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
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