Woods and Chalices Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Lucid Slovenian Green

  Mills

  In the Tongues of Bells

  The Clouds of Tiepolo

  The Edge From Where We Measure

  Ferryman

  Tiepolo Again

  In the Tent Among Grapes

  Mother and Death

  Along Grajena River

  The Dead

  Ancestor

  Academy of American Poets

  Enamel

  Vases

  Pessoa Scolding Whitman

  The Pacific Again

  Libero

  In New York, After Diplomatic Training

  Boiling Throats

  The Catalans, The Moors

  Sand and Spleen Were Left in Your Nose

  Arm Out and Point the Way

  Fallow Land and the Fates

  Perfection

  Avenues

  Dislocated, Circulating

  Car

  Odessa

  Offspring and the Baptism

  Washington

  The King Likes the Sun

  You are At Home Here

  Bites and Happiness

  Baruzza

  The Linden Tree

  Holy Science

  We Lived in a Hut, Shivering with Cold

  At Low Tide . . .

  Blue Wave

  Colombia

  And On The Slopes of La Paz

  Coat of Arms

  Fiery Chariot

  Shifting The Dedications

  Washing in Gold

  The Wood’s White Arm

  The Kid From Harkov

  Porta Di Leone

  Paleochora

  Persia

  In The Walk of Tiny Dews

  Olive Trees

  Mornings

  It Blunts

  Marasca

  Scarlet Toga

  Shepherd, You are Just Learning

  The Cube That Spins and Sizzles, Circumscribes The Circle

  The Man I Respected

  The Hidden Wheel of Catherine of Siena

  White Cones

  Horses and Millet

  Henry of Toulouse, Is That You?

  New York–Montreal Train, 24 January, 1974

  The West

  Publication Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Compilation copyright © 2000 by Tomaž Šalamun

  English translation copyright © 2008, 2007 by Brian Henry and Tomaž Šalamun

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  This is a translation of Gozd in kelihi

  First published in Slovenia by Cankarjeva zalozba, 2000

  Publication acknowledgments appear at the end of the ebook and constitute a continuation of the copyright page.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Šalamun, Tomaž.

  Woods and chalices /Tomaž Šalamun; translated from the Slovenian

  by Brian Henry and the author.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Šalamun, Tomaž—Translations into English.

  I. Henry, Brian, 1972- II. Title.

  PG1919.29.A5.W66 2007

  891.8'415—dc22 2007037468

  ISBN 978-0-15-101425-5

  eISBN 978-0-544-34366-5

  v1.0914

  To Metka

  The Lucid Slovenian Green

  To step into the splash. To adorn oneself. I strode

  the Karst valleys and bloomed. The underworld

  is plastic and juicy. Whales dunk a little,

  shoot a little. Chile is dewy, spring

  is paper-wrapped. Girded like an ant,

  like a cadet with argil. How do you reckon this? Bruised

  like an icon? Blasted with small and large candles?

  Slices are also in the trunk, there, where

  squirrels and hornets fertilize tiny eggs. Caesar

  walks staccato. Rome crawls by your feet. Wherever

  the grape plucks, it starts to purl. The Irish saved Europe.

  They piled sagas at fire sites. Everything northern

  (Styria). There, in the forests, live char men

  with flashing eyes. They snack on the Book of Kells.

  Mills

  I grew up with eggplants. I stepped

  from the truck, honey, chestnuts

  rolled in honey. The higher, grayer part

  creaked. It tottered. For a raven

  that you snatch by the legs and spin like a bundle,

  as long as it doesn’t crash into a windowpane,

  you don’t know if it hits with its back or its eyes

  closed, glued from fear. The windowpane

  is not its beak. The raven has no beak.

  The raven has only a sail with drawn-on

  seed. Stars, ricocheting into the moon’s

  glass, go out. Between the time someone’s

  in the sky and the time he burns

  in the sky is the beat of an eyelid. Water spins the logs.

  In the Tongues of Bells

  I decant a blossom. It goes before you.

  You’re filled with Uriah. Green, tiny, and pressed.

  Blueness is a furious cake, a round

  cake where yearning sleeps. Are the balls

  the balls of the earth? At wells

  and fountains? At Adas’s pillar?

  You say that you’d be my property.

  You’d lose everything instantly.

  I still wouldn’t notice you anymore, injured.

  I choose from the thickness. Honey collects

  cries. And when the body thickens and you get up

  because I dress you, because I congeal you.

  I erase you back in the past. I draw

  a white flap, shine a white flap.

  The Clouds of Tiepolo

  The flock fell behind a hill. God

  tottered. I chased a stall. Faded

  and flew. When there’s no syrup in the eyes, there’s

  no black man in the body. Virgo is in the loaf and creels.

  She throws snowballs while standing. Plans unravel.

  Clouds are rosy, as by Tiepolo.

  As by Deacon and Aritreia. Tasso

  kills a cricket. The knot spreads and advances

  into the jacket with many and’s, as with the Danes,

  who also translated the Bible like this. And so we have

  and, and, and—no more—which the French

  don’t have. They have crouching planks there,

  they call them elegance. The bridge goes in the eyes.

  The soul in the railway. I puff, for I’m a pillar.

  The Edge From Where We Measure

  Shiva gleams on a white pansy

  and a penguin kicks the sphere. The radar

  switches off. After speed? Nothing.

  We only slept some twelve hours.

  We were eating pizzas from Santa Fe

  to Boston. Our minds sprinkled. The wheat

  cleaved. I wanted to lick you on the neck.

  What? Where? You rob the steering wheel

  and the air. You stop. You smoke

  and build a hut for lit
tle birds. Triangles,

  you split open their feet, their toes

  with the drawn-in bulbs for fingernails

  which may be a football ground, a sea

  or your screen. You inherited six of them.

  Ferryman

  I know you toil and loiter. The mourner

  bids adieu. Her leaves’ whiteness

  recalls stalks. The graffiti of the poor

  is under the earth. The adieu has staccato poses.

  Drowns and flees. It resounds in the hut

  when you wipe off the saddle. So we have

  a wet ship and a dry rider. A worm

  from a trunk and an oudine from grain. The position

  between the land and the river is wiped. The position

  is wide. The river is cold. As long as he travels

  parallel he doesn’t need a draftsman.

  But then, now will it whistle? Will there be

  a bell, will it be perforated? Will the earth

  split, as then within vineyards?

  Tiepolo Again

  The pill percolates. Methadone is technology.

  Eyes in the Sava. There will be no more white tuck-ins.

  Christ was exposed. Roe deer

  kept their paws apart. Quilts

  fluttered, and the wheat-like ones. We shelled

  tweezers. Is there always skin under

  the skin? Is the situation in the niches

  and cockroaches and in the deep

  Piranesi caves taken care of? Will lights be

  by the legs? Will the dust burn? I gather myself

  by Mormons. I embroider from lace, I have

  a butterfly, Tasso, who drinks

  from a bottle. Clouds rush like crumpled

  wash, faster than watered guests.

  In the Tent Among Grapes

  Don’t sneak me onto mountains, chicken. Don’t verify

  your neighbor. You creep on my vaults. Where

  paws and stars flash. Where Nietzsche

  bites his knees (Komarča!) on the path above

  Nice. What an azure milky whiteness!

  Did you knead a little flour into torpedoes?

  Did you sponsor a robbery of bees? Ears

  adjust to the sky. Tendrils—if wholly

  in white garlic—do you then tear them

  like berries? We hear the engine, not the horse.

  His eyes are poured out onto my hands.

  Stumps and columns and stalks that you dunk

  into the Mediterranean. Steve and Ken (asleep)

  water flowers. The chimney branches out.

  Mother and Death

  There is no grinding. Consumption is embittered.

  The shove twists a white feather. The law

  is in Kent’s throat. White green violets.

  The schmeketa pump is knocked down.

  You revolt in the color of spilled wine.

  You bring cakes and name them,

  sell them here. White quails

  have top-notch wings. The bone is among

  the found. The found is expected

  by witch doctors. Confirm to her what she saw.

  Confirm to her that she was chatting.

  That there are no remains. That the way is easy

  always. That there is not even a drop

  of reproach in front of the white mute.

  Along Grajena River

  I helped

  the peach

  to braid itself.

  Why did you already shut

  your mouth on the mountain?

  The sled

  rolls,

  turns round its axles.

  It runs with

  dogs and moose.

  Boka is an ink stain.

  Cut into the icy slope

  and scattered powder.

  The stone gives heat.

  Ormoź begs a hen.

  I am Ban’s daughter.

  I played piano

  in Poker,

  the garden

  did not keep.

  Surely I must have died.

  The Dead

  Ou peut-être pas.

  Perhaps their trumpets curve.

  They forgot doorknobs in the floods

  and now they dive for them.

  Maybe they press the buttons

  to rescind the aberrations.

  Maybe they use crepe paper.

  Maybe they’re not so talentless

  and crackle underwater like shells

  and stones, such that every thousand years

  of crackling harvests us

  a tiny white stone.

  Ancestor

  Is it cold?

  Are you snowed in?

  The tent, does it still creak?

  In a field near the Hrpelje-Kozina station

  in the year 1911,

  a cadet shot himself

  in the mouth with a pistol.

  Academy of American Poets

  Muldoon says Heaney is like the Vasa

  ship. Built on three floors,

  it was the world’s biggest battleship.

  It made half a mile

  and capsized alone in a harbor.

  The warriors are killed by insects

  and lack of glycerine.

  Scurvy corrodes their skulls.

  Spruce trees shake off their seed and snow.

  Between Zlatorog and the Savica waterfall

  there is no hoarfrost.

  Enamel

  The tongue doesn’t bind itself. It’s a cleanser and a clean freak,

  the marble-smooth skin of refined ladies,

  a cork, a self-satisfied little clod.

  When Alexander burns Persepolis, it can

  meditate. It takes apart fighting lions

  as if it’s a silky little onion (diminutives strengthen,

  they flood), their kindness is worse

  than K’s, who wishes us all well.

  Am I a cold fish that kills Christ

  with its tail? Saws through the cross? Should he fall

  on his knees again, although he’s still perforated

  with nails? How will we do this, take him off

  the cross so the knees will bend?

  But what if they’re already cold and stiff

  like Cletus’s corpse, whom Alexander undid

  out of a guilty conscience, since he burned

  Persepolis. Clearly Persepolis had to be

  burned, the Rothschilds denationalized.

  Vases

  The sold-out butter rolls are padded.

  Torcello burns. The khan who spat

  over the drop is driving. The data is where

  the woods shove. When we come through

  the woods to the corpse, fond of air,

  did we already see this hide?

  Is it borrowed? Where are its signets

  and crinolines and my stamps? Die Gestalt,

  all scratched, cracked on the fork.

  Or further inside. What do I know.

  Did he ramble as in some kind of pot? We,

  the types, must borrow a little stove. Atanor

  wheezes. Cumin is brutally alive.

  Waterlilies go through little needles. Dwarves

  jump off. The does with snouts do not.

  Frightened, they kneel on leaves. This lumberjack

  appears in a porno. He’s drenched.

  He has an axe. The shirt fits him well.

  The birdies accept him, and the elephants, marching

  into the daylight, trod the reservoir alone.

  The curtains only hindered them.

  Pessoa Scolding Whitman

  The whore of all solar systems and diligent

  little ant, let’s begin with this restriction. Until here,

  cows, but here the guests can already wipe

  their backs, except we dry this laundry

  outdoors and the muffs also hang, although

  it’s summer at Jama in Bohinj. Ŝp
ela is already

  a great-grandmother now, she has a grandson

  who plays hockey at Tufts, already forgotten as well,

  like those who played chess here:

  Cvit, Raša, Avčin, the awesome Montanists,

  you can be Mister God in your country

  (Raša), but here in Oxford we wear coats

  differently, also stutter a little, out of pathos,

  so this then pours into our Carinthian blood,

  and after my sister, who got married

  to Detela, bore a genius (deceased), and one

  good and important writer,

  now the living and the dead pull each other’s hair

  and with Barbara we’re civil servants, telephones

  constantly bang against us, and she was a little

  in love, and I, too, and we sang

  žure, put together for us by our mothers,

  Madam Silva in her instance, and out

  of this are born poets and civil servants,

  who every free minute break for the Strand,

  give search for Mikuž, another boy scout,

  another nephew, another son, translating

  that dreadful Latvian, I can find him

  nowhere, and then Lojze arrives, the type

  who would not believe I wished him well,

  and yet today, first he gets lost in Harlem,

  then he still comes up to Phillis,

  who was wildly searching for him, and together

  they watch Microcosmos, Phillis