Woods and Chalices Read online

  howls with enthusiasm and they talk

  fourteen hours without stopping, while

  I, with Metka, rush to the same film:

  how the snails fuck doesn’t move us, hardly

  staying upright against catatonic fits

  of sleep because I must save my energy

  so I will wake up in the morning because then

  I furiously type and sniff everything: Barbara,

  if Govic rises, I will stare once more

  at the muscles of the inflated Avčin

  rowing, how should I be interested in

  the little sex lives of insects

  and robbers, and whether I truly

  forgot a gift for her birthday.

  The Pacific Again

  Open the bread.

  Oil the wound.

  Throw it up, puke it, speak it.

  As long as you won’t speak, it will hurt.

  It will hurt, too, when you say it.

  A caraway seed is a bath towel.

  Chafers that fold on bones.

  Puteshestveny’s bundles are clearly starving.

  The hunger reflects.

  From the statue, from Oregon,

  south of your Mihec, who is poured

  by a lotus blossom emptying.

  Order a mouth.

  You don’t know you can order it.

  Few things are always technical.

  Libero

  The fan carried Liquido in his arms.

  If I make him a face L will spring.

  We also capitalize the countermand

  and mythological monsters help us

  so our apertures don’t squirt.

  Crown witness, crown garden,

  watch the white lamb!

  Boŝtjan read me and then

  died underwater.

  Ophelias on hooks, I’m a statue.

  I’m a statue, fairy tales rustle.

  Boštjan read me and then

  died underwater.

  Who will be the third Saint Sebastian?

  The world wants to forget.

  We want to forget

  the dead and youth and freedom.

  In New York, After Diplomatic Training

  The good sides of a siege are not also those

  smudged by a horse. There’s a face

  in the clause. Seven cherry trees. The notorious

  seldom ever helps. He thinks mainly

  about his blades. Do the smaller

  and bushy help? Those seized below the deck?

  The roots are to be followed to sand and sky.

  The leaves rumble on them. If there’s no balance

  of silver and isotope—staffs—does it mean

  we, too, can be happy? Without rocks,

  there is no pier. The shelter extends to the bottom.

  Objects are already sorted in the womb.

  The creamy pigment sticks to some.

  Someone will have swelled English,

  a flayed stone in Potoĉka Zijalka. White dawn

  that will suit him, dark green plastic

  to pile up. Ribs creak

  a bit on an uneven floor. You don’t swing

  your brain, you swing a dish. Once more you burn

  crumbs, a face, pathos. You yellow

  the black seed. I march nowhere. Honey flows

  down my throat. Shed, breached, as if a machine

  gets dressed. Little barrels shielded us in the spirit

  of God’s eye. We poured them out as we swam.

  Boiling Throats

  With the screech owl the seed grows from the face.

  The white vacuum pumps, the white vacuum pumps,

  how you are squeezed. The cylinder is always strict.

  The coil only sleeps in the clouds.

  The cat and I, we scratch ourselves,

  she will wreck my jacket.

  She waits for fresh scales and the tone.

  Clones evaporate faster.

  At Fanelli’s she whispers to herself the membrane

  of the pigeon mail. She waits for fresh scales

  and the tone. Little onion leaves are beneath the hooves

  of fallen angels. They look like sacks.

  They burst because of the farewell.

  Anyone who goes soft gives away his voice.

  The Catalans, The Moors

  Poetry is a hatchery for martyrs. The river

  rinses the butter. Warum Nichts? A window

  is installed in a house, a house is installed in the dawn.

  A clock strikes the quarter hour. I am left behind,

  I am left behind, on the beach at Menorca

  I expire like a crocodile. In the region

  of Ciutat (with bicycle) near the young man

  in his bathing suit from the twenties,

  reading Cavafy. Did he have heavy hands?

  Goran has heavy hands. I’m molasses,

  don’t forget that. Cat with cloudy

  eyes. Voice found in the emptiness

  and driving you to the precipice. Graveyards

  as at Potoĉka Zijalka. Layers on layers.

  Sand and Spleen Were Left in Your Nose

  Blow into whales, schoolboy. The bait doesn’t hurt.

  Elephants, when alarmed, no longer know

  the river. They carry penicillin between

  ears and ribs, and trample reeds. Chess

  comes from their backs. Birds’ pecking

  on a tarp is only one part of rocking. The sea

  is black with fine sand. The white cork shines.

  Palm trees that open beneath the robbed one

  (all the checks, all the hash, two of Jure’s letters),

  you watch from two levels. The Ganges can wash

  away the double. Luckily the current was fast enough

  and in the morning, already at sunrise,

  at the ritual murders, only one sipped and reaped

  and didn’t care at all to wake up.

  Arm Out and Point the Way

  Vigorous, disfigured mice,

  tassels or bonbons. Latte (the name

  of the bitch with white fur), did the wheels

  overeat like the heads of memory at the ends

  of wood-limbs by Deacon? They were quite

  devoured. Stretched out, softened,

  given and given. Slime

  washes windows. Peter, as a rule,

  dances. Shoe shining is coming back,

  the white matrix of the Announcing Angel.

  People walking along roads

  is coming back, the fluttering

  of overcoats and the stopping of coaches.

  The rushing to work and the paying

  of tolls. We’re a bunch of flowers. Napoleons

  of the Bible. Worms between butter

  and jam at the vaults of Inter Conti.

  Ceelia Min signs.

  The foam curses and counts.

  A bottle is missing.

  Surely it’s hidden under the coverlet.

  Fallow Land and the Fates

  The boy scrubs the kitchen and crushes

  the dot to mom. Godfathers’ microwaves

  catch fire. Snakes, Easter eggs, gray hats,

  and crampon lamps flake from the pillars

  on the walls. He who brews brandy

  pants on screes, incantation.

  Boils he who carries the mountain

  and this one who unsaddles, supports yuppies.

  I rotate breasts and papers. The river

  makes the mesh. It’s easy to find shapes

  in the profiles of stones, but in the mud

  there’s the weight of the horse-collar. Sinking stools,

  you can’t pierce water! Only the scattered

  water can drink water. The full water twists.

  Perfection

  Leather without history. Strength without

  rickets. From a drawer. On the hand a wire. Blood

  is silk. Walk silently.
Blood is like

  fruit. Here, too, is heated.

  Shah’s tanks are entrenched. First we thrashed

  ourselves. We roared and got excited.

  Mirrors have to function as ovens. You see them

  from the road. On the machines producing

  dreams. Some read between. The perfect

  form springs up like an ear. I know

  a chiropractor who can pull out your arm.

  Five centimeters out of your shoulder.

  Joints crunch. No need for oil. You spin

  as you please. You leave when the tool falls asleep.

  Avenues

  Invent a jacket for wearing out.

  From a heap, a terrarium, little hairs.

  From harnessed little ponies

  and snorted snow.

  Bitumen sits on stamps.

  Whole corridors of sculpted

  chewing gum underground.

  Between seven and eight you can travel with a basket.

  With a songbook, a flower bed, as you please.

  You can dance with a puppet.

  Silky hen, I stuff dollars into your mouth

  to refresh the blood of your guitar.

  We’re happy

  and we beam when we leave work.

  Dislocated, Circulating

  Scrubbed hands, a goblet, a goblet,

  a column and a dripped heart.

  At the cross there’s a stole and a signet, agave.

  When sliding as on silk, white sheets

  or linen, and a rotor flutters.

  A mole sags under the soil.

  He completes slits in the air.

  Women yell, roll up arms,

  does he make up for the fall of six million bison

  over the cliffs of the Grand Canyon?

  How many filaments are in the blood?

  Or potato blossoms, blossoms

  of pumpkins, blossoms of raspberries?

  Organs shout down.

  The cash box is iron.

  Butterflies smack when they rise up in hope chests,

  shoulder to shoulder, in the dark.

  Did he slide?

  Did grief produce juice?

  Did he leave a trail like a snail,

  only he went a little faster and not so

  slowly?

  Where was he intercepted?

  Did they bury him without humus?

  “Fast,” he whispered.

  “Brooklyn, this is the skin

  cream.”

  Car

  The car is oily. Shutters in sleeves

  rush. Trees crystallize, their juice

  disputes the shutter. In history there are snails

  and stepped-on snails. The dead and those

  whose mouths we stretch. The juice costs.

  The mower scores a salary. Can I catch

  your tail and put you on the bus?

  In big cities people don’t walk

  hunched. Yesterday I saw a cab driver

  shot. On Third Avenue, at

  Thirty-first Street. People interrupted

  their reading. The young were worried. The police

  were alert, as if they would train all night.

  The air in the bus turned fresh.

  Odessa

  You’re lazy, Fedor, stupid and godfearing.

  If you look at the bottom, you don’t see crystals.

  Crystals are bedsprings, they have noddles

  in their robberies. As crooked as sea-

  weed. It sways, sways and doesn’t go down.

  The water levels it. Crystals are mouths

  of sweethearts. An agave is cut down with a hatchet, too.

  A stomach, a sweetheart, an artichoke.

  The neighbor’s hand, clad in plastic,

  cleaning up dog shit. We’re in front

  of Barnes & Noble. In front of the pyramids.

  Across the street you can buy wine,

  and when going to JFK and changing

  at Howard Beach you watch

  whales or sea elephants again (fish

  that flash) for which the artist drew

  gold pears, beards that reach

  to the airborne planes and to the depths of the sea.

  Offspring and the Baptism

  Canada begs one’s butter. Everyone is in

  the clearing. Godfather crouches, he’s tender,

  he tortures. The roost is mute. Iron shod

  I come. In the conical hayracks, in the intelligent

  bull. Rustling massages the sky. The cellar

  squats beneath itself. Seed undulates from the sphere.

  Lamb’s lightning utters the thought.

  Sperm is behind the drawers, behind solace, love

  is a red witness. We rented rivers

  and channels and tunnels. We travel a little

  stall in the wheat. I wet and splashed on you

  on the raft as you daydreamed,

  sheltered on the Ganges’ smooth surface.

  Did I come from lime? Did I make you

  juice with murders? Glue myself to the little knitted

  willow-made baskets? When the basket

  gently banged, language slipped

  and sizzled. It leaped over fields. The water

  was yellow, brown, downtrodden. The language

  frayed. Does the bloom evolve? Mountains

  drop into butter. A new fist

  picks them up. It makes plants from rice. The snow

  jumps at and batters the fields. If I didn’t

  protect your mouth, the cross would rot.

  Washington

  No one rides on

  the crest. No one stops Rembrandt.

  Trousers worn down on parmesan.

  On the crests of the hooved.

  Dinosaurs are made of rubber,

  more precisely, of green

  water-soluble chewing

  gum and that molasses

  à la watered-down sherry.

  You are drunk.

  Of course I reserved two beds.

  Of course I will force the door, what do I care.

  The King Likes the Sun

  Few of the ones he granted requested

  the invention. He didn’t overlook it.

  He wasn’t able to overlook it.

  It opens like a patch. The empire

  condenses and softens. First

  there are calluses. Then the wrap

  goes numb. The smell of pavement starts

  to boil. The pole obtains azure,

  water’s dark surface. Someone from afar

  leaps, as an animal would fall

  from a roof. He uses his arms to seize.

  The pole bends. Icicles

  sizzle in the sun, are noted.

  The little bird pecked up the nest.

  You are At Home Here

  I study lungs. I go nowhere.

  I gaze at the edge of white mountains. I want to die.

  The path goes into money. Now I can occupy a calendar

  of authority and give away the tent. They are twisted

  into the song, the food, the sea. They are dressed

  in white stories. He wasn’t hoarse, who didn’t know,

  a stamp healed the window and the wound together.

  The motive is beautiful. The elephant is bottomless.

  It spins vases and the girls in them.

  It spills itself on little cups, a coffee, an airplane

  kneels in the overgrown grass. This isn’t my bread.

  The bread is all yours. It adorns itself with claws.

  Jump into the factory of rough flags

  and stretch the edge. Fall asleep with the stretched edge.

  Bites and Happiness

  These are the little ribs of my patrons.

  They tramp in the black residue. They stir

  loam shipward, oust birds from v’s and c’s.

  There are vast white plains seen

  only by gargoyles
. The sun

  doesn’t lessen the animals’ luster. Gnats move

  with the raft on the river. Thorns cannot help

  themselves with water. You retreat with the drums,

  Tugo. You space out wedges and cotton wads,

  forget about blunt blows and cathedral bones.

  The entire temple seethes. Dwarves with lanterns

  don’t depict even the first ring. Between

  the dug-in hoof and the earth (graves of young

  potentates) there’s not enough sturdy concentration.

  Baruzza

  Vendramin! Sharpen it! I tell you

  to sharpen it but not so ardently

  that you break it again.

  You cleaned your shoes with your shawl,

  what is this, Vendramin, the mediation

  between Verdurin and the Misses Nardelli?

  Both nailed dogs onto placards.

  Take an eraser, a lamp, and a huge

  hammer, they barely lifted it.

  The nailing was done by servants.

  The lifting was done by servants, too.

  And in the time when there were no