The Blue Tower (4 page)

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-Christine 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
only daughter, my mother described all of that in the

 

New York Times
in August.
You don't know my mother and you say you saw
me. The two of us have been together for a whole

 

eternity. Paul is having Terry over, why don't you
come too. When I parked beneath that wall—out of 40,000
cars three go over every day, on average—

 

my car wasn't hit, my car got hit by a
kangaroo that was instantly killed. Me too,
man, when I finally smuggled the hash under my

 

gums (in Singapore they hang you, that made it
more exciting) and got it nice and ready before
breakfast, I always use it to celebrate when

 

I get to someplace new and I add the country's name
for the benefit of philistines, since even philistines
are part of democracy and etiquette. Only the prince-bishop commands

 

where to sow cabbage. Bodies jutting out, bugs
rasping, water running short and the pen is black.
Nature is beaten down into a concave gloss.

 

Because my father didn't lash any Jews, I'm
protected. Whiteness from a dark cup. Coffee
from a quiet street. Frescoes have a smell. The head

 

is Sirah's body. For three centuries we've been living
off matches. I chain a kleptomaniac to a
pear. The chain can't slip off because the

 

pear gets fat toward the bottom. I invented a pane
with three cantons and used a periscope like Živko.
I'll bet not just the picture from Marezige, I'll bet

 

you even have my Lujo statue in your cellar. What will you do
when the hunter's horn starts poking its way through your
soul? What will you do when you find out Snežnik isn't

 

yours anymore? What will you do when you encounter a bear,
grumbling, looking around for a pair of slippers. Take them off so they don't
give you blisters. Lower your periscope. And the canoe, the falls,

 

the kayak, all those rubber deals, so you bounce gently,
pull in your knees, pull in your knees, Živko!
of course I'll shove into your Postojna

 

Cave through a quiver. Putin learned from me
to poison before a hand even touches the trigger.
Diran doesn't have his black belt and I'm not

 

forbidden to say his name. I prize human
beings. In the clay they're lovable creatures. In Venice
I fell in love twice: with a fifteen-year-old girl in a

 

fur, on the Ponte dell'Accademia, and with a
seventeen-year-old boy who constantly
put on and took off his sweater in front of me at the Bacon

 

retrospective. All the attainable ones, wings of a dove,
I've brought along with me. Dunk the
veil. Made out of fox lairs, sleeps

 

blissful dreams. The horse climbs up on four
legs. I leave my driver. I leave my bike.
The joints pale and go rusty. Honor beats the bags.

What I softened and what I didn't soften
what I stabbed into Ogrizek's body, they say
he had a dog that ate bones. I warm myself,

 

close the armoire, turn off the light in the
bathroom. Yesterday I steamed like a horse after
riding. O scents of stable manure, o spurs

 

of Dr. Ewa Rogalska's late sister,
Pan jest troszeczkę
nieporządnym,
Christine told me, because she'd been
told to say that to me, instead of preparing

 

the servants properly for welcoming a guest.
Servants have to have a plan. They can't help it if they've
forgotten history. Servants have to be

 

ready for blows from the most unpredictable
quarters. Masaccio draws a red piglet in the middle
of the church, and this is what I told him: I'll pay

 

for everything but your whores, that would cross her, and I
don't like anything to cross her, or what I told
Andraž. Go and saddle up. In Sejno they'll

 

teach you to ride at least well enough for you
to talk about it. You've been silent long enough.
Out of that Dostoyevsky cage of yours. Žižek ran off. Only

 

Jani Razpotnik came with me. Žižek hid around a
corner, I clearly remember. They had just
made those holes beneath our house, Ravnikar wants Bologna,