Don’t nod off on
the train from Venice to
Vienna, dear
reader.
Slovenia is so
tiny you could
miss it. Tinier than my
ranch east of the
Sierras!
Instead, get up,
stick your head out the window, though it says
FORBIDDEN!
Listen to my
golden voice!
prologue I
God is made of wood and doused in gasoline.
I take a cigarette to burn a spider’s leg.
The gentle swaying of grasses in the wind.
Heaven’s vault is cruel.
prologue II
I write this to you, whom till now I’ve only
warned.
I can scarcely control my
servants, who threaten me with
revolt.
The smell of your burnt
flesh is my
life, they whisper.
We’re too old to
change masters.
So I warn you, your fate is
not clear.
If I weary in
this battle, you’ll
burn up.
a prayer
Friend!
Have you ever experienced
the endless pleasure of stars
merging,
the pop of a flower when it
unfolds in a red
horizon?
Don’t underrate the most
horrific esthetic
pleasures.
Every day, every
minute I fight
for you.
Thank you for your
name.
My ultimate
ally in the struggle for your
life.
Plead for me.
Plead that my foe not dim
my wits and drag
me off, innocent, to the
machine.
Plead that I master time
in my sleep and keep you alive
with silence.
god
I
demand
unconditional
love
and
complete
freedom.
That is why
I am
terrible.
sixth of june
Cover your
eyes, friend!
Don’t look at me!
Shield your
gaze –
a bridge of death.
In the woods I hear
a saw.
My light is
yellow.
My ribbon is
black and
red.
I watch over you.
poetry
It is
a greater
pleasure
to lose
women
than
money.
The greatest
pleasure
is
to lose
your own
death.
metka
I’m as
sleepy
as a
child.
I love
you
and the
whole
world
alike.
the man from galilee
My chair.
It’s true!
A fly has as much right to write the history of biology.
I smoke and
look at the photo above the calendar.
Women don’t tire.
Silently I gnaw at
an apple and throw it in the trash.
A stone dropped in a pond.
Monstrous Victorian
heads on the lampshade.
Who invented glass!
I rub my eyes
and play with my pee-pee.
Today I’ll go to bed happy.
I wonder what kind of
minority I’d have to be, if my legs were so
huge they stuck out 14 inches past
my brass bedpost.
de rerum naturae
Dear grandma, even now I remember your gentle
advice: be kind and
polite to the lower
classes. They’re people too. Common
folk can offer a wealth of
lessons. Yes, Lenin. That’s why
I swear in my poems.
In the Second World War, rampaging
Slavs ripped up my coat on Ilica and trampled
my fur.
Sooner or later everything works out.
A smile and silence are power.
They’ll give us back everything they took.
The last carpets went with my good
upbringing when I published my
Poker, just in the first round. And
Papa’s last forests, so he could pay off a debt to
Uncle Tozzi, before he wooded the Karst.
Clearly, as a Slovene poet I come across socially
deafer than Beethoven. The only difference is that
his ears got him screwed over by the
Party.
My grandma
could never remember
the names of my schoolmates.
They were:
1. the curly one,
2. the squirmy one,
3. the one whose mother wears too much makeup,
4. the one who always says hello so nicely.
riko adamič!
Remember how we built
a nine-room house with Fructus
crates! How your father’s
workers thought we were
childish? And we never published
the novel Wacha-too, which we typed in the
shade, under the laurel tree in our
garden. And how grandma always
asked, so does that mean Riko isn’t
the curly one? And we all answered
in chorus: yes, grandma, Riko
is curly, but he’s not the one you
think. Riko’s the one who
always says hello nicely. And
grandma said,
that’s right, two of you are curly-headed. I never know
which is which.
Then the child on duty cleared
the dishes from the table and each of us
went to his corner to
“take a nice nap.”
marko
And just as I was
wondering whether our snake
was still alive – we had all been
worried, because it had been
a week since it had touched
any milk – the door bell rang.
On the stairway stood
a woman clutching at her
heart. “Marko doesn’t have a father anymore.”
I didn’t understand. I thought about how
right I was to oppose
ash blue for the
door. You have to
insist, or there will be
scenes. At the top of the stairway Mother
appeared. I went
without a word straight to the basement
and the snake. I sat down on some
logs.
This snake will die, too, because I read too much
Proust. I decided to give up playing
the piano. To be
a better Boy Scout.
I’ve always wanted Yugoslavia
to win.
astonished eyes
Katka, the A student, got
ASTONISHED EYES. Tomaž, the A student,
got ASTONISHED EYES. Katka,
the pingpong champion, got
ASTONISHED EYES. Tomaž, the sailing enthusiast,
got ASTONISHED EYES. Katka,
Grandfather Frost of the fourteenth precinct,
got ASTONISHED EYES. Andraž,
t
he A student, got ASTONISHED EYES.
I’ve gone half a year now with no new
ASTONISHED EYES. Andraž, the violinist,
got ASTONISHED EYES. Father
keeps forgetting what he’s bought,
so there are four copies from
him personally.
Dear France Bevk, fellow native of the coast region!
There are twelve copies of your book
in our house and
we still can’t get enough!
light not fed by light
Scent of flowering buckwheat,
why do you lure Transylvanian vampires?
Scissors are a painful tool.
No one has the right to crush a stone,
move a doorway from east to north.
But still the archaeologists find forged
iron. How to crush responsibility?
Unchecked, it grows into pandemonium. The creature that
first stared into a fire was fried –
the flame was terrible even in the rain –
and it wanted the fire for itself. Fate is in desire.
The trees burned blissfully. Whoever saves
his life will be spared. Only the one who
splits the mirror with a diamond can sleep soundly.
the boat
Genesis is tiny silken
shifts, thinner than
the nail of your little finger. Are earthquakes and wars
the collapse of galaxies? A couple of swipes
with a brush at the earth’s skin,
a diary?
What is minimal?
What proves
the madness of a bud opening,
of a deer grazing? The poet bestows
wreathes, lays on hands. Yet only he who
veils his vision survives.
He who has seen too much has his eyes
pecked out by crows, and
rightfully so. The poet
kills the deer.
jerusalem
The crime has been written:
you will never
meet a person that you
love as much as
me.
kami
For Allan Gurganus
Mandelshtam lives on this continent now.
O, photographs of Russian heads, of onions against
clouds, of cattle in dust. I listen.
I listen for the night to deepen. Allan
tells a story of his mother. For her
coming-out party his grandfather commissioned
a fleet of pink airplanes and pitched pink,
sound-proof tents on the white sand strewn
for the occasion along the Gulf Coast and
summoned Miles Davis. The guests
lost a couple hundred thousand dollars
in jewelry as they danced. What is the door
like of the place where the old woman lived in Odessa?
Made of logs? And where does your name come from?
I’ve never asked you. Next week
the horse races start. Here and in
Mexico. Sephardim will be drinking milk at
tables along Broadway in this town.
This year it’s the fashion to go shirtless,
to have a German shepherd on a leash, in Saratoga.
the tree
For P. T. F.
I’ll see you again in March next year. But
the woods will be different. The light will be
different. The leaves will glint,
washed by humidity and sun. The taste of
meat is more terrible in California
than here, in the woods of Saratoga. We wave
to each other now, as I walk toward the castle. With one
hand you chase mosquitos away, with the other you
endlessly paint the same tree. Your loves are
the same as Metka’s. Vermeer, Petrus Christus,
the Dahlem Museum. “And when I walked along the beaches
in Delaware, I also remembered
Holland.” You say you live in a cabin. The tree
inhabits, becomes you. You wear the same jewelry as my
wife. What stands out on white paper,
nature? And why do you whisper so
softly when you show us your slides? We’re only
passers-by here, the Piranesi graphics and your
pictures. Don’t be afraid and don’t resent me. I
also speak the language of your forebears, Polish.
a stroll in the zoo
I
In Ljubljana
in the zoo there’s a
seal.
When it breathes,
it hides. My two
children
put their
hands in animals’
mouths.
Then I say,
David, tell me
something, did
Srečko
really get his hair cut?
Were you
afraid at all
in the airplane
way up high?
II
I run to
buy young
corn.
We’ll feed it
to the camel. Just see
what all
a camel
will eat. What an
unusual creature,
always hungry.
Then I remember
Vito.
Sorry!
Back then, when I
helped you move, I was
wounded and
jealous. That
shot in your
gut outside the
Academy, after we’d
driven
around
some barriers in
I’d like
to take it out and
sew it shut.
III
Alejandro
has drawn himself
so I can
feel him
more deeply. In the letter
Te quiero
is surrounded
with the same electric
cloud
as in
olden days
the ad for
Ilirija
shoe wax. Good god,
now I have a wife
again. I doubt
she’ll allow me
these things
at all.
Then Ana
laughs.
Tomaž, Pepca
said we have to
be back by twelve
thirty. And you
go off daydreaming
in the zoo.
IV
Metka, I said,
at the zoo
I saw
a llama.
Did you ever read
about millionaires
in South
America who go
to bed with those
animals? Before
I didn’t understand.
This
afternoon,
when I looked in
its eyes,
I was
shaken, too. Just
what we
needed,
Metka says. With
a llama! Aren’t
things
bad enough?
And I
remember
Maruška, who was
afraid
I’d go to
bed with Ana.
Women are
afraid of
a million
things.
circles
My
rings are
yellow
gold,
white gold and
silver.
I have wives under
glaciers and amid
palm trees.
Who pays
me for this kind
of life?
My
Slovenian nation? My
Slovenian
nation
knows what it’s doing. And any
enemy
who plans
to mess with my Slovenian
nation has been
forewarned.
It’s a fact: whatever I
write
really happens.
His head will fall off
at once.
three poems for miriam
I
I look at
Miriam in the morning, as she
awakens in
Japan. I don’t know
the face sleeping beside you in
the bed.
Do you still
wake up first? I picked up
the bright, left
wall, and
from the left only heard noise from the
street. Who is this
fellow? Do you
remember when we ate
frogs
and I was
hungry all
summer?
II
And I
stopped by your atelier on
Veselova Street downstairs from