earthquakes. The steamships can vanish and continue
their way through the brambles. The fur
is bemittened. In oatmeal today, tomorrow in
an abyss. Now the squirrel already has teeth and a
compote of roof, bottom and sky. Horizontal
is for running and gathering. Horizontal
is for hoarding together food like
blankets heaped one on the other, to capture the
warmth. Camões sailed away by boat.
SCRUBBED SLAB, DARK SCREEN
What sort of icons? What sort of Rigas? What sort
of stelae? What sort of sheaf of trees? When does the oral cavity
consider where north is? When does it return
mittens? What comes between evaporation and
overheating? And what can we divide with a
tractor? The shooting of an arrow to its target? Can we
restore the gentleman who’s sixty
feet tall, displaying his bones at
O’Hare? We travelers provided the slabs of flesh.
Memory is made of reeds. Handbags never
rot. Lakes leaning on your chest. Otters
like statues stowed before birth. Fine. Heels
in the sand, but I see. It started with Popeye and a
furious Olive Oyl. Persepolis was already washed by Disney.
A WORD TO THE HUNTERS
How the birdsong volleys!
I walk on a stroller.
“Selfish little beast, writing your own
stuff, who do you think you are?”
Calma, calma,
non sono un cinghiale,
don’t shoot me.
THE TIP GROWS ON BEFORE THE STEP
The rudder is hungry.
A showcase fills up clocks.
A boy limps.
He’s going home.
The wave waits.
Skin dresses
Billions of cross-joints, jackets,
ink pencils strewn like Russian fairy tales.
Brebis. My baby breviary.
Atalante’s stroller of tinsel.
What are you up to like a wreck? The point is in the mineral.
This ant had a wrinkle on its wing.
I shut off the gas. The tree is in Brazil.
On a handsome yellow board that strokes the wing of a bird
up on a branch from below.
It makes an ellipse and bends left and right.
It forms a triangle.
Cut the boletus right under the hood.
Stay faithful to mites.
Mangle your hands.
Die them in a stork, so that
the golden gray gushes.
LA TORRE, CELAN
A ball a seascape, no man’s Bogliasco, il gruppetto.
Lika cooks. Diran eats chickens on his own. Ahhh, floating
again, and I could care less whether there’s algae below,
I spit in l’abîme, I spit in the abyss. I’ve gnawed through
the Question of Technology. It could have helped dead brother, since
they were friends, I dropped him at that point, stopped using
him at all, the one who threatened all Kakania from his Nazi
lectern, except you couldn’t say that then,
I barely escaped from that snare, but
I do admire my dead brother, what would have saved him from
the Seine? Meat? Diran doesn’t join in any meatless
meals, he can’t stand salads. He touches himself. Not like in
Fellini, where the fat priest asks from the
confessional, ti tocchi? ti tocchi ragazzo? ti
tocchi? Diran circles around the table, scratching
his balls, but that entertains us, Alice is spoiled.
Tulips flutter in Dorset and in Turkey.
Anna is drawn to the plant. The botanical gardens have
all been closed in Italy, because art has devoured
nature. Taken all its money and not left a cent for
heating. It’s been two months since Lika was last paid
and I’ve knocked over my modem. We’re all paralyzed.
For three days Stefano has been calling for help, which
never comes. Albertina’s in Milan. She’s so pretty, and that’s why
I jumped to kiss her as she left and got
tangled in the cords. Marco says he’s calling us from
Riyadh, that he can’t stand those Arabs. We know he’s calling
from Milan and that he’d like to buy Beatrice’s house
on Rhodes. Terry discovered black and white and red bugs
in the bathtub. Diran is afraid of snakes. His father beat him to a pulp
if he discovered him in London when he should have been in school
at Oxford. Diran is the biggest star on my horizon,
since Péru left and didn’t ask me out to watch the stars.
THE SIRENS
I flower into shoulders.
Toss the snowball of a horse into the windberries.
Mildew. Chrysalis. A leg mouse scratches the slats.
Disappears and steps onto the deck of a typical boat.
Undoes the slats. Undoes the straps. Sunbathes its leg.
Watches the water splash and sunbathes.
Like a worm that gives its body away before it arrives—
where will he give it, at what points slice it up—
like a worm that gnaws, soaks up and hears cymbals.
Is that what a tail’s for?
Do dolphins come and lead?
Do they bring wetness?
Which finally, flatly, bent over at ninety degrees,
waves in the snow before it departs.
IVO ŠTANDEKER
Soup, Rabelais.
Soup in your mouth.
A turtle in the soup in your mouth, Rabelais.
Come running, thief, come running, thief.
Dismantle the wall of sulfur barrels.
Dove in the vapor of my lungs,
lie down, close your eyes.
Get up.
Lie down and close your eyes.
AN HOUR
When the candelabrum started to lose its light,
they seized the chickens, everyone shook at the
thought of the coming winter. This winter is a snare.
This winter is a farcical knot. This winter sees a
threat in a wise guy. The next one will be
Galician. The bugs of next winter are already
staring, and if the curls get spoiled, then
Ropret will be out of his meals. It’s a danger.
Honey is a joint over Jacob. He limps.
Professional soldiers get attacked by vermin
regardless of how many crumbs. To asphyxion.
To asphyxiation. Even she cheated her,
Anne-Marie Albiach. What is a pure
source and how does it smell. What did the flag say
when the head looked through it. Selim unrolls
a carpet for us to see. A mink. You walk on
black diamonds that attach
onto sleeves, that attach onto cuff links.
Fog is the hands of trees. It bends down and
opens the water. The thick hoarfrost hurts. A train
dunks it when it goes beneath the water.
An ibis extends its legs into a bonfire.
Do the kernels between the rings, in the places where
flesh is, flutter, hide, set up a
tent above them? I am conducted into an
arch. All of me is conducted. This is Uccello,
these are horses, these are horses’ asses, banging
into a bead he can’t sleep. When puff balls start to
crackle, when lightning starts to ooze, when the departing
open their flowers and the plant world starts to
drip water, that’s when the gold of the gray reappears.
Cricket, cicada and mufti all step on the disk
and you, I, we are the first edges of stones
in a well in the woods. Tumbling through the air toward the
darkness comes pig, dolphin’s godfather. Pig, dolphin’s godfather?
My mother was a seamstress who kept forgetting
her cardboard. The equinox is a hawthorn. Tiles are ants,
soldiers step on each other’s shoulders. Grown-up soldiers
spend the night outside. They sleep with their girlfriends.
Grown-up soldiers drink schnapps and make films of their
blisters. See how they stick to the tiles.
My ligaments got stuck to
Enver, who was Tito’s brother. We miners use
our legs differently than proteuses do.
The fan won’t exhale. It’s held in hand by a
Japanese girl in Osteria dei Centopoveri.
Both of us eat duck with mushrooms. You go to the edge
and call out “Hepatitis! Hepatitis!” She comes,
thinking she’ll get grain, and you
shove her over the edge like Cabiria. Winter
burbles. Opalescent refractions follow. Wonder, be
dumbstruck, Magellan, there are goose tracks in your
quiver. Hagia Sophia is a shutter. Milfoil should be
called fern. It’s a horrible effort to tear off a
bandaid. Have you ever rooted an island out of the sea? Actually
heard the noise made by the water as it flies into the void?
Have you ever protected the mist with your own hand?
Legs spreading out like a peacock turn into glass
at the court. The sultan bestows them as copies for the heads
of tulips and for the crawl stroke in the harem pool.
SAN JUAN DE LA CRUZ ROLLED IN THE SNOW
I don’t know if I’m Poltava, because I get attacked for nothing.
Go out to the black house and copy the clouds.
Take the cat with you.
We arrived at Tabor sunken in jugs of milk.
Before the war a marten used to dart around,
after the war a sign belched in your face.
The Danube isn’t nubile.
The machine rumbles, the table shakes, the coffee squalls.
I moan like a statue that’s had its beauty mark removed.
The curls are laid across the fire, I walk on
white embers. The girl on whose shoulders it will
fall draped hasn’t yet settled in my awareness.
The slaves, prisoners in fact, evaporate on me.
They remind me of mother’s flesh.
David has one hand too big.
Barbara Richter will give me a flat on
Uhlandstrasse. Diran told me yesterday that I have a
Stalinist zeal and that I’d like everyone
to believe in God. Terry also sees exactly that. Nuns
jumped from a great height onto his
bones. My curls have been cut.
RITES AND THE MEMBRANE
It sinks into movies, I sink into mortar.
Scythes and pincers of bugs are no homeland.
My questions burst the barrel, and a bullet flies out.
In the corners pits are put to sleep. The pool is covered.
The point of the pyramid over an urn, the stuccoed pyramid,
“Fat Joe, what’s luv.” The Jena is a river and the way you
warm your hands over the potbelly stove. I’m looking for chestnut
ice cream. These recumbent boards with huge wheels
race around the track for Icarus. Playthings, old pulleys,
so what is a waterfall called, if the waterfall’s green,
a puzzle, a hand leaving its gesture, technology
melting sugar. Rice and bananas and eyes and a flower.
O taste of things, as I bent over in Limoges in the
twelfth century and worked on the Savior’s little body.
I leapt over Grünewald and Pontormo, and kept throwing the wreath
off a viaduct. The white cat with the green ribbon wants me
to open the window. Even the steam was triumphal in the first
piston. Don’t ever turn to follow a train. The earth gets
a lid to rinse off your soot. Most people
hold on to the strap. I think of the engineers
who set stone upon stone without even
touching it. The world is sprinkled with dew. The Soča
was installed. Its military bottom calls me, and there I’ll shave
gnats. Before every lunch and after each birth.
SANTA RITA
Some grub worms feed me with an outsized spoon
and ask me if I can swallow all right.
A muff and a rag fly onto my head.
I dawdled under the window while
Kovačič was visiting Kocbek. Strip to the
waist and raise your elbows. Let’s see
if your leg’s going to jump. What do you see?
Spots? If it weren’t for Glanz, I’d see
ice. They threatened to throw my dad in the Vrbas on account of
his pricey slippers. The road worker who rescued him got
an emerald, ask Andro, at one time I
said that he got a ring with a ruby.
On Durmitor the lungs can breathe. From Lovćen
you can see the sea. On Narlan’s strips is written
“Lembranca do senhor do bonfim da Bahia,”
but he used to be my father. A knight on a
horse and a marionette. The chests all sank
and our enemies zipped through our throats.
Albertina’s getting ready to dance. Her
voice is the voice of Živa Kraus. Her parents would put
carrots in her school lunchbox, instead of panini. Any instant I’ll
ask galley slaves on board and invite them to row.
Chains and balls are a joke. Museums exhibit
boiling wine. How many plunks in the water
for every mile. How many potatoes
eaten, peels and all, to fend off scurvy.
I vote for the sound of rubber squeaking over
the sand. A flower stands still. The bison’s a plow,
I’ve joined the adults who rang the bell. Who
went flying up with the rope. I lock up
the boat’s oars, the attendant is gone. The one who puts
slippers on hooves has left for home. He’s floating
down the river to a lake in Louisiana. Under the surface
he has a cabin with Catholic insignias.
The electricity flickers. Santa Rita is a martyr.
I have no idea what she did as a saint.
SOUNDS NEAR PISTOLETTO
The baker sang to them for four hours, ordered
catering and all those excellent wines, until he finally
dared to ask her about the scent that
Grischa used. I’m leaving for Cuba, because
I like the fellows there. Panini, panini, hills,
I never got close enough to see
the mosquitoes in the valley. Scrub and wood
were burning, I carried the hashish under my gums,
the dog won’t smell you if I lick you all over.
Rinta, dove’s rinta, when will you return
to your forests in Haiti? I saw you, and more than
once, the last time with Suzy. She isn’t bashful.
I’m bashful. Suzy and John practically
belch on the same street. They’re both bashful.
They’ve never met. I tell Zadie, you won’t
believe, I’m holding a piece of paper
where Čander mentions you. The first time I heard
of you was when Beatrice introduced us.
Diran doesn’t like her. They compete like two
mice. Diran is dancing to Fat Joe again.
Marie-Chr
istine was jailed in St. Louis.
Fortunately they didn’t stamp that in her
passport. At first I worked with young people, they’re not
easy to put up with, her I met a long time ago, now I’m
a producer for Zeffirelli. Our forests in Haiti
are being cut down. I don’t go there, it’s dangerous, I’m an
The Blue Tower Page 3