vario burnos

Tomaž Šalamun

NEW POEMS

[ [ [

The deer braids the turtle.

But a sketch of a braid, because the turtle has no hair.

Oh, you can't have everything.

The cow can't harvest corn.

Translated from the Slovenian by Christopher Merrill and the author

BLACK SUN

Inferno happened when Dante explained to us how

he functions sexually.

Before then, it did not exist.

And Petrarch.

Who like a green dog on four wet dark green legs

sniffs Vaucluse and touches his clothes.

He thinks about the books his father

burnt, not about Laura.

It has to do with the race.

Who is faster.

God with his sand or we with our tongue.

Sand is the tongue of fire.

Tongue is the fire of sand.

Fire is the sand of God.

I'm falling.

I fall like an oak doomed to die, and also

women want to be more than metaphor.

With their moist, round, soft skin, with their

drunken scent of warm mushrooms they drive me insane.

Walls of hell, why do you stagger.

I miss the smell of burnt flesh.

Nature makes me tired.

It tires me so terribly that I sink in a cave.

Stars move apart.

I am the Sun.

With no air.

Fake fire falls upon the children's black hair,

advancing into their hearts so they burst like buckles.

Their mouths yawn open as if they were mummies.

They rave in benediction, they gargle my

name as I get dressed.

When I adjust my collar in front of him – the mirror –

everything is already late.

Translated from the Slovenian by Peter Richards and Ana Jelnikar

BLOSSOM & BLOOD

I’m the fruit whose skin breaks,

a container grabbed with a crane.

Gulls are bloodthirsty and hungry.

Their plucked feathers descend

as I climb. Booms, silky booms

in the frozen boat’s throat, between

the sliding rusty doors of the tanker.

What do I do here if my seal breaks?

How should I grease my black and blue shoulders?

Hey, little stoker, I squeezed your head

under the ceiling for I started to breathe.

Your limbs smashed on brown metal

cannot be washed away. A mosquito is caught in oil.

They nail the box Illyria on a stick

and when the lid is pressed to the ceiling

where should it go if not inside? You resemble

an old fly’s turd looking partly gray on a light bulb.

Shall we throw spears? I don’t have a tool.

And the huge trunk with a pulley coming closer

owns nothing. I’m shifted around.

Machines are putting me on the other dock.

And from there a train through

dark tunnels and damp gorges

or in the sun, sun among wheat spikes,

an hour before the arch goes out and the lights

of cars and houses ignite. How should I

remember you, little stoker. I’m almost

unloaded. Only a lintel or two,

only a distance traveled on foot and then

that closeness with the heart shown by your

hand. A span. A span. You slap wood

as if a piano, you measure the tone.

Such sweet sounds Pythagoras takes.

Translated from the Slovenian by the author and Peter Richards

THE FLASHLIGHT

Now I stand between

a pine tree wrapped in a diaper, between

a larch wrapped in a diaper, and between

a fern wrapped in

a miniature diaper. My flashlight

shines because it's night. I cough. My

cough reaches further than

the light of my flashlight. I unbind both diapers from the trunk.

At the miniature diaper my eyes start

to hurt.

I would like the wolf to come and tear me

apart. This path was walked by one who

smells. I turn my flashlight on

to see where

I am.

Moss is for resting our hands. On moss we

sleep and keep late hours.

Baby Jesus is surrounded by moss

and paper. Not only would I like the wolf

to tear me apart, I want to live

and from the corner of the room throw

a plum on the pool, which is glass on

paper.

But there are no rivers in the desert!

They will domesticate me the same way.

Translated from the Slovenian by Peter Richards and the author

THERE IS ONLY ONE MORE WELT

There is only one more welt staring

out of my destiny. Out from this welt I write. The welt

hurts. If somebody had cut open my welt

earlier, I still might have been able to

elbow my way out. I would have taken

my destiny off like a shirt and watched it

rotate. I have been doing this since the moment

I had myself incinerated and gave birth to my first

line in order to be calm.

I'm letting you know the exact order:

Poker, The Purpose of the Cloak, Pilgrimage for

Maruška, The White Ithaka, America,

Turbines, Arena, Imre, The Hawk, The History of

Light is Orange, Feast, Druids, Stars.

The Angel Method is for me.

Thereafter there is nothing.

I have no power over myself.

This poem is rather poor.

I am only writing it because

I feel I have to explain.

I am crystal clear.

Full insight into me is forbidden.

I have never been human.

Always an angel.

After reaching perfect shape,

it disperses.

Translated from the Slovenian by Peter Richards and Ana Jelnikar

Published by arrangement with the author