Kardelj’s cook – you said she was
“nice, not at all what you’d
expected” –
and we
danced to the Doors.
Are you still that
quick? When I
saw you safely ensconced
under nicely tanned
muscles –
hardened from digging
with archeologists – I
focused on
Iztok. We’d gotten fairly
warmed up and
undressed. And you
forgot about your prey
and explored me.
I giggled in
bliss, but couldn’t get it
up. You
have to
whine in my ear: I want to be your
wife. My
upbringing is
at fault, so I have a cupboard full
of wives and other
corpses
and keep collecting
them.
III
Hey!
When you get back from
Japan
I’d like to ask you
something. How do you explain that
just as I was
pondering
night and day whether I should or I shouldn’t –
remember the Bakery? – up
against my thighs there
leaned this dark one, with tight
curly hair, like some Styrian
baroque
Christ. Jesus, how I felt
it. Was that your boyfriend
Gregor? If you’re there
together now, say hello to
Kyoto.
I am
KAMI, come to visit you
again.
bob!
At breakfast
Kay Burford,
Kathy’s mom,
gave me
“A Cloud in Trousers,”
which you and
Kathy translated in
Iowa in 1972.
Mayakovsky died at 37.
I’m still alive and
sing the world
in gratitude. I’ve met
some brighter circles
for living.
One of those is
you. And you,
Vladimir.
If we’d made
love in 1930,
you wouldn’t have
shot yourself. Why
didn’t we?
I stood between
Gayatri and Lili
Brik.
thirty-seven and you twenty-one
Still between life
and death.
My loves are
terrible.
The moon is full.
I’m afraid I’ll spill my
port on the terrace.
I’m looking at you, Pavček.
I want money
for my books from you.
My butler
seduces me.
A curse on the day when I decided
to hire too young a butler in Mexico!
Where are you now, my wives?
Wounded? Heartless?
I run out of
fingers counting who all I’ve crushed.
Like bread.
I’m naked.
But my time still hasn’t
come.
why do you tremble, alejandro gallegos duval!
You’ve all been
nice to me.
My life has been
straighter than my penis
just now. I don’t know who has determined it and
set it down. I thank you, though.
When I’m in Mexico, I’ll love you to death.
But you stay there for now.
Don’t drink your wine too fast, boy.
You’ve got to become a great painter.
Shut out the noise from the street.
Don’t complain I’ve made you
lose weight, don’t show the dark
circles under your eyes.
I’ve enriched
everyone who has seen me.
Even a blind man would see the dew on the grass,
the milk along my iron path.
to pavček
Perhaps I’ll come.
Then again, perhaps I won’t.
In any case prepare the
money, since here’s my will.
Everything goes to my children.
I’ve paid Maruška to the
end of October 1979,
and if it’s
less than 400 dollars a
month, the Russians will
occupy you.
Study my life
closely. This amount is the
limit of your curse.
Now, at this instant, I still
see him. He’s still breathing, still
twitching.
We’re in a fleabag hotel
called the Daniel.
The other rooms are filled with
American tourists chewing their dreams.
The company I flew here with is called
Liberty, and
the agent who sent me the
tickets from Albany to Yaddo, Betsy.
I remembered that I hadn’t bought
Metka that part for the
cooker she used to
fix me meat, until something
burst and that
safety plug hit the
ceiling.
gaza
When I’m 37 years old, I won’t be
bald. I won’t
wear white dressing gowns with red
innards bulging in the pockets.
When I’m 37 years old, my
mother won’t die. I
won’t knock on my sons’ bedroom doors with
idiotic questions on my idiotically happy
face.
When I’m 37 years old, I
won’t exercise at five-thirty
each morning and wheeze through my nose like a
maniac. I
won’t parade through country
inns and insult good
folk who barely survived the
war. I
won’t wear knickers. I
won’t point to Haloze and all they took
from us and say
it’s fine.
When I’m 37 years old, I
won’t be on call, I’ll be
free. I’ll grow a long beard and long
nails, my
white ships will sail all the world’s
seas.
And if some
woman bears me children, I’ll fling them through the
windowpane from the dining room’s
left corner and I
wonder what will hit the asphalt first,
the curtain or the glass.
my uncle jockey and the butcher in zone a
And when we all
returned, happy and windblown, from Montebello –
we’d briefly forgotten the low
prices caused by the disgusting competition of the Yugoslav
border – we said, Uncle Mario didn’t just
race, he also
won!
Then I stared at the tunnel
from the window at Piazza Vico 6.
Why don’t we have horse
races?
Why did Uncle Jakob sell his
cafe?
Why did grandpa smoke so much that he got
cancer?
And who will inherit
the last wooded parcels?
But soon it got
dark
and next morning the car wouldn’t
start.
I had to go crawling uphill in a
bus full of squealing old
women with lire stuffed under their
bras from the chickens they’d
sold. To gape dimwittedly into
my plastic bag. We’re going back to the
country where my father’s director of coast
region hospitals. He squeals with
delight whenever some woman gives
birth. He must think that way we’ll get more
neon.
the koper-saratoga springs axis
Because my father was such a
snob that he refused to be
paid, one day, when
I came home for ten
minutes to shower after a
match, it suddenly became clear
that I would
“just go to Ljubljana” for college.
Serves your inflated ego
right, the family said out loud.
Just who do you think you are! You even
lost to Karlovac. Up to a
point! That’s right, we lost to
Karlovac. Which is why I’m here. To
wash up. Back then we all still used
those sprays, I put a fresh
shirt on and joined them at the
table. Wow! I said. Has Mussolini been burning
your banks again? You want to send
me someplace where it’s perfectly
clear all I can do is die, rot, become impoverished and
turn gray? Where grandpa
was so depressed at losing his
horses that for five years all he could do was
dream about opening a kaolin mine and collect
stamps, then finally had to give up
even his flat? Dear heart,
we have four children in the house, the tablecloth
whispered. I went pale. I never
imagined anything this
horrible could ever really
happen to me. So, once among the Slavs
I immediately gambled away Perspektive.
To avoid having to stare at those torturous
repeating episodes, when you first rent
a room to Madame Scriabine, then another to
someone who constantly
bangs the door shut. Not to mention the third and
fourth. The fifth one uses your cellar to chop up your
wife, instead of firewood. And it’s clear
you have absolutely no other
choice but to sell
your stamps, hire a
cab, keep an eye on the
packing and single-handedly scrawl
Mitgepäck on the wood. Even now I can scarcely
believe I could be such an idiot, trying
for years to enlighten a
country where since time
immemorial everything was clear
in advance, especially the fact that you
deserved me! But let’s put aside
History. I disappointed
Zwitter with it long ago. This poem has a purely
practical purpose, which is:
to persuade my current wife, Metka
Krašovec, not to forbid me
the young thoroughbred creatures I
race and bet on.
Last night in three hours I lost 219
dollars and won 240.
Whatever I do! My balance comes out on the
plus side!
21 dollars!
21 years!
It all evens out.
Whom did Lord Byron love?
my bard and brother
As the
chauffeur silkenly drives me
down to the city at four thirty, I
worry that downtown will slit my
throat. Thomas Smith, father of
Tony, alias Antonio Smith, best friend of
Goran and Boris, the twins and brothers
of Sofija, who
nearly became my
wife in Mexico.
Does my car
really have darkened windows? I’m
off to a bar where the drinks
are cheap between four and six. What they call
happy hours. Miss Miller is at
Bled now, at the dacha. That’s also the name of
my beer. Metka, is she a
drag? And I drink:
beer after beer, quarter after
quarter lost to the
juke box. Joe and Mary are both so
beautiful I’m afraid they’ll break my
shirt. And I think of
Braco. I don’t even have his address.
People! Why do you
grow up!
Then I think, when I get to
Ljubljana, I’ll put out an
ad. I’ve come back, Tomaž
Šalamun, making books and children is my
trade. I also want
four, like my
father. Call
three two four two zero three.
Joe has a different dog today and
great luck at darts.
Then a very strange, decidedly
hysterical laughter pierces the noise and refrigerated
air, like Fontana. Mary calls out:
LAST CALL HAPPY HOURS!
And I leap into
the sun and then over
Broadway back into the
air-conditioned limo, which takes me back to the castle.
chez les contents
Hey, old Triestine love, whom I
exported first to Brussels, then
California, then Jersualem: they say
you have a house on Mali Lošinj. Why didn’t you
send me chocolates in Sarajevo?
Slim told me. He knows everything, even
all the dirt about my present
life. Come to Male Srakane
sometime with the boat. On the island I silently
glide from sheep to sheep, and shine a flashlight in
their mouths. And type in the shade under the reeds.
Beside me sits a creature that’s lost its mind.
He wears a baseball cap and is covered in a
sheet. Slime oozes from his ears and eyes.
The people here constantly inter-
marry and abandon their offspring on the way.
So why didn’t you send me chocolates in
Sarajevo? I’d like to see how your
son has grown up and if you still
agree with the original design for Poker.
small wonder that our old professor
is now mayor of rome
I sat on a wall and sketched Perugia.
Argan also drops some coins in the almsbox.
For lunch at the pensione they give us cat meat,
at least that’s what they say. I get better.
I’ll never pass that exam.
Braco is in love with Vera, am I in love with Tatyana
or with Vera? Or with Dunya?
But not the Dunya who was in Perugia
and is an opera singer now, rather the Dunya
I was with at camp.
Vera and I saw each other in Greece.
Braco and I never saw each other at
camp. The English woman says
driving lessons here are practically free.
Tone will be the cause of our breaking up. Don’t even
know how to use an eraser. In
Split Dikan stole Vera from me.
My surveyor abandons me in Orvieto.
I watch the people burning in hell.
They’re naked and touching each other and then
they are included in frescoes and then Western
civilization clearly has nothing to point to
but a brothel
and in churches at that.
dear metka!
There are fresh flowers on my table every morning.
Now they change them in their big vases
every other day. For breakfast I sit at the
Quiet Table, so I just raise a hand and
wiggle my fingers to greet people
because I’m afrai
d of losing my metaphysics
if I say good morning. No one here
suffers because of you or Alejandro.
I’m always telling Trisha, Allan and
Kathy I’m afraid you won’t get very
much out of me, I’m just married –
April 11 – and on the way to be with my
Mexican lover. Everyone here likes you.
I dance with Kathy, walk with Allan through the
fireflies – we stroll through woods like a
carpet – and admire Trisha enormously
for her paintings. When I make love to her,
I become a tree she’s painting. Don’t be
sad if I repeat that I won’t
be able to live with you “faithfully,”
as people put it. I’ve tried, and
changed my plans. I’ll be in Mexico
from the twenty-second to the twenty-ninth,
not from the twenty-ninth to the sixth.
That way the week before I fly to
Ljubljana I’ll be back here to rest and it won’t
be like when I flew back for the
wedding, when between the moment I
knocked on the door on
Dalmatin Street and the moment I
good-naturedly shoved Alejandro out of bed on
Salina Cruz only fourteen hours elapsed.
I’m afraid it would
scare you to death, same as then.
liberty, blue folder
My life is in a cage.
Others look after me.
Kansas has the same sort of dust as Pannonia.
All the stalks have burnt out in my throat.
I’d like to be modest and tiny and
compressed. I’d like to be
dead.
I read a precise list of the tips and
clothes my travel agent from Liberty
requires.
I can’t afford them.
What is San Miguel de Allende like?
I carry the flag at such high speed that you
can’t even hear when it pops.
Kings fall, shot down by mufflers.
At the airport I always eat the last
sandwich. I stare at its geological
strata. My skin smells like an egg,
golden. Why doesn’t that fountain in the castle stop? White marble putto, don’t ever wake up!
A Ballad for Metka Krašovec Page 5