The Blue Tower (5 page)

 

the machines clattered away beneath my bed and they moved
Mrs. Novak out, while Žižek hides from me behind the
wall where Miška is now. Besides,
il n'a pas bien roulé ses

 

r, but Jani could. We insisted that the director of the
French Cultural Center deal with us, and
not with so-called French cultural

 

interests. Just where do you think you've opened your
center, we told him. And left. It turned out
Žižek was more cunning. He hit them straight in the

 

heart and buttered up that Milner, that
worm who forced his way into the party line till
Slavoj liquidated him. Now and then he still spits at me,

 

but less and less. Andro has stopped riding.
Pan jest
troszeczkę
nieporzą-dnym
just as much and Janko simply thinks
(I'd got on some stairs beneath an eave, since it was

 

raining and Janko with his shining face asked: what are you doing
up there on those steps—he was convinced I'd gone
mad, and that he'd find some relief—hey, Janko, it's

 

raining) and Å umi, who turned me like a screw,
spoiled brat!—of course those weren't the words he used—
young man, for years and years I was Stele's gofer, I'm giving

 

you the directorship after all. What Župančič? Izidor
Cankar! Oh, no, I said, Župančič even so.
He kissed ass once or twice, but you resent that

 

just because you kissed some ass yourself. Who cares!
Chi se ne
frega!
That multitudes in hoods and bonnets came out to
sing him serenades, and that as a child I stood before

 

his bier and in my mind's eye closed his eyes again, drew the
lids down like a pair of shutters, was only fair. He was a
clever one, too. He knew his grandson and I would be

 

al pari
one day and he wanted to protect him. Nice try.
I'm here to detonate your incest, so that now
his, others' and my gentle snow can fall on you.

I dreamed that Martinique was reheeled with water.
La bouche, la bouche,
André kept repeating, when
Andraž and I lived in Sing Sing. Did I chase him
because his name was so close? I told him
how I'd endured Senghor, that boats came floating from heaven,
falling on Lake Ohrid like fairy flies, that we
danced with our nephews, great-nieces and bodyguards,
all the ones that were here to keep them from staging a coup there. His locals
lured me to a monastery. Okudzhava wore black
shoes. I was the sweet party elite, sweeter than your
mouth. Palms flutter in Senegal. The priests wear cassocks.
And once, as I walked back from the St. Paul metro station, after
Semolič and I had been drinking at George's, I was picked up
by the same guy who had caught me at the words
la bouche, la bouche.

Thirty police cubes heaped up on an open
head. The syllabus: geoglyphs in Nazco. Set fire
to the wrapper wall of a one-year-old snake that has pimples
(vents) on the inside of its line. Icarus
hid his feathers under some fig trees. They lifted
me up in a basket. Little donkeys are handy.
They sleep on porcelain, covered with quilt.
A coil of heaven, blueprint of the mouth. What do chimneys
support, as they smoke from the belly? Who is
the outer circumference of a baker? In summer cold
clay is enough. And a lapidarium in the next country over, chopped
straight into the water. Mirrors are the defense of
pure little bug legs. The Greek god has a scythe on
his windlass. See how the boat crawls now.

Gregor tells us what you're up to.

 

There's humor tucked away in the chalk of the white spots.
People ask me how I get my eyelids to
sink. It's simple: skin,

 

stroke a dolphin, sometimes set Armenia on fire.
Diran knows exactly. Hash helps, hash is a
walker. Not for him, he's black, for him it's

 

weed. Marco called again. He
really means to buy Lindos. And I think about
Juan (his mother-in-law, the psychiatrist,

 

who trained with Lacan, frustrated because
there are no real customers in Naples), sure he checks out
when he thinks about the Nazco lines. Mostly they've

 

left to gather mushrooms, and I'm alone.
I'm riding yesterday's weed and even Diran's
typing. He's in the tower. He's got everything

 

poured into his computer. But me, if I'm not
physically chopping wood, I get lazy. My cornea is eaten
by torches, and dwarves in togas come rolling out of

 

geoglyphs. It hums, and if anyone has ever really thought how
to build a house, it's Juan. In Pittsburgh they also want
me for a semester. Liliana Ursu wants me

 

to write her a foreword. “I'm hot in
Kuala Lumpur.” Quite well known in
Singapore. Only to a precious few in

 

Jakarta, but they're on fire. In Jakarta
people don't have much money and have to
borrow my books. I still have that sheet,

 

Andrej, that you gave me on the flight to
Asia. All packed away. I'm not making things up
and not lying. Not exaggerating. Except

 

when I admire Marco's boat.
It's hopeless. It eats up so much gas.
No wonder you can't sell it

 

to anyone but a Saudi prince
at a loss, maybe the one who
cruised me on the Greek islands.

 

He designed and tracked it down himself. You
track down an invention like a hunting dog. And we were
melancholy everywhere. I've actually chased

 

Archilochus. GLADSTONE WAS A
PIG. I ONLY LIKED DISRAELI,
I hear distinctly. Just as Pogorelić

 

got everything from Liszt, via living people,
so now can I drink deeply from
the English crown. That has strategic

 

significance. Marco Canoni. Look it up.
O your eyes, Queen Victoria. O your
white feathers. But young dots do

 

the same. They're on the dense, on the tiny and
the fresh. I'm on the rare, the horrible and
mad. But not sold out. Not sold out.

 

I'm fighting with Primož's prediction that
I'll end as gilding, that I'm just playing.
Deit strokes my head. Deit has a say in the catch.

A slave placates my godfather. The left sleeve is
too short. I'm with you. Root out every
half-splinter half-straw from the base of the

 

brush. I'm with you.
O grain, forming a sphere from your stalk.
Destroying and building churches.

 

Bending a clapper.
Spitting on crumbs pressed into the sand by a horse
hoof.

 

Why did you land here and not there?
How deep do you sink?
A screw would be no fun, you saw and

 

shoved off. The noises are fairy tales. So are the foams.
The light
turns around. A bird flickers like lightning and

 

sings like lightning.
Copying its divine gift.
The last sap of the beams in a trench, before it pays its caste.

 

I'm charming. I've subjugated.
I discover some change in my
hand.

 

A berry falls onto a drop.
Ardent la belle, where are you?
I've retreated into the cream inside the bread.

 

I hear the paws of Teddy, the black dog, as they
echo off the grass as off a carpet.
He also loves and desires attention.

Dane was handed around by Parisian counts
who offered him trips on their yachts around Africa.
And now me: would you go with me to Kuala

 

Lumpur? “Who will get it?” A pear is stuffed
with a piano, o exvalidated. The surrealists kept
everything under glass. Their piano lay alone

 

amidst clouds resembling some Tyrolean fence.
A pear stuffed with a piano, o exvalidated,
accomplishes three times thirty thousand times as much

 

as the queen bee in her hive. When Beatrice buys and samples
cheese (it's true, Tonino, the serotonin in pecorino, with ruccola
and chianti make you dream towards morning

 

that you've lost your keys, your wallet, and all your
cards) people are stunned. She takes a fig, gives it
first to me to bite a little off, then tries it

 

herself, and puts whatever's left back into the grocer's
hand. People learn. Even in Tuscany they've forgotten
quite a bit. They're only now

 

discovering why Masaccio was tremendo,
why he struck Gentile da Fabriano to the quick
when still a boy, not to mention (but which

 

Longhi said, long ago, though no one believed him)
what he did for Fra Angelico. He made Fra Angelico
ready for God. Till then he'd painted cliffs like

 

Bosch, little monks like Bosch, and his animals
carry something in their mouths like one-headed
stars. I open the corridor. There are people

 

gathering in it now, who'd also like to get bread,
while the two of us just try some, turn it,
cold-bloodedly preparing ourselves for slow food.

 

The people get that instinctively, although they
had those idiotic Savoys instead of
proper noble souls. And Pan opening

 

Radovljica is worth six hundred silks. Rock me,
Vintgar, little paw. There it's blue, there it's
cool. There an old man sits on the cliffs, eyes bulging, like some

 

haggard eagle. And there I, the sun, retreated early
and left you in peace to develop. You can also
feel free to forget those five hundred postcards. A leg

 

cut into a pine doesn't bleed like a leg snagged on a
cork tree. Rabbit carries his lettuce and house
on his back all by himself. And Bloom really is

 

fat and really does look like Bloom.
Terry stroked him while he lectured about the
Mormons. Yesterday she was a lizard, a canicula, a

 

cassiopeia, because I can't spit straight out what she
really was—an iguana. Diran and I danced ourselves
bloody at the sight of it. I'm sixty years old.

 

My soul is growing. I scare Metka by gurgling as I
wake up. By wheezing like a volcano. When I move
my body like a mountain to my studio, these little

 

rabbits jump out of it, before I've even
finished washing up and exercising. Those spiritualized worms
spring up if I wander the world.

Vesper sketched bird, glossolalia.
Do you remember? From out of those little cheeks and boxes
at Novi Sad Radio?
I've been bound to the nipples with sticks.
Ouch, Bermuda mattress!
Ouch, Bermuda mattress!
A strong bird that extricates itself to winter,
planning a rumba for part of the sky.
It materializes as flying geese.
I went to the movies to sprinkle myself.
Conscience stings the coffee, rolls out a dead pie.
Hairpins go flying from wall to wall,
as do Turks, bearing three mythical titles:
Commodore of the Turkish Opera. President of the Chamber
of Turkish Architects. But we're not there.
We're here: the young archbishop of Constance has a Jacuzzi.
Lorraine under a blotter. O my herbarium.
Tannin and a rolled-up bag, where are epic elements?
Six broad-shouldered, six men.
It wasn't till Delaware (when we missed the exit) that I sensed
how dew is produced on the skin of America.
What if I wrapped all these pieces up in a kerchief and numbered them.
I religiously take off my slippers and put on a shoe.
I religiously listen to the sounds in my body.
I will religiously open the door and go out to smoke.

Refuse from a tundula.
The caro anita of mankind.
These are lions on a bridge without manes.
Stampless horses without bellies.
Pupolotti (bulbs) that burn out and get changed.
A real bridge with a real foundation, with real water, and a wet
shadow. What here can be walked across, we always swam.
Spinning our hats and stovepipes in the seawater.
Fashion doesn't grow old. Water doesn't grow old.
The turning point in the nest should be overpaid.
I remember you with knitting needles in your lap, when you used them
to point at Rafko.
A buck loped down from the castle.
Rosette, a rose, Rosika. Where Mazlu, Stančič
Avšič, Mrs. Abramič, and Mrs. Senčar (née Ban) gathered.
First wipe off the knife, then the grave.
The soldiers are marching off to sleep.