Woods and Chalices Page 4

  The dust from the ruins is still damp.

  We burned down and built from

  the shit of camels and cows.

  Yesterday on Elizabeth Street I saw

  a man who had such a hat.

  At Starbucks it truly smells

  of the roasteries of Trieste, the aroma

  they first carried away to Seattle.

  We were still talking about two

  supermodels (about cow dung),

  hairstyles, little braids, goggles,

  about the carefully outworn,

  and I injected into myself

  this text into the photo:

  Jorge Vegas, soft shadow friend

  whisper fire. Caress the blood

  within. Set free the buddha

  cat in me, into ginger

  haven, sugar stone smile . . .

  Shepherd, You are Just Learning

  Penetrate, don’t outwit. One iota,

  two people’s houses. Laughlin. I’m blotting.

  From everything wrecked, white gray glances.

  The little mill didn’t spin. It was all about a heavy

  paw. It’s purified. Forged by faith and poured.

  The little coat is not rickety. It’s cast in a green

  and silver building. If you break into a chafer’s belly

  with your head, the water comes springing. Torna,

  which propel hard drives, are from garlic.

  As if I’d have more iron inside my palm.

  Water is always young, excluded, and self-

  pleased. Ken Jacobs arranged the red plateau

  on which Norse was written, burning

  on Chambers Street. Egypt cut itself.

  The Cube That Spins and Sizzles,

  Circumscribes The Circle

  Noble little grain, farina,

  dark edge of gold icons,

  it rolls.

  Is the bell mucus, the blackboard stored

  with the petition flower?

  Mormons have all the names in the gullet.

  But with me the watch is warm, boy-scout-like.

  Jure Detela was an athlete.

  All night we sat on the bench in Zvezda Park,

  I guarded him and convinced him

  not to go and clip the bears’ fence.

  This was wrestling with an angel.

  His eyes poured out of him. It was rustling

  when the morning rose.

  He was comforted, fed,

  and willing.

  Beheaded.

  As if he did clip the fence.

  The Man I Respected

  When I returned from Mexico, I looked like

  death. My mouth collapsed

  and disintegrated. I was paying a penalty

  for my sins, my palate had dissolved.

  I could touch my brain with my tongue.

  It was painful, horrible, and sweet.

  While Svetozar sat outside in the waiting room,

  I tore down the instrument case.

  No, I am not being precise: he left the office

  before me, I only suspected who he was, I didn’t even

  know him. When I sat in the chair,

  my energy tore down the instrument case.

  To pass from world to world

  means an earthquake. Yesterday he died.

  The Hidden Wheel of Catherine of Siena

  How does the butler configure?

  He eats out of a hand. He strokes his nickname,

  the number six. The beak is rasped,

  sawdust whistles under right angles. It’s yellow

  where it isn’t cut through. Softly,

  we could stuff daisies into it, and as with hair

  and fingernails, there is no pain.

  The pain is in the missing part.

  In the missing part the impaled daisy

  flutters. Is the butler

  then a Venetian mask? Clarissas,

  pacing solemnly between the power plant

  and the grilles in Siena.

  In Assisi. I was steered into the wheel.

  And when I, drowsy on the piazza,

  thought of Pincherle, nibbled

  gelati and fave and massaged

  my heart, I realized

  the nave is empty. There are no side

  naves. There is no roof. Between the sky

  and the pavement there is not even a tiny circle.

  White Cones

  Vanilla, the ruin, house of silence, threads.

  The starling stipples the sky and knocks down granite.

  It eats stars. Small, dirty boxes

  full of worms. Meccas flap.

  Dervishes are thimbles on neighbors.

  In the hall there’s a dome. In the dome

  there are boxsprings overturned.

  I.e., turned voraciously.

  Horses and Millet

  The mind has no swings.

  It’s wacky, frozen in lianas.

  When they gash, they’re like doorknobs.

  The flame in them burns.

  The worms get a tarp on their eyes,

  cows eat the millet on the tarp,

  not shrubs.

  The louse creeps into them and falls asleep.

  Henry of Toulouse, Is That You?

  What did we fly over?

  Which boxes did we fly over?

  Which yellow boxes did we fly over?

  Vases pull lightbulbs from their mouths, shine in white.

  The clause is pressed into the gums.

  Hats cover only undisciplined mice,

  the opposite of what we’d expect.

  The axis is unavoidable.

  Is that you, caraway seed?

  What did we fly over?

  New York–Montreal Train,

  24 January, 1974

  At first I was shaking like a switch in water

  because of “the chain of accidents.” My second thought

  was that I’d gladly be as systematic

  as Swedenborg was. Was the frame clear

  and did I accept it, though all the zones

  of my body had yet to go through the slot? Immediately after—

  I saw it in a flash—angels are censorship

  and fog, merely a field of space that hauls you

  toward the center. They quickly paled and glued

  in a lump. I felt physical hands,

  they caught me gently under the armpits. The air

  whirred, but not as if the firm body

  would go through, it was as if someone were dragging me

  through milk. They all expected me, though

  they noticed my physical presence only

  gradually: first the old, then the middle-aged,

  then the young. As if someone with a rheostat

  had broadened their field of vision.

  Some reported (let me know)

  that they were carrots, and that their scraped

  skin was already in the earth. Some felt clearly

  that they must go only headfirst through

  the waterfall. I was interested, they were here

  by some selection, but this thought died away because

  they stopped it and I couldn’t utter it.

  It was like stopping a drop that falls

  into water and then spreads in circles.

  Clear waves, I traveled with them.

  A solid lump (above my head)

  licked and flooded me with pity

  and delight. A strand (a cone) coming from

  this lump pulled me apart,

  spread me horizontally, though I was the same.

  I knew: they have other sources, infinitely

  more powerful, infinitely more tranquil.

  I noticed an apparent affinity in dress.

  Veils (clouds) at the height of the chest. I didn’t walk

  along the ground, but along something hanged, resembling

  ice or glass (optically), though I felt it all: />
  the moss, the parquet, the grass, the asphalt (green!).

  I didn’t see this with eyes but with skin,

  as if the skin were watching. At the same time I read Haiku,

  I. G. Plamen, and for some time The Village Voice.

  I was in the train and looking through the window, reading again.

  In an instant I grasped everything. Language is “articulated” and “mute”

  at the same time, it occurs in tepid flashes. Accidents

  are the humus. As if ping-pong balls would fly

  in all directions at once and massage you.

  The West

  There’s no Kowalski in a cookie, in the dark there’s only

  le sucre. The measure, gray little measure, three.

  I box the fruit to burst the fruit. The gush

  is in the wretch. The moon is in the extinct. Tiny frogs

  are seamstresses, they unstitch. Does grief shout in the valley?

  Does it rebound off radiators? Indians

  who rebound from the countryside with candlesticks

  and a pickaxe. You fall on Belarus and turn

  in the seaweed. A stain, like patchwork, leaves,

  gathering by naked trunks. Exceptionally

  with blinkers. Exceptionally with a hand, exceptionally

  with a foot, sails cross themselves.

  A salmon rushes toward semen. Does it spit out

  a bomb and the river and the earth?

  Not everyone is planed behind the house. It’s important,

  what the entrance to the underworld is like.

  If toadstools faded. He tugged his arm inward.

  He lowered his altitude. He fell from a horse

  long ago. Needles are on the ground again, where

  yesterday was a cherry tree. In Bavaria

  they learned how to throw the mortar. To make it

  radiant when it drops from the house.

  Eyes, a spirit taken on a plate, the fever calms.

  You climb because you need solitude.

  You need solitude because of the edge.

  In the cellar there are little birds shifting from leg

  to leg. You burn only Roman buildings.

  I hurled myself onto cushions. First we hugged,

  then kissed, then stripped,

  then dressed. I wouldn’t allow it. I wouldn’t

  shut him in the lens. We only held hands

  like two little girls. He boils

  monkeys, he strained himself, too.

  Leaves had not started to fall. It’s cheaper

  if they move him. At the same time he’s filled with flour

  and sand and I don’t know how to read signals.

  Publication Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which these poems first appeared: Blackbird: “Ancestor,” “Colombia,” “Marasca,” “Perfection,” “Washington”; Black Warrior Review: “The Hidden Wheel of Catherine of Siena”; Boston Review: “You Are at Home Here”; Circumference: “New York-Montreal Train, 24 January, 1974”; Conjunctions: “Arm Out and Point the Way,” “The Linden Tree,” “Pessoa Scolding Whitman”; Crazyhorse: “Mother and Death”; Cutbank: “Along Grajena River,” “At low tide . . . ,” “Baruzza,” “Blue Wave,” “Fallow Land and the Fates”; Denver Quarterly: “The King Likes the Sun”; Fence: “Olive Trees”; Field: “Offspring and the Baptism”; Gulf Coast: “The Catalans, the Moors,” “The Dead”; Jacket: “Coat of Arms,” “Fiery Chariot”; The Modern Review (Canada): “The Kid from Harkov,” “Mills,” “Paleochora,” “Washing in Gold”; New Ohio Review: “Porta di Leone,” “Vases”; North American Review: “And on the Slopes of La Paz”; The New Republic: “Persia”; Octopus: “In the Tongues of Bells,” “The Lucid Slovenian Green”; The Paris Review: “We Lived in a Hut, Shivering with Cold”; Poetry Review (UK): “The Man I Respected,” “Scarlet Toga”; Subtropics: “Boiling Throats”; turnrow: “The West.”

  All poems were translated by Brian Henry and the author, except “Academy of American Poets,” “Ancestor,” “At low tide . . . ,” “Car,” “The Catalans, the Moors,” “Coat of Arms,” “Colombia,” “Fiery Chariot,” “Holy Science,” “The Man I Respected,” “New York-Montreal Train, 24 January, 1974,” “Persia,” “Pessoa Scolding Whitman,” “Scarlet Toga,” “Washing in Gold,” “Washington,” and “You Are at Home Here,” which were translated by Brian Henry.

  About the Author

  TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN was born in 1941 in Zagreb. He has published over thirty books of poetry and frequently teaches at American universities, including Pittsburgh, Richmond, and Texas.

  About the Translator

  BRIAN HENRY has published five books of poetry, including Quarantine (nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), The Stripping Point, and Astronaut, which also appeared in Slovenian. He has co-edited Verse magazine since 1995. He reviews poetry for the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Boston Review, Jacket, and other publications. He teaches at the University of Richmond in Virginia.