Vasko Popa
Page 5
Tie her to a cat’s tail
And chase the cat
Don’t bow down to the little box
If you do
You’ll never stand up again
The Victims of the Little Box
Not even in a dream
Should you have anything to do
With the little box
If you saw her full of stars once
You are bound to wake up
Without a heart or a soul
If you slid your tongue
Into her keyhole once
You’ll awake with holes in your forehead
If you ground her to bits once
Between your teeth
You’ll wake up with a square head
If you ever saw her empty
You’d wake up
With a belly full of mice and nails
If in a dream you had anything to do
With the little box
You’d be better off never waking up again
The Judges of the Little Box
to Karl Max Ostojic
Why do you gawk at the little box
That in her emptiness
Holds the whole world
If the little box holds
The world in her emptiness
Then the anti-world
Holds the little box in its anti-hand
Who’ll bite off the anti-world’s anti-hand
And on that hand
Five hundred anti fingers
Do you believe
You can bite them off
With your thirty-two teeth
Or are you waiting
For the little box
To jump into your mouth
Is that why you gawk
The Benefactors of the Little Box
We’ll return the little box
Into the arms
Of her small honest properties
We won’t do anything
Against her will
We’ll simply take her apart
We’ll crucify her
On her own cross
Puncture her bloated emptiness
And let ooze
The blue cosmic blood she gathered
We’ll sweep her clean of stars
And anti-stars
And everything else rotting inside her
We won’t make her suffer
We’ll simply put her together once again
And restore to the little box
Her chaste insignificance
The Prisoners of the Little Box
Open little box
We kiss your bottom and cover
Keyhole and key
The whole world lies crumpled in you
It resembles everything
Except itself
Not even your serene mother
Would know you any longer
The rust will eat your key
Our world and us inside you
And finally you too
We kiss your four sides
And four corners
And twenty-four nails
And anything else you have
Open little box
Last News About the Little Box
The little box which contains the world
Fell in love with itself
And conceived within itself
Still another little box
The little box of the little box
Also fell in love with itself
And conceived within itself
Still another little box
And so it went on forever
The world inside the little box
Ought to be inside
The last of the little boxes
Not one of the little boxes
In love with itself
Is the last one
Let’s see you find the world now
from Raw Flesh
Wolf-Ancestry
Under the linden trees in Sands
My great grandfather Ilia Luka Morun
Found two wolf-cubs
Sat them both
Between a donkey’s ears
And brought them to the farm
He fed them sheep’s milk
And taught them to play
With lambs their own age
Then he took them back grown
To the same spot kissed them
And made the sign of the cross over them
From my early childhood
I’ve been waiting for my years to equal
My great grandfather’s in age
Just so I can ask him
Which of those wolf-cubs
Was I
Eyes of a Wolf
Before they christened me
They gave me in the interim
The name of a brother suckled by a shewolf
As long as she lives my grandmother
Will call me wolf cub
In her linen-like Walachian tongue
On the sly she used to feed me
Raw meat so I’d grow up
To be the leader of the pack some day
I believed
My eyes would start to glow
In the dark
My eyes don’t glow
Perhaps because the true darkness
Hasn’t begun to fall yet
Stepfather of Wolves
On a sled loaded
With salt and smugglers
My great grandfather Ilia Luca Morun
Flies over the Sands
The wolves howl and charge
The men and horses
Great grandfather threatens
That he’ll kill anyone
Who reaches for his weapon
Instead he stands up
And howls more terrifyingly
Than the long-tailed brigands
The wolves’ howls grow sadder
As they fall behind the horses
Which all of a sudden have sprouted wings
Less winters and snows
Separate me from my great grandfather
The clearer I hear his howl
Broken Horns
My grandfather Miloš Popa Nemac
Spoke less during his lifetime
Than a deaf mute does from birth
Instead he knew how to slip his shoulders
Under a young bull
And lift him off the ground
The bull would try to plant
His four hooves into the air
And try to gore the sky
Men stood in a circle
Threw fur caps in the air
And crossed themselves backwards
In dreams I beg my grandfather
To show me where to find
The old god of our herd
Grandfather stands in front of me
With broken horns on his head
Under the Sign of Wolves
On the highway just outside of town
They found horses with torn throats
Harnessed to an empty wagon
And on the top of a mulberry tree
A merchant changed into a white sheep
All night the wolves danced
Around the fruit tree reeking of human flesh
You would have known how to haggle
With those long-tailed dancers
My grandmother tells me
I stare into her pointed teeth
And try to puzzle out her laughter
Then I run into the backyard
Climb the snow-covered pear tree
And practice my howling
The Other World
My grandmother puts cupcakes
With lit candles on floating planks
Whispers to them messages
For dead men and women of our blood
And sends them down the river Karaš
The planks slide through black water
The little candles struggle through dusk
And vanish around the turn of the river
Grandmother announces
That they have happily reached
The other world
I have already been there once
To set traps for birds
I didn’t know of course
It was my cousins I was hunting
Among the blossoming willows
Shadow of a Shewolf
They tell how my grandmother
The witch Sultana Urošević
Cast a shadow of a shewolf
She never left the house
On moonlit nights
So no one could step on her shadow
Deprive her of secret powers
And kill her instantly
They tell
That I inherited from my great grandmother
My eyes and my tongue
Whether the shadow of a wolf too
I don’t know
In the moonlight
And often in the sunlight
I walk backwards
Just in case
Unknown Citizen
Astrologer Vinko Lozić was born
Once and forever in the town of Vršac
They bathed him in wine
And swaddled him in grape leaves
His first toy was a telescope
Made of a corncob
So he could study heaven’s ABC
During the day he lived among men
At night among the stars
When his time came to die
He migrated into the body
Of a clairvoyant fellow-citizen
Every one of us in Vršac
Could be him
Though no one admits it
And so I too shrug my shoulders
In the Village of My Ancestors
Someone hugs me
Someone looks at me with the eyes of a wolf
Someone takes off his hat
So I can see him better
Everyone asks me
Do you know how I’m related to you
Unknown old men and women
Appropriate the names
Of young men and women in my memory
I ask one among them
Tell me for God’s sake
Is George the Wolf still alive
That’s me one answers
With a voice from beyond the grave
I touch his cheek with my hand
And beg him with my eyes
To tell me if I’m alive too
Earthbound Constellation
In front of a lit grocery store
On Gudurička Street in Vršac
Three old laborers drink
Their evening beer from a bottle
The tossed metal caps make
Its constellation on a patch of dirt
Between the sidewalk and the roadway
They glitter in the twilight
And wait for its stargazer
I went out to buy cigarettes
I needed a bottle of beer too
To find a place for my own star