A Ballad for Metka Krašovec Read online

  Tomaž Šalamun

  A Ballad for Metka Krašovec

  Translated from the Slovenian by Michael Biggins

  Twisted Spoon Press

  Prague

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1981, 2001, 2014 by Tomaž Šalamun

  English translation copyright © 2001 by Michael Biggins

  “When I Crawl ...” from Feast by Tomaž Šalamun, copyright © 2000 by Harcourt, Inc., reprinted by their permission.

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be used or reproduced in any form, except in the context of reviews, without written permission from the publisher.

  ISBN : 978-80-86264-93-6 (epub)

  ISBN : 978-80-86264-12-7 (softcover)

  Contents

  Copyright

  BOOK 1

  BOOK 2

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Colophon

  This is my mom.

  BOOK 1

  This memoir is a hatchet to slash through my own heavy flesh and through the flesh of anyone else who happens to get in the way ... But, you see, this is not fiction. This is life. My problem is that I don’t know what I am doing. I lived all this mess, but I don’t know what it is. I don’t even know what I mean by “it.”

  – Joyce Carol Oates, Expensive People

  Nothingness is the source of everything,” I say – and precisely that allows me to stand on it as safely as on concrete.

  – Emil Filipčič, Grein vaun

  Night drenches the land of the smile.

  Death is in an ant’s fist.

  I didn’t bring dice to the table not to see the cake’s bottom.

  Escape up the power pillar!

  The emperor’s servants’ door won’t yield to dust.

  Draw a totem in the nests. The dog will drag off what’s there.

  Moss is tucked away in dark drawers.

  Off with the crackpot’s head. His horse eats.

  Billions of stalwarts. Too few for a single bird flight.

  Who, if he ponders, knows of a tree shooting out of a pumpkin.

  Found a green airplane. Throw steaks on the block.

  Neither the screen on the window nor the guard at the door cares to hear about one gray kopeck. Each knows the wisdom of both sides.

  Father, with your whetted teeth, why don’t flowers grow from your flesh?

  Questions are the chronic deaths of unmilked animals.

  Sight is the punishment.

  I don’t know what the spirit of silver smells like.

  O tribes! Graze your fly on your mouths.

  The fortress bursts.

  Let the ointment drip on the rounded shapes of the planes.

  Yes, said Alice, but that leaves the question of whether time

  has a pocket.

  Gold needs soap bubbles more than the sky.

  Wire the horses. They know what to do with the oats.

  The eye washes a wound in the belly. This is where I’m at home.

  Shortcuts wash the street. The breath of springtime lingers and stands still.

  There are fingers in cups on the altar.

  Whoever picks up the pot will boil.

  The peaks of the rooftops. See the rope on the branch? Perpendicular from the pine.

  Solitude is a shot in the void.

  All people don’t have a sense of moderation.

  Draw fairy tales. I’ll be in the picture as punishment.

  A photo of the copy will sink any goalie.

  Monsters in the gums are crushed into birds’ shoes.

  Their shin bones stick out.

  In the saddle the windows are egg-shaped.

  The name is in the whiteness and the jagged w’s.

  Others rework the factories into rabbits.

  There’s gold in the seed. Only in snow does it melt into a cult.

  The king whispers to the shore.

  I don’t like black cherries on the tree.

  Who rubbed soot on the she bear?

  A fetus, smashed jaw bone, part of the wind pipe missing.

  I’d like to be rain, scrubbing the roof.

  I’d like all my hair to burn, to be bare.

  I died when I took my shoes off.

  Ivy entwined me, like a castle.

  Inside me there’s still chalk,

  outside a small yellow briefcase.

  It dangles from my hand like a saint hanged

  from a tree – the same cherry tree.

  For David Del Tredici

  Whips! Yolks!

  The captain threw a lasso and knocked me to the steamship’s bottom.

  I’m left alone in these peelings of spring.

  My tunic too long. You sting me.

  I can’t endure with my sleeves rolled up.

  God knows where the pianist is.

  A door with a brass handle slammed behind him.

  The book shelves shook as he started his car.

  Sullen is the pose of the black child, bending over the well.

  He’s eating his scabs.

  A glider shoots out of a hangar.

  It must be early April.

  The child shivers on the stone.

  You can see the pilot’s leather eyes.

  The leather straps under the pilot’s chin are

  thinner than the rope that drops into the well.

  A tiny bug is on the screen of a sifter,

  on it a drop of beer.

  Next floor up lives a girl with yellow eyes.

  It was exactly noon when the sun shone

  straight down on my head.

  I counted my rings, looked for the shade.

  I placed my stamp in the desert.

  Then I took a monogrammed handkerchief.

  I put it under a waterfall.

  It was a minute past noon.

  The balance remained the same.

  A line-drawing deer swims in the water.

  Easter recurs eternally.

  A wild boar shakes the trunk of an oak.

  Tea spills across the grass.

  Numbers are etched in binocular lenses.

  On Sundays, when they wrap the bells up in cellophane

  and carpenters hammer nails into the wooden wall,

  people flow like a stream. Water always

  runs downhill.

  On Mondays soldiers get dry rations.

  They rub cortisone on themselves.

  Bunches of hellebores adorn the sleds.

  A sword delineates seven things.

  Deer, children aren’t born from mothers, but from

  emptiness. Likewise, lettuce doesn’t grow out of the ground,

  but from emptiness.

  I’m more silent than a snake.

  A seed flying off the adhesive tape,

  where did I draw a train on the map?

  Boughs branches, boughs branches catch the engine’s steam.

  Turn on the lights.

  I see my neighbor’s tiny yellow fist.

  I imagine the world standing on its tip toes.

  Here in the tunnel someone forgot an orange.

  Only oil can slip through the sun.

  It shines onto a carved bench.

  I drink flour out of Meissen saucers.

  I never considered that knots are where

  branches grow out of the pines.

  Why does the flame licking my hand emanate from the eyes

  of a man long since dead?

  The Danube floods.

  All memory is extinguished.

  Of all the drenched guests only the oldest

  doesn’t bother me.

  The rest should be shoved in an igloo.

  We’ll
give them marmalade, like last year.

  I’m speaking in the future tense.

  When we lift all of it up, set it on round

  poles and slowly, with horses, move the nests toward the south.

  I throb in tiny copper wall tiles.

  You’ve struck me to the quick with that light.

  Count the leaves of your life,

  you’ll see I’m not mistaken.

  Only sheep will slip.

  epitaph

  Only God exists. Spirits are a phantom.

  Blind shadows of machines concealing the Kiss.

  My Death is my Death. It won’t be shared

  with the dull peace of others squashed beneath this sod.

  Whoever kneels at my grave – take note –

  the earth will shake. I’ll root up the sweet juices from

  your genitals and neck. Give me your mouth.

  Take care that no thorns pierce your

  eardrums as you writhe, like a worm,

  the living before the dead. Let this oxygen

  bomb wash you gently. Explode you only

  so far as your heart will support. Stand up

  and remember. I love everyone who truly knows me.

  Always. Get up now. You’ve pledged yourself and awakened.

  A stream,

  the scent of freshness.

  My tooth starts aching.

  All my girlfriends have turned gray.

  Dandelion fluff floats.

  A stone sinks.

  I stare at the circles.

  White plates come between the fish and blue tablecloth.

  I eat rhubarb and see grandfather’s

  house with its oleanders and cracked

  steps.

  Tsilka is forbidden to clean the guns.

  Mrs. Abramič is winding wool.

  Deer come in the early morning.

  German prisoners eat out of tin plates.

  The stone, not the mind, draws

  circles in the pond.

  I wait for the right gesture to straighten my heart.

  Birds across the ocean,

  the same spoons are here, too.

  When I see cakes wrapped up in part

  transparent, part frosted paper,

  my mouth waters.

  I remember a thorn in my heel.

  Sheaves of wheat lay in a field.

  When I climbed up on my father’s shoulders,

  I didn’t know he would die.

  Blue towels terrify me.

  The pictures of naked women keep moving

  to higher shelves as I grow up.

  When father works, the clocks stand still.

  The chalk in this picture will have to be fixed.

  Even really strange people travel by train.

  The world is so big and wide

  that we’re like little flies.

  That taxi driver must have suffered a lot in life,

  huh, mommy.

  It’s composition when the lines blur nicely

  and arrive at the same spot on the apple’s crust.

  They’ve blocked our radio.

  In freedom everyone’s eyes will shine.

  We’ll smooth out foil chocolate wrappers

  and roll them up again in tight, tiny balls

  for other continents.

  Bombs kill grasshoppers, too, if they fall on a meadow.

  The children’s mouths are smeared with chocolate.

  There’s a blotter and a bronze horse on the desk.

  I look at my white heels.

  A mill like the one shepherds make out at pasture.

  In the clap of a hand:

  countless cow births.

  Sorry, pine!

  You fall when I write.

  Those lines that the lion scented are in the pupil of my eye.

  I’d like to die with a red cap on my head.

  A fly on the hairs between splayed legs

  has no sense of the agony of birth.

  In a great wall

  a crevice for a white candle.

  The number 20.

  I’ve hurt my fist.

  The arc of a swaying net retains the same

  power of primordial memory as the ash of this box.

  Ladders are made of the same rusty points as mud.

  A dark, precisely fitted bandage

  covers my sun in its golden spot.

  I touch the skin:

  it doesn’t flash.

  Deceptions are the deceptions of technology:

  of an unformed face.

  The wings of a bee torn off:

  he pitched wooden hoops onto a bottleneck.

  A duck devours mould to keep the species from dying out.

  west broadway

  I like being in the air. I descend on the city, on

  people. Burrow into the ground. Carts with oxen,

  a peasant with a whip drives through the village on a peaceful

  afternoon. In the Bronx, a Jew dressed like he was

  back then. The view onto the roofs of streetcars from

  the dentist’s in the Ljubljana skyscraper

  is gone. They were strange and I was so high

  up. Then came the hungry years. I was in places

  where people wore black, clinging

  trousers. Walls were spattered with red

  oxide, the mayor showed us where a giant

  power plant would stand. Then we moved to the sea.

  Among the bamboo I puzzled where all the pine

  needles came from. I watched steam ships

  from the terrace. I knew I would sail. They woke me up

  in a town where the white sun shone on the Duomo.

  The pharmacists whispered. They threw books onto

  trucks. They were leaving because we had come.

  I don’t have a country. Whomever I clutch onto, I drink.

  Everywhere they bid bulldozers to tear down my

  buildings. This bar and these people walking past –

  Castelli, who’s aged since I saw him

  last – that’s when the fire was in Venice, there was

  a revolution, although he still has the same

  dog, other beautiful women around him, the same kind of

  wild orchid in his lapel.

  gabrče

  A fine thing. The right thing. These dark pine

  branches guard what’s behind them, color. A bird,

  chiseled like a wooden toy – a paper

  napkin – if it didn’t hop and sing.

  A strong desire seizes me to climb up and

  set a silver candlestick beside its nest.

  A gesture beside the mould of death. These fellows will

  grow up into mountains, they’ll moulder like abandoned

  mills. Will memory ever scatter them over the

  earth in the sky? Lojze, Stanko, the innkeeper’s

  cross-eyed boy. Gone where? I’ll be a waiter. I’ll be

  a woodsman. I’ll stay at home on the farm. I’ll go

  in search of other sunsets, to sea.

  Is the line between snow and dry land

  sharply defined? Is the Rižana the best place for pitching

  banknotes into lard? Will you come back next year?

  Are you eating enough meat?

  109 = 10 = 1

  “I’m on my way, sweet wife, I’m on my way.” – The author in a letter to his wife, from Yaddo to

  Ljubljana, May 15, 1979.

  “Cher Maître, nous sommes au mois d’amour; j’ai (presque) dix-sept ans.” – Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to Theodore de Banville, May 24, 1870.

  “Tomás: quiero vivir mi juventud a tu lado y compartir mi vejéz con la tuya. Siento miedo tan solo de pensar que no regreses y te olvides de mí, y al mismo tiempo espero que los tres meses que faltan para tu regreso pasen rápido.” – Alejandro Gallegos Duval in a letter to the author, from Mexico to Ljubljana, March 26, 1979.

  Blue circles in the mouth
–

  garlic for the heart,

  wind-blown ashes at the edges of a hexagram –

  of years.

  When it snows

  the earth roars under the weight of oxygen and pain.

  A virgin forest,

  a water lily floats above the valley.

  Little rag girls,

  a mother like a clay muzzle.

  Blue pencils on a white strip of paper.