Ana Jelnikar 

Translator

I'd almost forgotten the sacred nonsenseof the world. 
Where it begins and where it ends. As a poem does.
You want to say : we were there, but we didn't have

control over our verbs, they came and went
so naturally. As with really good poems. 
I'd almost forget the beginning, the sand pit

and where it ends. I was convinced that I could stop
and that the glass would hold up under my small body.
Now I know : there the cracks are opening & also for 

the time back then. The world's not forgotten; I'm coming 
back with a slow, calm step, as though all the gentleness
I can muster gestures towards the peak of my powers 

while pure concentration courses through my body.
The poem is such a space of poise. Lunch is 
done with, and teas drunk, the chapter read. 

Time for new shifts to newspaces.
We'll have to sit on the bench
and send a page a life off 

on the digital sheet. But adress ourselves how ?
Like poems; they start from nothing & end with us. 

for K., 1 January 2013, 04:54

The government is corrupt
and we're on so many drugs with the radio on
and the curtain is drawn.
GY!BE, The Dead Flag Blues

Perhaps I would only want to remember summer days
when the tree fell asleep, leaning against my back,
or those hours when with soap in my palms I'd try to
wash away my face as an excuse that the day is done 

and that tomorrow it's all going to be different again,
in need of renewal and tears between two wrecked cars.
Turn on the radio so we can hear what happened between our eyes, 
in front of which occasionally in the darkened cinema hall,

the beaming face of Willem Dafoe came swaying in.
The vomitting of the Portuguese flag on the road's edge
forced you to think about your own death and parents
who don't even know you scraped all the dust off the table

and shoved it into all the mucus membranes of your body.
We were scientifically-mystical, biochemical, poetico-
physical, to each other and also to ourselves.
We danced longer. And hid outin the latrines.  

Perhaps it is then (now) that hope starts
for all possible survivals of the apocalypse
that would make of these days merely feverish dreams,
before the world breaks like the jam centre of a biscuit.
 
It is always others who die. The others in ourselves.
While we are falling in love with days we cashed in
with the return to our bed. Only then are we
allowed to break down and fall ill and cry like in films

because the only thing we recognized in these days
is the emerging memory that will endure, glow and hit you.
We were lucky to be born into this later period
(like everyone before us), it gives us entry to 

a sadness that others were unfamiliar with. But leaning
through the rainy window you don't have the impression you
are in the desert, unless that is its darkness on the other side of
the street. We're in the twenty-first century & no one really knows

what that means. New York is without electricity & under water.
Everyone is leaving for abroad & we've squandered other possibilities.
Still we don't know from where such thoughts come, when it rains
and the cities are filled with people who know that the world 

in their hands will only last until the end of vulnerability
and covert amazement and only till the end of the night.
When I was able to breathe deeply and go for a walk:
past the trees, market square and fountains, past the graffiti : 

tatoos on the skin of the town telling us every time anew
a story that sometimes, but more often not, contains the two of us.
We have found the time and found the skin by the pale light
and hair longer than ours, and all the sexual organs

and blood and worries and hair and wounded animals and fear
and innocence and searching and music and each other
and apparitions between the world and ourselves. All this laid
into a gift that we'd never recognize from the outside. 

I would've had to discover poetry by age thirty,
have had my first child with my second wife,
gone bankrupt a third time, tried to ruin someone,
to know what I was missing out on when alone.
Don't forget what you are fighting for : that
silence you allow others to break into.
Trust, so you can hear them say :
Now you've opened up to us, right ? You spoke
and we listened to you. We listened to you
and it was important and you deserved this
after years of silence, after years of listening
to our screaming, which we'll turn back to 
as jauntily as to a walk in spring time, 
while all these words will pain you like
the stillness at the end of The Graduate.
Or a perverse interest in suffering.
When I am quiet, I hide nothing. 
When I am quiet, I reveal myself to the core.
I have nothing left, not even my lucky matches,
not even feeling jaded by a new melody,
or the twelve-steps list of anonymous alchoholics :
4.) we will undertake a thorough and fearless inventory
of our moral state of being. I'm not prepared 
to surrender myself to the hidden hope
that in fact we are perfectly fine. I hope 
we are mortal, that death comes as soon as it can
and without discrimination. No, that's not what
I wanted to say, I was angry & sorry to be so.
That in all the days of our life we would admit
to ourselves whenever we totally fucked up, today too.
But now it's already dark outside & once more I've written
myself to white-out. Somebody came & walked the dog
so I'm alone in the house again, feeling quiet and calm
like a smoker after a cigarette, like after the end
of the poem. 

Given what I see every day
it helps to say
anything  

Today it's raining and the salad's growing,
the day resembles no other
and what will tomorrow be like. 

It won't work, I find myself saying.
Maybe it's just one of those years
but the earth goes deeper

and the sky always brings some gift.  
So important it all is
and constantly changing

and this hurts like hunger
like fleshy stinging nettles at the edge of an allotment
which I cut down with a scythe. 

Given the lavish performance,
the bounteous holiday of seeds and fruits,
I don't do much work. 

That means I do
what needs to be done
so as not to forget what's vital.                       

When we go from here
we'll take
the garden with us. 

A young crow came.
It's sitting in a black baking tray
I left out on the garden bench

so as not to forget
the elderflower blossoms.
The baking tray is full of 

young crow
beak opened
screaming searingly. 

Then it leaps to the ground,
makes an awkward totter round the garden
and returns. 

The elderflower bush smells good
all the way back to here,
but she wants to be somewhere else. 

She doesn't yet know how to fly.
I take the baking tray into the kitchen
and tell the whole story. 

In the evening we sit at the table.
We've done eating the fried elderflower, 
from outside the sound of

the wind's rustling.
Again I'm the last one
to bed. 

The minute I close my eyes
I see the crow.
The world is young.  

And then it all goes blank.

Mornings follow mornings, days repeat them
as though they want to merge into one vast morning.
The corner road by the playground turns from fresh shade
and pulls up directly in front of the sun.
Each morning this happens a little bit earlier,
soon, perhaps by tomorrow, it will be too early even
for the road & it'll wake caught in sunlight.  

It's worth starting the day early.
Wearing a glove of dreams we skated across
icy tracks to live & sleep through the darkness. 
To open the windows & air the room. In the morning
cold air positions itself on all fours between
the floor and the ceiling & holds the entire day upright.
White cherry tree, last snowdrops, new ball in the courtyard. 

There's no nature mornings can't find.
Nothing is unnatural. Work flows from one morning
to the next, the postman rehearses his way address by address,
until gradually he empties the gold-blazing bag
and rests by the low wall of the fruit orchard. The bee doesn't notice him.
Children from the kindergarten, on their walk, make a ring round the parked bike
like a delightful forecast for the next day morning. 

On flexible string, taut from the early morning
washing hangs, socks walking in the wind, tottering
trousers approached by noon falling almost
into a forsythia bush. That rare connoisseur of morning,
the invisible cuckoo, lays out trap eggs and sings
from the tree opposite. The echo is a fleck of time
that passed from morning, and came back on a moment's delay. 

Throw the ball toward me. I'll chuck it back.
No matter if it runs out onto the road. It's worth the try.
The cherry lit in the darkness sheds blossom all the way to daylight,
and in the morning white the ball lies by the edge-wall and looks
like an egg. Next to it cold air is parked.
Returning from the sunny walk, one of the children
finds it & carries it to the playground & everyone follows : 

It's never too early to repeat the exercise. 

Pylons   

Slanting snow, Sunday open to the sky.
The play of water and cold unfolds
in even, fantastical sequels.
Three figures cut through cluttered pavement
like apparitions. 
I'm seated at the table by the window that's
planted into the thick northern wall.
The child's asleep with breath zooming  
round the room, fisty-fighting the snowstorm. 
Two thoughts veer headlong on the slippery slope.
They come to a stop at the top, take sledges
from their backs and sit down.
Look, mother 's waving at us.
Look, there.
The sledges go rushing across the white clearing
like crazy,
Gusts of wind and fine snow, back & forthing
a starkly bewildered child's face,
leaning
across the imagined edge.
Then a cough, a moan.
I sit and follow all this
like a vigilant dog, 
on guard under the tall pylon
& eat Sunday snow. 

I wish I were somewhere else.
Not that I know where that is.
And I'd not be getting up to anything.
Just somewhere I could get back from
or some place I could stay.
When I take in the air, I tend to know.
Light is not the most important thing,
because it changes all the time,
but air is.
That breathing comes easily.
That you can intake & give out. 
Tired in the evening, fresh in the morning.
That the movement's good.
Somewhere where you like to work. 

Three gulls flying above Ljubljana. 

My friend is an existentialist. He collects china
and Japanese teapots. You get the best cup of tea at his place.
Steeped to perfection. It may not be a true ceremony
but in our drinking, when we sit around the table,
there is definitely something aesthetic. I like the scene
when we keep quiet and sip the scent of tea.
All of us are existentialists. First we laugh, only then do we say
that’s a good joke. The two of us also read Šalamun.
Once we spent the whole summer saying: Jonah
are you a fish? I am a fish. We were all on the island Hvar.
I have another friend who is a Buddhist. We were standing
on the border between philosophy and theology. We said: ouch, it’s
sharp. You can cut yourself here. Perhaps he will read the Tibetan secret
tantras and then we can all have a laugh together on Shoemakers’ Bridge.
Another time we joked about nothingness, how horribly cold it is
for our homes. He said: I am sated with wisdom. From now on
I shall take only with a teaspoon. It will lead us all astray.
Branko sent me a sacred cow from Nepal.
He should’ve come back by now, but he is a wanderer.
Two of my friends are musicians. One writes to me from the North
though he has an Eastern name. Lao Zi is a legend.
The other is a bass player. He may speak to Peacock one day.
On Tales of Another footprints are white. Jarrett is talking to
angels. Spirits too, if you will. When we discuss music
we never know where it comes from and where it goes. But for sure
it is not in the notes. This much we agree on. And I know from personal experience.
Another friend of mine works in printing. The two of us ride bicycles together.
Sometimes we don’t speak at all. Perhaps he doesn’t know when I am decent.
That I uncover myself when I am hot. Because I was afraid that he’d fall
I gave him The Climbing Skills. A book from 1950.

Let’s all go to Medvode for some tea some time to say a thing or two
about our destiny. Something fine binds us. Grom said
a good score is like a stick of gum that stretches and spreads
to all sides but doesn’t snap. It seems to be the same with us.
We are swinging on rubber, careful not to be too rough.
When it is hot we wait for it to cool. We blow too,
and our wind makes ripples on the edges of china.
Something fine binds us. The important thing is that it bursts
but doesn't snap

Forgive me for being so inconsiderate
praise from the people close to you matters most
love is a rushing homeland on a bicycle
and war only frightful news on people's tongues

under coats stone particles crumble
these don't overlook anyone's weaknesses
but try and do whatever makes you satisfied
fear is the forger of someone else's money

the body is an inner tube filled to the brim with air
the universe an airless prisonhouse of the mind
whoever dies won't say another word

is war merely frightening news on people's lips
if only everyone did what made them happy
change is a rushing homeland on a bicycle

First song speaks of the old way
of life. How things were set
in the beginning and how it was clear where
they should end or outlined begin again

with familiar feelings. But then the cuckoo
started to strike greater hours, and grass
grew taller and flowers blossomed more beautifully
and afternoon strollers gazed at hitherto missed colours.

Snow still white, but cleaner
and brighter, the sky above the roof tiles still blue,
but blue in the goldenness of a perfect
afternoon, and the song still resounding

in its evergreen tones. The stars cast
their glance towards us like surprised acquaintances
bumping into one another after a thousand years,
and the book sticks to its claim even after a thousand years,

and a special river has crawled between
the glittering rocks from the old riverness
polished to perfect shapes like durable
hearts tossed into its winding.

Not a month to name
nor a year to know when
it all started, only sounds of moments
poured into an ear and the time unknown

as though all time was past, your original sin
still buried in your sleep and from an empty
pocket you can pull your first song
which took you there. But it is plain and clear now,

only its chorus that you once knew by heart
keeps changing, so that you can never catch the words.

Will you always skate alone.
Will your skating pay off.

Skater, the music blusters out of silence
stronger,
your heart keeps balance with the skates.

The giant shapes of cities want you melancholy,
but you can't stop to catch the open talk.

And you skate alone (as if someone was skating beside you),
in a crowd of skaters (and yet you skate alone).

How you change, you know what's under the sky,
how skilled your skates are!

Even the first skater wants to show you how to be
the fastest skater in the rink of the universe!

That you are not the only one,
that there are those more competitive,
but not everyone can be in the wonderful thicket of the void.

Are you following the sky, follow it, follow it,
there's always something momentous there.

Just don't tell people about your skating.
They wouldn't believe you kept your balance on your own.

Stop always saying what makes you happy.
You're not the only one with jagged skates.

Skate as if you were skating on your own.
Skate as if you were skating alone.

Boy, where are you skating, in your anger
you have lost your bearings.

There is a universe attracting you
and your skates take leave of the ground.

Do dancers dance on their heads here
or do they simply fall
and are deep in their fast falling.

Tiny dots are planets and the skates
every so often slide off the curved surface.

Is this a dance of dancing or has the earth
danced for all time and your skating is only a wish.

If you move with such haste, can anyone ever
stop you, see you take off your skates.

You are a fine skater, your skating
the flight of a comet's shards through the cosmos.

Did you ever see a shooting star, catch sight
of lightning, suddenly, hear big banging.

Did your inner human voice burst or
close-lipped voice for the first time.

Ah, you tremble (gliding into the void),
the skates groan: regret nothing.

Pick up castaway skates and glide
across frozen pavements.

Point-blank honed, cut into the surface
and let the legs with the skates be one.

Skate away quickly, alone, as though it were a race,
pay no attention to shouts: “Where is he skating?”

It’s good to skate this way, no bounds
under skates everything is allowed.

You’re the lone skater down here, you see
neither marks nor shadows the skates cast.

You glide among the city lights,
you hold your balance,
you don’t fall over backwards.

The skates leave a sharp trace of lines,
grooves in the shimmering surface under them.

So, take a dusty old pair and skate away
into a skidding substance, there you’ll feel whole.

Skate by yourself and under you, ice will turn
to a quickened liquid.

Don’t tell people about your skating.
Skate as though you weren’t skating alone.

I’m sure you absolutely have to
trust imagination and the tracks
that language takes in pathlessness.
It probably knows. In any case,
it’s smarter than we are, probably our only support.
When you walk through the desert you need water
and spare parts for the jeep.
So take everything you find in this dictionary,
and everything you don’t. You might need it.
Even later, even when you no longer are —
apparitions of comets over the dunes,
and the stars will shine on.