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Albert Balasch

How are you, mum.

Today, with an unstained stump,

I’ve only opened my mouth the once.

I’ve turned into a bare knuckle—everything that’s in—

and that, mum, was to pop the question.

I’ve rummaged in what is to come

(nothing other than what we’re about)

with lousy blankets tied tight,

with stunted elbows for hands

till I’ve stretched out in the shade and given up.

Our voices know no pity, mum,

but some listen to them like rats

cowering before the rain.

Do yourself up nicely. The head can bow down

to the side that’s abandoned,

where is the stone pillow, the front

that holds us up. And may fear

not catch us out.

tr. Jonathan Dunne

Emily Dickinson

AMPLE MAKE THIS BED

Ample make this bed.

Make this bed with awe;

In it wait till judgment break

Excellent and fair.

Be its mattress straight,

Be its pillow round;

Let no sunrise’ yellow noise

Interrupt this ground.

Aleksandr Skidan

from SCHOLIA

neither the hills blistering with vineyards

nor the tercets which promise catharsis

the utility of the image

monitoring

the valorization of the chasm in your groin

dishonors dreaming

the pure duration of the offer

to make love

the devastating splendor

of the saint’s relics exhibited under glass

imagine

you’re still alive

in the subjunctive mood

in webs of information

glossy fires

aura of the burnt offering

aura of the disappearance of aura

auto-eroticism and auto-

referentialism of art

artificial cock

jerked by a trinity of fingers

the crusade

of capital

invested

in the crusade

in <the> dead God we trust

tr. Genya Turovskaya

Rosmarie Waldrop

DISASTER

Grief it began with. And disbelief. Went and looked and went and looked. For what was no more. Scrutinized screens and saw. Nothing. The papers in the land and. Took in nothing.

Nothing has room. For all. No ruins can fill it. No rubble. No number of dead.

Like a movie. Like a comic strip. Please distinguish between. Crumbling towers and the image of crumbling towers. The image, repeated, multiplies. Locks on the plural. Crowds.

Our morning was mourning. Our day, frantic. Our night, fear. Up to down we prefer. And right to left. But many movements in many directions are better than how crashes a wounded boar through the woods. Where safe in the dark it used to rest.

Aleš Debeljak

IN A MARSEILLE HOTEL ROOM

The key in my pocket doesn’t keep me warm, I swear.

Darkness has been passing away for hours,

morning is almost here. I will never stop searching

for you. But I don’t have a clue what has to be done.

The walls are warm and heavy scented, damp

from lonely visitors, their forgotten families.

I am going down the corridor, my fingertips

are trailing the wallpaper and the paintings

as I approach the destination and step

through the final door. I immerse myself

in the boiling white of clouds with no name,

tiny veins on the breasts, a map of muffled thrill.

Look, my lord, how it’s not difficult at all

to choose a path. A choir in the pelvis starts singing,

the sky inflames when I plant the sapling,

it shoots up high, as fast as lightning, as nerves.

You scream, lord, and I with you:

warm milk pours across my face and floods me,

the city, the world. Foam and furrow show the way.

No hesitation. I follow you, I swear.

tr. Andrew Zawacki & the author

Edvard Kocbek

THE TIME OF THE POEM

They say the day of the poem is setting,

man has sold the leftovers,

shortages are tiresome,

fear of death destroys

poetics after poetics,

what we write are just signs,

only a fool is what he is not.

We are all in a tired place.

Time sets and rises again.

Each darkness is miraculous.

Every confusion is healing.

Power and unrest never cease.

Home has gone abroad

like a girl before a mirror

delighting in her face,

the sea is immensely deep.

I am returning now, my dear.

The gardener’s palm glows with charms.

She never repeats a gesture.

I sketch her by tattooing

everything living and lose my fear.

The seven wounds of sacred madness

reek with the stupefaction of incredible speech.

I depart for rank regions.

I have allowed all my fields to lie fallow.

My queen bee remains wild.

You will know me by my bare feet

and by my deep dreams about the mountain

which has gone to the prophet.

tr. Michael Scammell & Veno Taufer

Aleš Šteger

CLOSE YOUR EYES

Close your eyes and see a poem.

Drained out from it, you desire in secret the solidity of all things.

It reminds you of a white room recently painted,

of the windows and doors summer forgot to shut.

But these also fail to suggest forms of the physical world.

There is no place to enter the poem.

It exists only in a gaseous state.

People floating inside it, the metaphors

that hang on its walls, might possibly allow

for a galactic breeze to churn into something else.

Two naked clouds might begin to make love.

Might ventilate stars into a cloud

of slaughtered boar, of grey smoke,

of father smoking and watching from the poem’s

darkened corner. Probably he authored every poem.

You can’t see him in the shadow unless by himself

he appears silently behind you, playfully closing your eyes,

asking: Who am I? Won’t you kill me? Aren’t you mine?

tr. Peter Richards & the author

Dane Zajc

LUMP OF ASHES

For a long time you carried fire in your mouth.

For a long time you hid it there.

Behind a bony fence of teeth.

Pressed within the white magic circle of your lips.

You know that no one must catch scent

of the smoke in your mouth.

You remember that black crows will kill a white one.

So you lock your mouth.

And hide the key.

But then you feel a word in your mouth.

It echoes in the cavern of your head.

You begin to search for the key to your mouth.

You search for a long time.

When you find it, you unlock the lichen from your lips.

You unlock the rust from your teeth.

Then you search for your tongue.

But it isn’t there.

You want to utter a word.

But your mouth is full of ashes.

And instead of a word

a lump of ashes rolls down

your blackened throat.

So you throw away the rusty key.

And you make a new language from the soil.

A language that speaks with words of clay.

tr. Erica Johnson Debeljak

Alexei Parshchikov

CATS

At the factory, where they make antibiotics,

the cats roam about.

One covered with shells is like driftwood

somewhat knotty.

Another with its outstretched tongue

resembling a fire iron.

And the third so gigantic, like some great calm

over the Persian Gulf.

They criss-cross about the pharmaceutical factory

licking the various pills,

between the plague and cholera,

the flu and smallpox,

slithering through so many different deaths.

They shoo around everything, these tsars of indulgence,

and only while dying, they obtain their skeletons.

Here’s the black cat writhing, scratching the ground

hallucinating, he sees himself buried there.

And the white one, burnt out on drugs

fleecy, like feather-grass,

his small heart in plumes.

The cats are guessing that they’re beholding paradise

becoming the very supporting points on which it exists,

as if they were stretching a canvas,

getting ready to shake down

the ripe apples.

Now that they’ve apprehended paradise,

they’ll go off at the same pace

like mechanics alongside the wing of an airplane

embraced by the forces of disappearance.

And they’ll let paradise fall from their paws,

and the dictators will meet them in passing,

and crush the cats under their boots.

Nero’s battling with the cat.

Attila’s battling with the cat.

Ivan the Fourth’s battling with the cat.

Lavrentiy’s battling with the cat.

Korea’s battling with the cat.

Kotov’s battling with the cat.

The cat’s battling with the cat.

And the cat’s karate is nothing

compared with the statues of dictators!

tr. John High

Michael Palmer

CONSTRUCTION OF THE MUSEUM

In the hole we found beside the road

something would eventually go

Names we saw spelled backward there

In the sand we found a tablet

In the hole caused by bombs

which are smart we might find a hand

It is the writing hand

hand which dreams a hole

to the left and the right of each hand

The hand is called day-inside-night

because of the colored fragments which it holds

We never say the word desert

nor does the sand pass through the fingers

of this hand we forget

is ours

We might say, Memory has made its selection,

and think of the body now as an altered body

framed by flaming wells or walls

What a noise the words make

writing themselves

Ali Abdollahi

MEMORIES OF SECLUSION

My right shoe has gone on leave

I am neither four-footed now nor two-footed

I read Nietzsche in primordial trinity

At nights, he comes to my sleep and says:

At last, I will rub your mustache away!

The telephone has been on answering for days

Again, this importunate landlord!

I scratch my foot with a knitting-needle

I never saw any good from the right

Left has always been left

I am tired, tired

Tired of this tripartite opposition

Right-handedness, left-mindedness, nihilistic belief!

tr. Alireza Abiz

Alireza Abiz

We came out of the café at five

For a short walk in the street

We came out of the café at five

A man was shaking his head

In the butchery on the right

A man was shaking his head

When they beheaded us at five

We also shook our head

When they beheaded us at five

tr. the author

Andrzej Sosnowski

A SONG FOR EUROPE

Is that a rainbow? No one has seen one for forty years

it’s the end of the world or something of that kidney.

Do not run to the shelter. When love is

quite literally an occult power divvying up life

into equal parts bliss and loss—like the siren

slanting through memory in the air raid of flashbacks—

this is Germany close to the French border.

The dream enlarges of the battle of continents.

The factories spew by night, there are discords and afterglows

and the style of this tale is impossible to pin down

so the poem is shoved this way and that before ending up

in the hands of an unknown recipient.

It was never thus. No, it was ever thus.

Will you be the one? Such a strange encounter—with an emerald

round your neck and a shadow on your eyeshadow—is that a smile

or a veil of mourning for the words that have gone missing?

Is the emerald so that you won’t

distract yourself? So the poem can tail you

like a shadow and screen your eyes, I mean this

poem—a dark spot on the truth fetched up from the depths

of a tear, a sliver of light, vitreous full stop

that terminates all this chat about broken mirrors.

Be her, be the one left over, in the quiet of the ‘all clear.’

Perhaps we were callous to be drawn so easily into

the blackout life with never a hint

when you took the ground from under my feet

while the sky took an overdose of snow. Love

isn’t the word, but neither is any other. The poem knows this

and declares it, as if it’s declaring the Blitz.

tr. Rod Mengham

John Clare

A VISION

I lost the love of heaven above,

I spurned the lust of earth below,

I felt the sweets of fancied love,

And hell itself my only foe.

I lost earth’s joys, but felt the glow

Of heaven’s flame abound in me.

Till loveliness and I did grow

The bard of immortality.

I loved but woman fell away,

I hid me from her faded fame,

I snatch’d the sun’s eternal ray

And wrote till earth was but a name.

In every language upon earth,

On every shore, o’er every sea,

I gave my name immortal birth

And kept my spirit with the free.

Anne Stevenson

THE LOOM

I drowned in sleep.

And once my lungs were gills,

I watched my liquid shadow,

fathoms deep,

Weave through a trembling warp

of light and hope

a weft that kills.

No working hand

Had anything to do

with how the sea

Hurled itself in salt against the sand,

or how unfeelingly

The shore forgot to be the land

and mimed the sea…

Or how, under the dream,

One tightening thread

Gathered those crooked strokes of light

into a beam

Through which I rose—not quite

from the dead—