TO DISORDER

  What I softened and what I didn’t soften

  what I stabbed into Ogrizek’s body, they say

  he had a dog that ate bones. I warm myself,

  close the armoire, turn off the light in the

  bathroom. Yesterday I steamed like a horse after

  riding. O scents of stable manure, o spurs

  of Dr. Ewa Rogalska’s late sister, Pan jest troszeczkę

  nieporządnym, Christine told me, because she’d been

  told to say that to me, instead of preparing

  the servants properly for welcoming a guest.

  Servants have to have a plan. They can’t help it if they’ve

  forgotten history. Servants have to be

  ready for blows from the most unpredictable

  quarters. Masaccio draws a red piglet in the middle

  of the church, and this is what I told him: I’ll pay

  for everything but your whores, that would cross her, and I

  don’t like anything to cross her, or what I told

  Andraž. Go and saddle up. In Sejno they’ll

  teach you to ride at least well enough for you

  to talk about it. You’ve been silent long enough.

  Out of that Dostoyevsky cage of yours. Žižek ran off. Only

  Jani Razpotnik came with me. Žižek hid around a

  corner, I clearly remember. They had just

  made those holes beneath our house, Ravnikar wants Bologna,

  the machines clattered away beneath my bed and they moved

  Mrs. Novak out, while Žižek hides from me behind the

  wall where Miška is now. Besides, il n’a pas bien roulé ses

  r, but Jani could. We insisted that the director of the

  French Cultural Center deal with us, and

  not with so-called French cultural

  interests. Just where do you think you’ve opened your

  center, we told him. And left. It turned out

  Žižek was more cunning. He hit them straight in the

  heart and buttered up that Milner, that

  worm who forced his way into the party line till

  Slavoj liquidated him. Now and then he still spits at me,

  but less and less. Andro has stopped riding. Pan jest

  troszeczkę nieporzą-dnym just as much and Janko simply thinks

  (I’d got on some stairs beneath an eave, since it was

  raining and Janko with his shining face asked: what are you doing

  up there on those steps—he was convinced I’d gone

  mad, and that he’d find some relief—hey, Janko, it’s

  raining) and Šumi, who turned me like a screw,

  spoiled brat!—of course those weren’t the words he used—

  young man, for years and years I was Stele’s gofer, I’m giving

  you the directorship after all. What Župančič? Izidor

  Cankar! Oh, no, I said, Župančič even so.

  He kissed ass once or twice, but you resent that

  just because you kissed some ass yourself. Who cares! Chi se ne

  frega! That multitudes in hoods and bonnets came out to

  sing him serenades, and that as a child I stood before

  his bier and in my mind’s eye closed his eyes again, drew the

  lids down like a pair of shutters, was only fair. He was a

  clever one, too. He knew his grandson and I would be

  al pari one day and he wanted to protect him. Nice try.

  I’m here to detonate your incest, so that now

  his, others’ and my gentle snow can fall on you.

  MARAIS

  I dreamed that Martinique was reheeled with water.

  La bouche, la bouche, André kept repeating, when

  Andraž and I lived in Sing Sing. Did I chase him

  because his name was so close? I told him

  how I’d endured Senghor, that boats came floating from heaven,

  falling on Lake Ohrid like fairy flies, that we

  danced with our nephews, great-nieces and bodyguards,

  all the ones that were here to keep them from staging a coup there. His locals

  lured me to a monastery. Okudzhava wore black

  shoes. I was the sweet party elite, sweeter than your

  mouth. Palms flutter in Senegal. The priests wear cassocks.

  And once, as I walked back from the St. Paul metro station, after

  Semolič and I had been drinking at George’s, I was picked up

  by the same guy who had caught me at the words la bouche, la bouche.

  LINDOS

  Thirty police cubes heaped up on an open

  head. The syllabus: geoglyphs in Nazco. Set fire


  to the wrapper wall of a one-year-old snake that has pimples

  (vents) on the inside of its line. Icarus

  hid his feathers under some fig trees. They lifted

  me up in a basket. Little donkeys are handy.

  They sleep on porcelain, covered with quilt.

  A coil of heaven, blueprint of the mouth. What do chimneys

  support, as they smoke from the belly? Who is

  the outer circumference of a baker? In summer cold

  clay is enough. And a lapidarium in the next country over, chopped

  straight into the water. Mirrors are the defense of

  pure little bug legs. The Greek god has a scythe on

  his windlass. See how the boat crawls now.

  WHITE HASH, BLACK WEED

  Gregor tells us what you’re up to.

  There’s humor tucked away in the chalk of the white spots.

  People ask me how I get my eyelids to

  sink. It’s simple: skin,

  stroke a dolphin, sometimes set Armenia on fire.

  Diran knows exactly. Hash helps, hash is a

  walker. Not for him, he’s black, for him it’s

  weed. Marco called again. He

  really means to buy Lindos. And I think about

  Juan (his mother-in-law, the psychiatrist,

  who trained with Lacan, frustrated because

  there are no real customers in Naples), sure he checks out

  when he thinks about the Nazco lines. Mostly they’ve

  left to gather mushrooms, and I’m alone.

  I’m riding yesterday’s weed and even Diran’s

  typing. He’s in the tower. He’s got everything

  poured into his computer. But me, if I’m not

  physically chopping wood, I get lazy. My cornea is eaten

  by torches, and dwarves in togas come rolling out of

  geoglyphs. It hums, and if anyone has ever really thought how

  to build a house, it’s Juan. In Pittsburgh they also want

  me for a semester. Liliana Ursu wants me

  to write her a foreword. “I’m hot in

  Kuala Lumpur.” Quite well known in

  Singapore. Only to a precious few in

  Jakarta, but they’re on fire. In Jakarta

  people don’t have much money and have to

  borrow my books. I still have that sheet,

  Andrej, that you gave me on the flight to

  Asia. All packed away. I’m not making things up

  and not lying. Not exaggerating. Except

  when I admire Marco’s boat.

  It’s hopeless. It eats up so much gas.

  No wonder you can’t sell it

  to anyone but a Saudi prince

  at a loss, maybe the one who

  cruised me on the Greek islands.

  He designed and tracked it down himself. You

  track down an invention like a hunting dog. And we were

  melancholy everywhere. I’ve actually chased

  Archilochus. GLADSTONE WAS A

  PIG. I ONLY LIKED DISRAELI,

  I hear distinctly. Just as Pogorelić

  got everything from Liszt, via living people,

  so now can I drink deeply from

  the English crown. That has strategic

  significance. Marco Canoni. Look it up.

  O your eyes, Queen Victoria. O your

  white feathers. But young dots do

  the same. They’re on the dense, on the tiny and

  the fresh. I’m on the rare, the horrible and

  mad. But not sold out. Not sold out.

  I’m fighting with Primož’s prediction that

  I’ll end as gilding, that I’m just playing.

  Deit strokes my head. Deit has a say in the catch.

  THE SLAVE

  A slave placates my godfather. The left sleeve is

  too short. I’m with you. Root out every

  half-splinter half-straw from the base of the

  brush. I’m with you.

  O grain, forming a sphere from your stalk.

  Destroying and building churches.

  Bending a clapper.

  Spitting on crumbs pressed into the sand by a horse

  hoof.

  Why did you land here and not there?

  How deep do you sink?

  A screw would be no fun, you saw and

  shoved off. The noises are fairy tales. So are the foams.

  The light

  turns around. A bird flickers like lightning and

  sings like lightning.

  Copying its divine gift.

  The last sap of the beams in a trench, before it pays its caste.

  I’m charming. I’ve subjugated.

  I discover some change in my

  hand.

  A berry falls onto a drop.

  Ardent la belle, where are you?

  I’ve retreated into the cream inside the bread.

  I hear the paws of Teddy, the black dog, as they

  echo off the grass as off a carpet.

  He also loves and desires attention.

  LIME TREE

  Dane was handed around by Parisian counts

  who offered him trips on their yachts around Africa.

  And now me: would you go with me to Kuala

  Lumpur? “Who will get it?” A pear is stuffed

  with a piano, o exvalidated. The surrealists kept

  everything under glass. Their piano lay alone

  amidst clouds resembling some Tyrolean fence.

  A pear stuffed with a piano, o exvalidated,

  accomplishes three times thirty thousand times as much

  as the queen bee in her hive. When Beatrice buys and samples

  cheese (it’s true, Tonino, the serotonin in pecorino, with ruccola

  and chianti make you dream towards morning

  that you’ve lost your keys, your wallet, and all your

  cards) people are stunned. She takes a fig, gives it

  first to me to bite a little off, then tries it

  herself, and puts whatever’s left back into the grocer’s

  hand. People learn. Even in Tuscany they’ve forgotten

  quite a bit. They’re only now

  discovering why Masaccio was tremendo,

  why he struck Gentile da Fabriano to the quick

  when still a boy, not to mention (but which

  Longhi said, long ago, though no one believed him)

  what he did for Fra Angelico. He made Fra Angelico

  ready for God. Till then he’d painted cliffs like

  Bosch, little monks like Bosch, and his animals

  carry something in their mouths like one-headed

  stars. I open the corridor. There are people

  gathering in it now, who’d also like to get bread,

  while the two of us just try some, turn it,

  cold-bloodedly preparing ourselves for slow food.

  The people get that instinctively, although they

  had those idiotic Savoys instead of

  proper noble souls. And Pan opening

  Radovljica is worth six hundred silks. Rock me,

  Vintgar, little paw. There it’s blue, there it’s

  cool. There an old man sits on the cliffs, eyes bulging, like some

  haggard eagle. And there I, the sun, retreated early

  and left you in peace to develop. You can also

  feel free to forget those five hundred postcards. A leg

  cut into a pine doesn’t bleed like a leg snagged on a

  cork tree. Rabbit carries his lettuce and house

  on his back all by himself. And Bloom really is

  fat and really does look like Bloom.

  Terry stroked him while he lectured about the

  Mormons. Yesterday she was a lizard, a canicula, a

  cassiopeia, because I can’t spit straight out what she

  really was—an iguana. Diran and I dan
ced ourselves

  bloody at the sight of it. I’m sixty years old.

  My soul is growing. I scare Metka by gurgling as I

  wake up. By wheezing like a volcano. When I move

  my body like a mountain to my studio, these little

  rabbits jump out of it, before I’ve even