Saturday, December 27, 2014

Tomaž Šalamun poem

Tomaž Šalamun

Fish-Peacock

With juice in my muscles.
I’m not bad, I’m used to it and calm.
I’m dissolving my eyes.
I hear the sail fluttering.
The sun kisses the white linen
thirty times and settles
like a glowing club.
Who cares about refoli!
From the left and the right—the sea!
A quadruped first uses all
four of his legs, he runs over the earth.
The bush scratches, how it tamps down, now this, now
that, but what steps into silk,
a rift in the glue, still on the earth?
Is it still in triumph and juice when it takes off?

No one scratches you softly in heaven. You
can’t roll up your cloven foot,
no granite cube for your
head. Mouldering limbs have meaning.
The air is grayish bronze,
someone is burning linen tablecloths,
the calves are drunk and dazed.

You catch your lungs,
they roll over and uncover
a fresh cherry pie, someone
unwinds it before it was poured
into the piepan. Plants grow
into it and out,
the skin fits like the moon.

Do you remember my blue bathing suit
and the record for the hundred-meter freestyle?
How you stretched above the splits.
And your rested pulse,
a little like a twitching fish,
a little like a fish fanning itself.



Translated by Christopher Merrill and the author

[from Verse, Volume 15, Number 3/Volume 16, Number 1]

No comments: