The fluttering of a stony horror – cherries.
Fingers on the back of the neck.
The scent of night’s infinite infatuation.
Love is in scissors that cut.
Wires that chase sleep away.
Shepherds wait.
Kekec smashes his hand.
Within the mountain –
along a thick, vertical line on the temple’s wall –
the burden collapses in cascades of lava.
Butterfly fixed with a silver pin –
the shadow of your wings is now my wellspring.
Swords are for the powerful.
Threads are for pure silk.
I am the mouth of the Book.
Feathers are the feathers of god and dog,
conspiring brothers –
fresh linen.
Bananas,
as real as clouds.
Cockroaches perished in white lime –
a ford of the universe.
A bubble in wet flour bursts –
the illusion of a trolley.
A city of light is built on a cliffside.
The edge of the abyss is too damp.
The first birth has no memory.
Supreme grace opens onto
terror. Every system of death cultivates
material. Poetry is most valued at the
court for performing drudge work.
Kafka is at fault for the occupation of Prague!
Counting is most terrible of all, because it’s beyond death.
Roots break the tongue’s seed for
tactical reasons of the cosmos.
Work shoots out a crystal kernel – buds of nothingness.
Its status is higher than the status of peacock’s feathers.
snow man
Suffering joins fear and disgust.
I see enormous snowballs. I SEE
ENORMOUS SNOWBALLS. People
think they contain the hidden horror
of the world. But I know. They’re the finished
work of slaves, waiting for me.
I can build the little guy
half asleep. When I take a red root
from the bin and stick it in the smallest
ball, I’m more relaxed than a
king who’s planted a tree. The photos
of my gestures go to the center.
Immortality is always nihilistic.
we peasants
When I truly shifts,
two deer appear to people on earth,
the green forest’s color stops dead,
madness swallows us, and drunkenness.
When I truly parts,
I breathe slowly, slowly, gently,
in horror I stare at the tremor, like a pagan,
dumbstruck, so as not to expend the world.
Then I wait, for a long time I wait
for that strange ocean to subside.
All Slovenes building houses have a stroke.
My red roofing tiles, the red tiles of my neighbor
Lojze, building a stall for his livestock,
we both gave you color, color.
the dance
It was humid.
Five p.m. by eyewitness accounts.
My head, black from oxidized carrots,
crashed onto the canvas to bright-sounding
shouts. Ustaša were strolling around
town. Little bread loaf, they beat me up.
Then the Liberation Front actually smuggled me through
Gorjanci in a bread basket.
That’s when I saved the first life –
Vojeslav Mole’s. In a smart navy
overcoat, I pick daisies and wait for
freedom. I always imagined it as an
explosion at the train station.
A huge orchestra, a ray of
light returning to earth;
my mother barefoot, her hair let
down, winding her way up the stairs to the
bunker. No one escapes my
dance, the dance of the white hare. Fresh
recruits are most startled of all, my brand new
wife for instance, whom I
touched on the Pyramid of the Moon.
She slid from Teotihuacán to
Ljubljana, as if on that tarp
used for saving
Christians. Too late! She made a few more
circles like a drunken fly and then
collapsed into white space with terror
in her neck.
We drank champagne from olden times.
Some elderly woman covered my teeth with rice.
This time I washed my head.
But that doesn’t prevent
the cries of my overseas monsters.
I’m at work.
On the way.
I comfort them ALL.
san juán de la cruz and john dilg
My god is a cruel yellow bug,
it settles wherever it wants.
Clown! I don’t fall for your tricks
anymore! My god is a thousand flashes in a
single cube of sugar. Now I dip it into
coffee in your castle, just as
fate dealt with your two children, Katrina Trask.
The sugar vanishes, I vanish. I wipe
my forehead. The guests stare and ask
if I’m insane. I come unstuck. And again
it transports me into the fire in the eyes of others.
Into the steely velvet irises of John
Dilg. Every bite in his bread is a
tempest. I bend like a bridge. I’ll
endure this joke. Where are you,
grass? I’ll wall you up in a bee.
Insects, insects! Striped, smelling
machines! Stay where you
were, friend. Don’t stroll over the
abyss of my rights – human fibers.
insects, birds
I feel
the hand of god on my neck.
Who is it that dares to crush my head!
I look at
a dead wasp.
It lies on white paper, under a black
note: Call Junoš.
Print that gesture on me, print it.
God is the Void.
His head: a lump of reeking colt’s
flesh. It fell to wolves in the snow.
What do you want
dove, go back to the Hudson!
Don’t rip my body with lightning.
The window! Make it stop staring.
I’ve heard that you have
white hands,
lord of the Void.
I’ve never seen them.
Endure your crime.
manhattan
I’m crucified.
Between continents.
Between loves.
My nests are in the air.
They burn with a gentle flame.
A white sail hides me from
photographers, Hudson River.
The water is deeper here.
The sky a darker gray.
On the horizon
two blunt pencils.
Dug in.
I won’t be coming home.
one, my arm
The Holy Ghost has kissed me.
Far, far off I hear an avalanche.
My fingers pierce a jungle.
A fig tree is growing in this room.
My chest has gone all pink.
My eye is black.
A peacock’s tail is growing out of me.
I am the Buddha.
What will become of the horses in the Russian steppe
when charred honey starts to flow?
The bright fluid circulates in the earth’s flower,
Blossoms are in green pipes.
Mountains and non-mountains squeezed in one,
my arm, I am in stardust.
My face licked, by whom,
a deer, a cat?
I
am
dew in a can which
a child can carry,
I am sweet, white milk.
a ballad for metka krašovec
The last time I ever lost
consciousness was in the evening, the fourth of January, in
Mexico. Dr. Sava was treating me
to dinner,
to Benito Cereno,
to the desert,
to Nolde’s youth and
to the story of how he’d joined
the Melville Society right before
Borges, when he was buying
grease for Yugoslavia.
Once we published together in Gradina.
Hello, Niš!
But I really couldn’t
listen, because I was constantly thinking about
the letter I’d gotten that morning from Metka
Krašovec. A tiny blue letter
written in the same characters as these.
I collapsed under the table.
The next morning I visited her in the
hotel. First, I wadded up some super down
Krašovec for her, some
fiancé three times removed.
He flew right back to LA. I don’t
like incest. I put on my
backpack. I kept trying to figure out why I’d
passed out. For weeks I took her around on
buses and gave her everything
to eat: holy
mushrooms and the Pyramid of the Moon. With me you sleep
on hard floors among
scorpions, but also where you pick
fruit and murmur: you are color, you are color.
One day I
interrupted: I’ve got to go
to Guatemala with that boy, don’t you see that he
appeared to me as Christ. We lay on a beach in
the Caribbean, the two of us and a Portuguese whose name
I forgot. Go, she said. I can tell I’ll be
crushed, but then I’ll merge with you
in the light again. I was
afraid. I went nowhere. And that night I took her to a
motel that was a collection
point for white cargo on the way to Rio.
She kept gazing calmly into my eyes.
You’d better look at the sky, woman, what are you looking
for here, I shouted, I told you long
ago, there’s nothing left
here. I was shaking when we reached
the Pacific. Salina Cruz, the fans,
prisoners weaving
a net. I roamed naked through the sand.
Purple plastic bags, the sky, my body, all
purple. Metka! I said to her, you
can’t pretend you don’t know.
You do! Don’t play with fire!
Go back to your
Academy. Eventually they’ll even blame me for
making you leave. I have to work,
you take this trip alone, I told
her as we flew back from
Cancún. Why do you lose your
scent and taste, religion!
You’re crazy! I shouted at Carlos, Enrique and
Roberto, do you want that woman to
abduct me back
to Slavdom? And why are you looking
so good, she asked me when she came back from
Morelia. And I no longer
knew who was grandma and who was
the wolf. You’ll miss your meetings, it’s time for you to leave,
Metka! And I saw her to the
airport. I was afraid she’d
explode it with her convulsive
crying. So long! But then the ground
started giving way beneath my feet, too.
My advice that she
pretend I was nearby in Šiška was really
false. Nobody has been in Šiška for ages.
I phoned her.
I’m coming to get married.
Come then, she said calmly.
Through the receiver I could feel her gazing in my eyes.
A very, very
tall gentleman read
my tarot cards, an old woman from
Persia read my palm.
They all told me the same thing.
And I was happy. I shivered.
And I knocked on the
door of my neighbor,
Alejandro Gallegos Duval, to tell him that I was
happy and shivering.
Why are we all living on top of each other?
Junoš and Maja said:
he’s not so terribly handsome as you see him, but
it’s strange. He looks a lot like Metka
Krašovec. I arrived in Ljubljana on March
twenty-seventh. I paid thirty-two marks for the
cab. Metka was sick and pale.
I returned the blood to her face. And she wouldn’t let me
wear his ring, too, but she wanted me to wear
hers alone.
I watched my wedding witnesses with
interest. I finished all the other guests’
sparkling drinks. Did you at least
buy some nice tent with the money from my
Montenegrin reading? Two deer came out
on Snežnik.
I’m here.
My hands shine.
America is my fate.
– In the woods of Saratoga, May 1979
A book of photographs:
a tale of the perfect lover.
Learn from the eye of others.
God is my
reader.
to david
Son! I don’t see you,
don’t hear you.
I caught sight of a squirrel in the
woods as I carried my black
box. Now I’m staring at an
arrow and the label
MARGIN.
Don’t collapse into beauty.
Dive into it like an olympic
pool and pierce it from
below.
The surface is beauty.
Let it bleed.
mitla
I forget what I drank in
Mitla.
I remember we wandered onto
side paths,
up the steps.
The stones in the temple were arranged
like a wall with a secret panel
for the hidden image
of a dog’s lacerated muzzle.
The dog licked pink sugar
in its mouth.
To the nun who fixed
real hair onto the doll of Christ –
what did you pierce the head with?
Young ladies in far-off lands wear high heels.
Man strokes
a copper sphere.
I set a
dead
anopheles onto velvet, to think more easily about the world’s impermanence.
From a greasy, black field I hear the cry
of a horn.
A cupola smokes.
If it weren’t for Descartes, they’d have
found the golden flower!
Horses in the steppes would have their hooves wrapped
in a layer of nylon. The nylon would be in my
mothers’ flesh.
I lifted the eastern edge
of the table, to let the
crumbs
of bread roll toward the
door.
When I crawl around
this forest, naked, like
an animal,
I Feel the World.
I will change into
the grasses.
When I am eaten up by
the worms,
they will turn everything,
as I do,
into gold.
With my tongue,
like a faithful, devoted
dog, I lick Your
golden head,
reader.
Horrible is my
love.
god’s straw
“La sainte eut d’abord la vie d’une femme entourée d’un luxe frivole. Elle vécut maritalement, eut plusieurs fils et n’ignora pas la brûlure de la chair. En 1285, agée de trente-sept ans, elle changea de vie ...”
– Georges Bataille, L’expérience intérieure
May 22, 9:30, listen
Metka,
wretched creature, lurking from your ambush across
the ocean on my holy mouth with warm, dangling
members, affixed to that infamous
hen-house, dripping with oil and melon.
Into your blind alley, march!
Long live Agatha Christie and all tranquil
fossils! Disgusting
zipper!
Absurdly soldered flour-box, consuming
miles of my paper, even in my
sleep! Where did you get the right
to wiggle beneath me,
paramecium,
to quiver and yelp like the orgasm of some alpine
tour?
Your ears are flat! At every
throb I pray for an avalanche to
bury you. Hey, Saint
Bernards! I want your liquor for my wife. For
her sake I’ve neglected the
insects that have stopped
fluttering around my silk. Watch yourself,
cannibal, wanting to imprint
my face into your live
flesh.
I won’t take the bait.
I’m not some Slovene peasant.
I’m Angelica da Foligno.
I remain god’s straw.
andraž and tomaž šalamun
A Ballad for Metka Krašovec Page 2
