Curtis Harnack Wrapped Me in a

Shawl

Tomaž Šalamun
Translated from the Slovenian by Michael Taren
and the Author
Scantily Clad Press, 2008
http://scantilycladpress.blogspot.com
_____

poetry must be made of music, moths!

I buried my soul in the sand so it would lie there for a while
to hide and get crust, to be made safe
so the devil when he bites will slide with his teeth

giants’ anthems, covered shoulders

I chopped off my hair, toes, black thresholds of paintings
I fodder princes, I don’t touch hunting grounds
I die in front of senators, among burning geese

I have strong blood, plenty in stock

I grease my mouth with soap to make them shriek
if my shadow falls on a shiny metal object I throw myself on it
until I warm it I don’t leave it

if the sun will pass through the door before the great winters I’m saved
bury me at the lonely place, the grave should be circled by crosses
let me rest so that the time will be seen
my hair and toes should be stored in sealed polyvinyl bags

Christ

If I’d eat my mom, the fish would tear her up

already in my throat. I’d better post her
on the gun. Let her flutter like a flag with wet paws,
thought the boy with the small bundle before
he fell asleep. For a long time he didn’t dream at
all, then he suddenly saw Christ how he eats kohlrabi.
Why do you do this? he sayeth. Why don’t you leave
kohlrabi in peace? Christ didn’t know what to do,
no one till now did reproach him his greenery.
What should I eat then, he said. We’ll go hunting
said the boy with the small bundle, for sure you’ll
catch a rabbit. And they went. The light that
poured from the Christ’s belly diminished and they
started to stumble on stones. I’m not skilled, said the
Lord, I never caught a rabbit. Leave it to me,
said the boy with the small bundle, only
the light’s missing. And Christ had eaten another
kohlrabi and the light was back immediately.
You cheat me, said the boy. The light should
shine by itself. The rabbit will be just for me if you
don’t get better. And it was so light that rabbits
were like holidays. And one gave them his eye,
the other his nose and this was plenty and nobody died.

Death! Death! Death!

The apple opens, dust!

The bull drops off the horn.
The mirror is the mirror’s prey.

Water washes the dead.

Air kills the living.
There’re seven marbles
on the ground.

And blue is black,

and black is the red basket of berries.
Moooooo!

The action berths balloons

and pours grease on the eyes of the double-crossed.

Castles will stick to the gluey.

The grain is laughable.

Where are you, red hood?

Where are you, black plum,
white milk?

The train rushes among deer,

grazing bluntly like
the dawn.
Kitty! Kitty! Kitty!
The leaf is pierced by a freckle.

Blue bird approaches flying.

Grandfather

I dreamt a huge monument, that wrapped itself

with a red wire. Birds didn’t peck the stone,
but the interspaces between the wires.
There were no interspaces!
The pores, my grandfather!
Your soul had always the shape of a pear.
You stood on the steep slope above town.
You held the torch in your hands.
Townspeople started to pour each other with blood, with the buckets.
Tacitly we went to buy an English dining room.
Everything in the room. The portrait of young mother and
the silver chest. The salesman told us there’s another
town beneath this town.
The cathedral glitters in the sun
under the earth too.
Then you fell.
You crushed the theater.
From your head people started to build
houses. Someone carried your
right thumb to his garden.
And I rushed by car on the dry river.
Your huge monument sealed the treaty.
I kept taking your stony veins from your belly and
kept testing them.
I visited your wife in the hospital
and stuffed the nurses mouths with five thousand
banknotes,
the biggest paper money then.
You were dying.
Not your wife.
Your wife died long ago,
before, in the year one thousand
nine hundred fifty one,
in July,
when mom cried on the terrace.

Miners

Palms burn.
Palm trees burn.
Triangles burn.

A horse paws on the sand like a girl from

the north touching nettles.

Gold caves open.

Water freezes.
God’s eye swills little brooks
and blows on the heart.

Fog rises from leaves.

Someone in an apron runs across the porch.

The whip bursts.

The sun falls.

Her Dreams for Her Birthday

All at once I was in Russia. I don’t know

with whom, with Travitza or with Harriet,
we roared with laughter. In Russia, I stepped
directly from my apartment which had
streets and giant rooms. There were soldiers
everywhere. The meat hanged from the
shack. So they do have meat we said to
ourselves, but it turned out the meat was only
for the canteen. We passed them. A certain
woman came running, she told us her son
in Moscow filed a request and we should
see if the request was being processed.
We promised to do that, and proceeded
through the woods roaring with laughter.

In the Abulafia Clutches

Watered by pro domo sua, are my footprints servile?

And who is this shelf, the edge of I, the roof above my
head concealing the sky. Am I off? Is in the rarefied air
left only a trace of scales’ libido? Scales of sloughs
of the terrible cabalist Abulafia, who is in fact concentrated
to the mouth, not even to the language. “La bouche,
la bouche” in Marais, three steps from Seine, with
sun from Haiti. Am I punished by Césaire? We, poets,
after a certain fulfillment of years disappear. In the air,
in the consecration, in the pandemonic responsibility,
in Johanca, home at Vodice. We lose ourselves in
the woods, they undo our hands. The horse
from the turban doesn’t calm his stretched clients.
I blacked out the source. Delight blacked out the source.

Largo di Vitoria

Out of milk, out of strong skin jumps the big brother.

When the river flows, the berth sleeps.
There’s the block behind me.

The biggest mango tree in Bahia

is a hundred meters away.
Spike Lee said this.

Where do you rove beneath drying hood?

Young greenhorns move by themselves.
The tribe sleeps on the bench.
Black leg between two seagulls
is dressed in blue slipper.
No one smells itself better then little hills.

The lady with crutches caresses the tired mailman.

The child lies with his legs pointing the monument.
I vomit, as I’m a trunk.

O lumberjack, your woods are feathery.

A graft seizes the near.
The beak dies in conscience.

We hide the confirmation.

There’s no flesh from leaves.
The rule is from Attica, eye of the post promised

as a witness. The vase drinks his neighbor.

Čučo, let’s go to have lunch and talk.
There’s no smoke.

Granny

“O my Tomilay,
come back,
don’t untie your hair.
Don’t forget the golden doe
beneath birch leaves.
Shoot only in self defense.
Do you always give enough to beggars?”

My horse had heard it too.

This was the voice of my dead granny.
Let’s stop, horsy.
I’m really sick probably.
Where do I ride after all?
The solar discus?
What did the phantoms who tire me so
really want? Might these skeins be
some head offices liking me
alone in the mountains?
And who will put his body
on the paper for Metka’s
drawing?

I’m bewitched, horsy.

Again I’ve done a silly thing.
When I open the door, I say don’t
ask. Red Hand Brotherhood
totally bewilders me,
you’ll read in the poem.
I choked and I feel awfully
guilty that the bull yesterday almost
killed you.

Here, my hand!
Draw it.
Let it be red to remember,
although I’m still
furious at those little Martians.

And you should know to be thankful to my

Granny. We won’t
visit more churches for you to
have fun with Christs in
violet velvet Bermuda
breeches.

Opera House

The breeding place for the God’s eye

is in the plastic bag. The breeding place
for the God’s eye is the inner sandolin.
Why does the moss cover my wounded
heel? It was deeply cleaved, in the wound
teeth were made. With it I chewed
the squirrels-traitors. The murder of
Aldo Moro rebounded off the white eye
only a bit. But not in our lands. Our
lands were torn up. In the Opera
House Emil Filipčič was beaten. Jure
Detela beat him. I became aware
of it when the pope set his lips to
Agça. I knew it was about Fatima.

Pastorela

Swabians have eyes like potatoes. Their mothers

are all waiters. A Jew, okay, but with the dead
mother of art history said Maruška, left and
married in Tübingen. She took with her all my
boxes. Tomorrow is Christmas and I’m
the boy with the bundle. Noble, right? For
the boy with the bundle this was the worst day.
He looked under his skin where there were
nothing but hookers and gave them some
food. 100 hojas de papel bond de primera,
he copied from his Scribe notebook and although
the hookers were slightly consoled he still
didn’t know what he should do in the world.
And he took the sea in his hands, looked
if they make a door to him and he clasped it
to his heart. He walked along calle San Francisco
and punched piñata, so bonbons were pouring
out. He took a seat on a truck where there
was a live Christmas crib. Jesus was made of
wood, because no mother would give such
a small boy, but all the others, shepherds, little
angels, Saint Joseph were his age. They traveled
slowly, people sang and threw oranges from their
windows and still they were supposed to go
to Plaza de Toros to climb on the revolvable stage
but it was so windy that they preferred to go home.

Guadalajara Airport

Meadows of dread. Birds gently put to sleep

among sun rays wounding them so they bleed.
The air kills semen. The front of the bird is grass
afire. The leaves are strangers with the soaked
goiter. With their heavy goiters making
holes in cheese. The tribe writes. I don’t drink
coffee. The engine falls with snowy silver
parachute. Americans have many troubles. The faces,
set up in the circle are Diana’s. Who
stretches out the arrow turns round the dawn.
Gurgles, he who drowns. Cabmen lift up
trunks, putting them calmly on carts. The wheels
are tiny pearls. With the knitting needles cut
out the eyes on the meadow of dread.

Paul Twitchell

Two rocks,
marble and
granite.

The rain,
the golden
hair is

built in.
What are
the animal joints

like,
what are the joints
of milk like.

We don’t
know. Thin is
the stone’s

skin under my
fingers.
We’re all

exposed to
the sun
in two faces.

The Boats

I’m religious.
Religious as a wind or scissors.
An ant eats, she’s religious, flowers are red.
I don’t want to die. I don’t care if I die, now.
I’m more religious then the dust in the desert.
Children’s mouths are round. My eyes are
a syrup, the cold drips from it.
Sometimes I think nettles stung me, but they
didn’t. I think I’m unhappy, but I’m
not.
I’m religious.
I’ll throw the barrel in the river.
If bees would rush after my face, I would scratch
my face with my hand and I would see
again.
I don’t get upset.
My soul presses like crowds press the door.
When I die oxen will graze the grass the same way.
Houses will glimmer the same way.

To Disappear in the Fairytale, To Perforate One’s Legs

What happens with the difference in the head?

Where does the difference settle?

When the beast wickerbaskets itself,

the rape sets in.

The piglet eats the piglet.

Mallarmé budges.

The lice, beneath the golden cowslips

don’t come back again.

The grass stands up, Goethe stands up,

here are the miners with their lamps again.

Again, the event in Venice breaks out,

in the night, in the bus,

between vaporetto and hotel in Mestre

when an unknown man in the crowd

says: I’m a poet, nobody wanted to

publish me, all my life

I had to be a high school teacher.

He stares at me and shouts: Rudolf Steiner!

The cult will abduct me.

They will eat my fibers.

The sack is delight, the ivory is delight,

the sea robbers kill the fly.

Thermopyles are small yellow spheres,

blue small squares, they eat each other.

I lived in the hotel with round

walls, with a round lamp.

Outside the hotel was ice, it

creaked, the soul embraced the storm.

I’m hemmed by black yarn.

The sphinx will tear up my black

yarn. He uses me like

a pretzel. I use him like a pretzel,

we make love. We know little

how the skin pastes all over flesh,

we breathe and beam. Again,

the cricket grimaced. I live among hard-boiled

corn mush and safes, to give the donkey

blue glasses, to make him eat blue
straw. Blue straw doesn’t starve a man.
Blue straw entitles him.

I take care. The fragment alters into

the serpentine. My sight, scanned,

changes into crystal. What do we

want with our eyes? What do we want

with our aprons? Boiling water and a spider.

An engine slides in Vremska Valley.

Sons of Darkness

There’s no light in the Pythagorean mills. Soda dropped

from the numerals. There are pistils on the white
turtles. What does Babylon want? And the cyclic sweet
milk, breast-feeding these sluggish animals moving
from the edge to the edge as in the oasis. Crystals
stretched in the sky fall in the bucket. Is Engidu’s tear
more salty than the tear of the child waiting for his
mom at Prule kindergarten? Didn’t I somewhere see
his little coat already? It burned above the fire of the temple
where they killed all forty of them. Where are you,
Artemis? Wagons are greasy from food. Greasy air falls
on palm trees. Greasy are pants of sages. Greasy
is the ring turning round our souls like little wagons
with their white gluttonous dust. Mourning dove!

After This Night

In front of a thin plate with round stones.

You say the red pillar appears, the salt

moves. That the red flame breaks out if I

shove away. Such is the concentration

of rocks. To you, to you, water,

water between mirrors. You are the new

young Prince. Confused. Not yet aware

you wetted the cosmos. You’ll learn

gradually by paying levies. Janez Bernik

said about Andraž: break his beauty,

his trap is his beauty. The horses, the carriage,

the shawl took care of it. It was given

back to him from Hades. Beauty consumes

him calmly. Silk walls take breath away.

Take Karma Away from the Flour

Satrap, you too don’t know if you’d

pull through if I’d cut you out
and compress you
in the chimney of the locomotive.

I’m the inner room, you’re nothing.

All my talks are the talks with the loved one.

Long Ago

Bullfinch, bullfinch, sap, bullfinch!

With the lathe I ripped open the sky,

I crawl. He isn’t you, isn’t you, isn’t him.

His neck is straight, a giraffe would curve it,

a giraffe would carry the luggage on the

railway station, it would run. We would touch

straps. We would touch straps with our finger

and burn. Houses lick each other and

move. They creak in knuckles. The flame

licks them from the inside, first the lions above

the door, finally the lions’ eyes. Remember,

the snowflake dropped into my mouth,

you wanted it for the title page. I was standing in

Central Park. Curtis Harnack wrapped me in a shawl.
Tomaž Šalamun has had books translated into most of the European
languages. He lives in Ljubljana and occasionally teaches in the USA.
His recent books in English are The Book For My Brother, Row, and
Woods and Chalices