A Ballad for Metka Krašovec

by Tomaz Salamun

  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