The Blue Tower

by Tomaz Salamun

finished washing up and exercising. Those spiritualized worms

  spring up if I wander the world.

  FLIGHT

  Vesper sketched bird, glossolalia.

  Do you remember? From out of those little cheeks and boxes

  at Novi Sad Radio?

  I’ve been bound to the nipples with sticks.

  Ouch, Bermuda mattress!

  Ouch, Bermuda mattress!

  A strong bird that extricates itself to winter,

  planning a rumba for part of the sky.

  It materializes as flying geese.

  I went to the movies to sprinkle myself.

  Conscience stings the coffee, rolls out a dead pie.

  Hairpins go flying from wall to wall,

  as do Turks, bearing three mythical titles:

  Commodore of the Turkish Opera. President of the Chamber

  of Turkish Architects. But we’re not there.

  We’re here: the young archbishop of Constance has a Jacuzzi.

  Lorraine under a blotter. O my herbarium.

  Tannin and a rolled-up bag, where are epic elements?

  Six broad-shouldered, six men.

  It wasn’t till Delaware (when we missed the exit) that I sensed

  how dew is produced on the skin of America.

  What if I wrapped all these pieces up in a kerchief and numbered them.

  I religiously take off my slippers and put on a shoe.

  I religiously listen to the sounds in my body.

  I will religiously open the door and go out to smoke.

  PTUJ

  Refuse from a tundula.

  The caro anita of mankind.

  These are lions on a bridge without manes.

  Stampless horses without bellies.

  Pupolotti (bulbs) that burn out and get changed.

  A real bridge with a real foundation, with real water, and a wet

  shadow. What here can be walked across, we always swam.

  Spinning our hats and stovepipes in the seawater.

  Fashion doesn’t grow old. Water doesn’t grow old.

  The turning point in the nest should be overpaid.

  I remember you with knitting needles in your lap, when you used them

  to point at Rafko.

  A buck loped down from the castle.

  Rosette, a rose, Rosika. Where Mazlu, Stančič

  Avšič, Mrs. Abramič, and Mrs. Senčar (née Ban) gathered.

  First wipe off the knife, then the grave.

  The soldiers are marching off to sleep.

  SUGAR

  Hidden in the kraut-and-bean soup and amidst numbers was the tarp (the cerada)

  for covering people’s fates. We were rigging the boat

  when a new order came. Everyone onto the truck with the people’s

  fates, we’ll cover them, if we must, with our bodies.

  It was one of those frequent scenes when you install

  seats in trucks, because you want people to be comfortable.

  Houses were burning. The cork had been stinged. Blood flowed

  down the sinkhole to the sumac and soaked into the earth.

  Now doves and ants take turns scratching it out.

  Depending on whether it’s ovaltine or rice. A Red Ant, hidden

  behind some backpacks, didn’t know that we’d sliced up his tent.

  What to do with the flag. What to do with a glass chicken.

  Boccalin appears in poems. The grownups sing our theme songs. All morning

  I fling my pot around the boat deck and watch people.

  ATHOS

  The stump was wrong. Hermelin dies as soon as I open my eyes.

  We painted the fish pull-on,

  and it jutted down.

  It wagged its tail in the water, in the Greek mountain.

  There were flies on the roosters,

  the flies were the first to open their throats.

  Athos sun, Athos lava, and the looks from people.

  Fish wagged their tails under the sea

  we saw from here.

  Armoire lava, armoire lava,

  we’ve included the faithful.

  The abandoned and debased.

  Cut into a pear so the blood ran.

  Giacometti’s cart was on the bench.

  Its posts shone blue.

  Elijah’s chariot was between my sleeve and fur lining.

  I cast a spell on a little monk.

  He got up like a count. He got up like a son. He got up like a swordsman.

  If I lean on my shoulder, the forest hums.

  LETTER FROM KEVIN HOLDEN

  TIGER TIGER TIGER TIGER TIGER

  There are tigers everywhere

  Dream tigers, paper tigers, tigers in trees, in snow, in my tongue &

  stars

  Dear YOU

  In the Blue Tower

  Please tell me if you receive this

  At this address

  I have been thinking of you

  Thank you for the Postcard

  Yes!

  Les Rois!

  I was away over break—In New York

  Art

  Brooklyn

  & With my mother in Rhode Island

  The SEA

  I walk around

  Like a TURTLE

  & The Pines

  & Elsewhere

  So when I returned, I had it

  Planet, CATHEDRAL

  I miss you

  I had a dream about you

  Sledding & the Snow & Wolves

  They were friends

  A cave of Winds

  The poets speak of you

  You are loved here

  When do you come to the United States?

  Here is something (else) with which I am in love:

  “Art is at present the only construction complete unto itself, about which nothing more can be said, such is its richness, vitality, sense, wisdom. Understanding, seeing. Describing a flower: relative poetry more or less paper flower. Seeing.

  “Until the intimate vibrations of the final cell of a brain-god-mathematics are discovered along with the explanation of primary astronomies, that is the essence, impossibility will always be described with the logical elements of perpetual contradiction, that swamp of stars and of useless bells. Toads of cold lanterns, squashed flat against the descriptive intelligence of a red belly. What is written on art is an educative work and in that sense it has a right to exist. We want to make men realize afresh that the one unique fraternity exists in the moment of intensity when beauty and life itself are concentrated on the height of a wire rising toward a flash of light, a blue trembling linked to the earth by our magnetic gazes covering the peaks with snow. The miracle.”

  Tzara

  Isn’t it wonderful?

  We should go find Tristan in the Trees & love him

  Distribution center

  The hollow

  The birches

  Tell me news

  Here there is snow!

  Tiger

  Dreams

  LOVE

  THE FLIGHT INTO THE LAND OF EGYPT

  A cypress that sets up camp at home base and licks the eyes of the egg king.

  Of an elephant that distinguishes wheat flour from rye.

  The one that climbs up a ladder, then spits capers down.

  A catfish with its eyelashes yanked out.

  The one who lifts a rock and moves the rock.

  The one who draws in the sand the precise route for the invasion of Egypt.

  Sovre, in person, alone, drinking black coffee on white lace,

  setting the black coffee down in its white cup next to the pheasant.

  Honey and trout and capers and berries.

  It has started to rain now in Thebes, for only the second time in Thebes’s life.

  I have discovered a tin watering can.

  Alice washed herself off into me.

  If the railroad helped the ball, then the ball buried the railroad.

  No
! The wall straightens out. The fur coats are stunned.

  Diran bends down over Nanni’s ear, Beatrice takes pictures.

  No! Don’t take the jacket, go around the cutlet.

  Are you here?

  I am.

  What are you doing?

  Crunching and drinking water from the porters’ fountain.

  Only the stewed fruit is traced.

  The nature of the impoverished is in the earrings, where white cypresses grow.

  Red, glowing eyes that get stuck on the railings of bridges.

  So do you protect them with silken nets?

  “What should be flat?” The surface?

  The grass where you bounced la balle before stepping into the bite?

  The chakras pour out October.

  I fall on a body and see a chanterelle, or rather I wonder

  if you can already see three hours after sunrise.

  What really soaks a policewoman’s kuglo, what really scrubs her sleeves?

  Cash and a heart with flour and suds drive through the reeds.

  The fine carpet is of ice, here’s where the catfish and fortresses pass.

  Fragments of castles gurgle forth out of gold-iced, formed bast.

  My ear. My home. Intention?

  Give me the ermine bird, one eye green, one eye crimson.

  Half of the guards sleep leaning.

  From eyes to eyes you dip the plant, from eyes to eyes.

  What will you assemble out of the kite, dying Murn?

  A gullet slithers up the mountains.

  We bathe ourselves.

  We won’t trample the songbird in our galoshes and ponchos.

  Faruk offered a prayer ticket.

  Faruk has left the land of Egypt.

  Back then I had a cabbie’s hair.

  We had lunches and dinners at Jošt’s.

  We have each other.

  Horse, pissing on my forearm and biceps,

  on my blue and black line tattoo.

  What did it cost Persia to lay pipes into Asia.

  La Sua Eccellenza Governatore Generale del Canada,

  these days the finches regulate the weather in Asia.

  In Canada the sun drops way down in the evenings.

  What hurts comes to the light of day on its own.

  THE SOUL MURDERS THE TILE

  The soul murders the tile, shoots it to bits.

  Nicholson translates air with desire.

  I translate a face with a hut.

  A ball with a broad lap,

  an incantation with coffee, a block with a subway.

  A flag with a cap, a cap, your pith cap.

  The night with soil.

  Those of you who come will vanish, and those of you who vanish will come.

  Young, lazy and too slack to cut my throat, as

  Caravaggio did, because I was a zero to him, less than a fly that

  disturbed him. Go find Shakespeare! Obsessed with himself,

  and my doors burn and shine around his soul.

  I was the first to hurl a stone from the tower of Babel.

  I was the first to blink.

  I was the first to slaughter my mother and a servant, then

  cleanse and purify myself.

  To lie on the grass like fresh laundered linen.

  The first to ride through the blue woods on a deer.

  And yesterday evening, as Alice—Beatrice’s favorite dog—

  made love to Diran, both of them have horrible, red tongues, thorns to

  the living. A white oar to my soul.

  I, the silverware under the angle, chief of the unreasoning,

  a stone,

  smoke that sleeps through its scent, I give

  the Prater to my spades. I don’t smell them anymore beneath my

  angle.

  In the cold, thin air I eat locusts and am a saint.

  Here’s the beginning of my crown.

  The spheres on its tentacles bark and lick in the boats.

  We’re lost in a jungle where we

  bear on our shoulders the physics for Christ’s body.

  At Rodez Artaud wore an apron.

  My bones meet their ends in the ether, on the anvil.

  Dove of the hungry. Thread of the mortal. Astrakhan of multitudes.

  Dad.

  BROTHER

  The little arms are commanding. Wet, they steal the canister.

  The molten lead that flies through my body forms a

  flower. I kiss the baker on the mouth. I’m here.

  A bulb of bright-colored, blue ones, a bison’s butterfly,

  a fang that snuffs out its prey and then rolls up into a

  higher, squeaking body. You turn the soul over,

  you eat the steak. You breathe and the nylon squeaks.

  It ruts, crunches, rides and cleans itself in a cupboard,

  the one that brought me here in a box, at first in a

  box. Checking the king’s balls. He brings the

  drug. Why shouldn’t we nail the tongue to an

  arch? Two tongues. Two symmetries. And we’ll

  scrape them with the blade of a scissors so that they curl

  (bend up) like the ends of a ribbon that are left free

  when you wrap up chocolates and flowers. So that Celan

  might swim in the Seine. So he might do the crawl through the Tuileries,

  as I did. Beneath every tree they lay, covered

  with trinkets and tape left from parcels marked

  UNRRA. The sound of the tape. A sled in the snow.

  A sled in the snow. A sled in the snow, a mountain of dark ones,

  a mountain of bright ones. My tree is the incantation.

  PLEASURE

  What does bleaching mean, brilliantined

  pug,

  black heart with a red tongue.

  Whom did you make love to on the couch and then set the couch on fire?

  The tower ignited, the tower was almost blown to bits,

  tiny bits of the gommapiuma burned down.

  Alice predicted

  the flame with her red tongue and you predicted

  the flame with your red tongue.

  It happened on the ninth of October, 2002,

  from half a million to a million people marched

  peacefully, and Terry was moved

  to tears. Albertina danced a flamenco and opened the

  belino and then came the fire.

  THE BLISTER

  Soy in earthen pots, a Roman.

  Koper sticks its fly in my pillow, the flowers are lovely,

  the bees are lovely, lovely blood, lovely blood,

  the fire is lovely, the smells rising from it,

  a flood brings grayness and cold, everything’s clean.

  When a blister comes out of the body, does it thirst?

  It’s wet, it crackles, together with Bruno and Saint

  Francis, with Halal, the bruises that Saint

  Stephen gets, some stones bounce off,

  some land softly, others hit and he screams,

  here, here is your home, drive out my heart,

  egotistical factory consuming chairs like a boa,

  It gives chanterelles to Venuses, the weather has bounced off.

  So what if its wings spread enough to drain swamps,

  black mud sucks down its trunk. From the leaves, parts of frogs,

  frog eyes and the moss on trees rolls something

  like a carpet, its scales showing silver.

  They become the brother of north or south, which calls,

  they start to flutter. Sometimes it digs out

  a well. Pops out. Air gurgles in the throat of the

  earth, and we in the sky. Boatsmen have often

  explained that our own sand covers the mind from the light.

  Sirens are crackle, snap, pan-fried dough made of flour and

  pears. Some get their skin flayed, others their eye

  sockets moved, two thirds of
Tuscans were

  cashiered near Florence. But the olive trees

  bore olives again and puppies, peacocks and beautiful

  caterpillars picked them until people recovered just

  enough for their little arms to reach up.

  Oil from the olives drove off the plague. Red tongues

  just faked fire. If a heavy iron ball

  drops from a great height onto his bones,

  crunch, the swelling, the stalk, it all belongs to the river.

  REMINDING MANKIND OF YOURSELF WITH A WHIP

  What do you swing your club and spew pits for,

  Thousand and One Nights?

  I gaped at the frescoes.

  Who would have thought they were so scribbled over.

  The paint has peeled off.

  The walls are heavy and wide.

  I divide Africa along its head, so we’ll all be warm.