Has some rather new technology in here.
How's the sound?
Is that good?
Welcome, delighted to see you all here tonight.
A long awaited event, many years,
we've been trying to bring this poet to Tucson.
And I'm very happy to be able to do so tonight.
I have a few announcements before the reading.
Seems a little intense.
First, of all the next reading sponsored by the Poetry Center
will be next Wednesday the 28th here.
It's the reading by graduate students
in the MFA program completing their work in poetry.
And those who will be presenting that night
will be Robert Brown, Heather Brossard, Melanie Finley,
and Carl Markham.
Always a wonderful opportunity to celebrate
the accomplishments of some of our students.
So that's Wednesday.
And most of you probably already know
that the Poetry Center currently has an exhibit
at the main library and also in special collections of posters
from the early years of the Center's reading series,
1961 to '74, posters, photographs,
and some odd and quite beautiful small books, artist design
books, chat books.
That's in the main library and in the special collections
library.
There's a display of books from Arizona publishers,
both journals and small press books.
So I urge you to take advantage of those.
Those will be up until the end of November.
And a final announcement is that our website now has some,
I think, tremendously useful supplementary information
that David Penn has been writing about the authors coming
in on the visiting series.
So if you'd like to learn more about these authors,
I urge you to visit our cyber place
at www.coh.arizona.edu slash poetry slash.
Tomaz Salamun was born in Zagreb, Croatia,
and raised in Slovenia, which was,
until 1991, the northernmost Republic of Yugoslavia.
He received an MA in Art History from the University
of Ljubljana, undertook further study in Paris and Rome,
and worked as a conceptual artist, showing work in 1970
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
before turning to poetry.
Or as he described to us this morning,
before poems began to come in his life like stones that fall.
That first trip to New York was followed
by longer stays in the US as a member
of the international writing program
at the University of Iowa, as a resident of Yaddo and McDowell
writing colonies, and as a Fulbright fellow.
Widely recognized as one of the leading Central European poets,
he is the author of 30 books of poetry
written in Slovenian, a language spoken
by only 2 million people.
Two volumes of selected translations in English
have been published in the US, The Selected Poems of Tomaz
Salamun, edited by Charles Simic,
published in 1988 by The Echo Press and The Four
Questions of Melancholy, New and Selected Poems,
edited by Christopher Merrill, published
last year by White Pine Press.
To scan the list of poets who have collaborated
with him on his translations, most notably,
Bob Perlman, Charles Simic, and Anselm Hollo,
is to gain a window into his poetic lineage.
A lineage trailing the smoke of European surrealism
and [INAUDIBLE] avant garde.
When I say smoke, I do not mean to suggest that the fire has
come and gone in these works.
Indeed, the fire flares so brightly that reading them,
one feels that good jolt of energy of having experienced
something utterly new.
One is struck by how American they sound in their Frank
O'Hare style casualness.
And one is struck by how their imagery is
both so grounded and so impossible,
as in the best of the surrealists.
How these influences came to him,
we learned in conversation this morning,
are equally fascinating in what they
reveal about the cross-pollination occurring
in World poetry's during this volatile century.
O'Hara getting his casualness and the French poets Reverdy
and Apollinaire and then handing it off
to an itinerant Slovenian poet in New York.
And in Slovenia's neighboring Serbia,
poets being influenced by the French surrealist, Andre
Breton, who generally was not read in Slovenia
but whose influence then also filtered indirectly
into Salamun's work.
But this makes his poetry sound overly intellectual.
And what is so remarkably refreshing
about it is how in spite of the rich stew of aesthetic sources
on which he's fed, his work is so
innocent of premeditated theories.
It's filled with a wild, and jolting, and grateful humanity
in which language manages to make the tarnished world shine.
Please welcome Tomaz Salamun.
[CLAPPING]
Thank you, Alison.
It's one of the major event in all poets living life
if you receive a letter from Alison Deming
to come to Tucson because you are
known as the important center in the world for poetry.
I will read from my poems, early and late ones, and two of them
will be in Slovenian.
"Jonah.
How does the sun set, like snow.
What color is the sea?
Large.
Jonah, are you salty?
I'm salty.
Jonah, are you a flag?
I'm a flag.
The fireflies rest now.
What are stones like?
Green.
How do little dogs play?
Like flowers.
Jonah, are you a fish?
I'm a fish.
Jonah, are you a sea urchin?
I'm a sea urchin.
Listen to the flow.
Jonah is the roe running through the woods.
Jonah is the mountain breathing.
Jonah is all the houses.
Have you ever heard such a rainbow?
What is the dew like?
Are you asleep?"
Kako zahaja sonce?
Kot sneg.
Kakšne barve je morje?
Široko.
Jon si slan?
Slan sem.
Jon si zastava?
Zastava sem.
Vse kresnice počivajo.
Kakšni so kamni?
Zeleni.
Kako se igrajo kužki?
Kot mak.
Jon si riba?
Riba sem.
Jon si morski ježek?
Morski ježek sem.
Poslušaj kako šumi.
Jon je če teče srna skozi gozd.
Jon je če gledam goro kako diha.
Jon so vse hiše.
Slišiš kakšna mavrica?
Kakšna je rosa?
Spiš?
"The Cross.
I'll draw a cross.
Serpentines on my rocking chair.
How pathetically the shirt hangs once the body has left it.
Yet it's still a shirt.
And here's what clinches our defeat for us,
both a suitcase and a t-bar.
Have you ever seen a chair running
from the bathroom towards the kitchen,
or vise versa for it doesn't matter?
Hysterically, asking, what about my eternal life?
Have you ever seen a balcony railing
saying, I've had enough, I've had enough, I've had enough.
I too am fond of my modest life.
I too must have my share.
And if you've down glagoljashka street and seen
an old boot lying between house number 4 and the well,
left there from that year, when the last nighttime regattas
took place and Mario won.
Did the boot ask you, hello, excuse me
for bothering you here on the street
but doesn't it seem to you, doesn't it seem to you,
doesn't it seem to you things are inscrutable
in their craftiness, unattainable
to the rage of the living, invulnerable
in their endless flight?
You can catch up with them.
You can sees them, motionless, in their staring.
Dead men.
Dead men, dead men.
Where in the steps the birds fleet and the day
splits in half.
Where the cube heads are sailboats of whisk
and the wagon loads of boards rebound off cliffs.
Where morning's glitter like the eyes of Slavs.
Where in the North the beaver slap each other.
It resounds as an invitation to death.
Where are the children point to the livid eyes and jump
with rage on the timber.
Where with their turn of arms they
scare the bulls belonging to the neighbors.
Where they stand in line for the cold.
Where the bread stinks of vinegar, women of wild animals.
Dead men, dead men.
Where the tusks flesh and fairy tales
wrestle with the highest art is to nail the slave in mid-air.
Where the corn is burned on the vast plains so that God can
smell it.
Dead men.
Where there are special churches for birds
to teach them to bear the burden of the souls.
Where the inhabitants at every meal
snap their braces and step on sacred texts under the table.
Where the little balls are orange,
mothers are nailed onto square shapes.
Where the horses are black with soot.
Dead men, dead men.
Where the skittles are tools of giants
bruising their greasy hands on logs.
Where meat dealers are beaten to death with rackets and left.
Unburied Where the danube flows into the movie, from the movie
into the sea.
Where the soldier bugle is the signal for spring.
Where souls leap high and whisper in chorus.
Dead men, dead men.
Where the reading is strengthened with
gravel to be heard.
When we strike it, it booms.
Where the trees have screw threads.
The boulevards knee joints.
Where they cut into children's skin the [INAUDIBLE]
after birth as into cork trees.
Where they sell alcohol to the old women.
Where the youth scrapes his mouth as the dredger
scrapes to the bottom of the river.
Dead men, dead men.
Where mothers are proud and pluck out
filaments from their sons.
Where the locomotives are covered in elk's blood.
Where the light rots and cracks.
Where the ministers are dressed in granite.
Where wizards graft causes animals to fall into baskets.
The jackals tread on the eyes of otters.
Dead men, dead men.
Where one marks the size of the sky with a cross.
Where the whip is rugged and the cheeks puffed up by fires.
Where the flocks have eyes of leather.
Where all waterfalls are though they
tied them with black ribbons of young beings.
Where they break the instant bones
obsessed with timber hooks.
Dead men, dead men.
Where photography is limited to plants
that grow and blow up the paper.
Where the plums dry in the lofts and fall in the old songs.
Where soldiers' mothers will the food parcels up to the rack.
Where the herons are built as athletic Argonauts.
Dead men, dead men.
Where sailors come to visit.
Where in the village the horse is neigh.
The travelers smell.
Where the little bathroom tiles are covered
with drawings of Irish seeds.
Where the cannibals are fed wooden shingles.
Where the vine branches are wrapped in gray
veils so that the eyes of the jealous film over.
One must cook well for one's husband and pigs.
I comb my daughter's hair.
Where are you going stars?
Sunflower, are you asleep?
A sunflower, black seed, gold.
Are you asleep?
The gods spread the wings over you.
Black venom, a closed miracle.
Are you asleep?
The dew flattens you.
You sleep.
You awake, bewitched.
Dust and whirlpools of trains, a failed path.
You're asleep.
And you're expecting a bride.
A black rain drops of light.
A black sword, sunflower, gold and bondsmen.
Poppy and a weed.
The steps of tired people.
Their boats loaded with soil.
Your death.
Sister of the sun.
A statue of greeting.
In the glow, I meditate on my sins.
Crickets, a red brick driven to the ground.
Pumpkins, brothers, winged animals.
Sunflower, we share the land, silence of turning."
"The Difference.
Did you open his eyes?
Did you think he was unfriendly?
I didn't open his eyes.
I didn't think he was unfriendly.
Will you burn him?
Will you bring him wings?
I won't burn him.
I won't bring him wings.
What's his profession?
Driver.
He drives into dust all day.
Does he splash when the snow falls?
When the snow falls, he clings to chains.
Where did you meet him?
In the woods.
He said, he wanted to be a pilot.
He wanted to know if it's much warmer down South.
And if there's much difference between footprints.
Acquedotto.
I should have been born in Trieste in 1884
on the Acquedotto.
But it didn't turn out that way.
I remember the three storied reddish house.
The ground floor with its furnished living room.
My great grandfather, brackets my father end brackets,
nervously studying the stock market reports,
blowing cigar smoke and calculating quickly.
When I was already four months inside my great-grandmother,
there was a family Council.
The result of which was the postponement
of my arrival for two generations.
The decision was written down.
The sheet stuffed into an envelope,
sealed, and sent to an archive in Vienna.
I remember traveling back toward the light on my belly
and watching an old man fussing as he measured the shelf.
Taking another body from the shelf
and shoving it by the head down the air shaft.
I had the impression I was seven years old
and that my substitute, my grandfather,
was a bit older, nine or 10.
I was composed at the same time these events disturbed me.
I remember that for a time I withered most likely because
of the strong light.
And then my lungs flattened like a bag.
When I reached the proper tonus, I fell asleep.
I knew my body was down below.
And in my dream, I saw it many times.
It was that of a slow moving man with mustaches, a dreamer,
and banker his whole life.
Are angels green?
Can the sky support them?
Workers have a mouth, a face, a walk, kids.
Little lambs lick grass.
Tigers tear meat.
To get water they go down to the river.
I've seen the rainbow going down.
Shepherd swimming over.
I waved.
Felt I was burning.
I knew I was awake.
Wondered who was singing.
Who made you day?
Where do ants come from?
Why does the thread hold together?
Why does daylight fall on the knife?
Stupid maturity rubbing my collar.
Where are the blacksmiths to forge my shoes?
I don't like them to cover my eyes.
I want the light to strike me.
Air, I want everyone to breathe.
Mouse, shit.
Sand.
I'm not the subject.
I'm God's strong box.
Like a cow, I have to lie on gold at the precise altitude.
It isn't true that I'm here on the sand
because I would love it.
I'm the pumpkin on the hot roof of the world.
The Lord drips water on me.
I'm not the subject.
I'm God's strongbox.
I made no decision to look either down or up.
I know.
Last night, in the water where Barnett Newman's line
disappeared, I drowned.
I swam to the surface like a black, dark blue, luminous
blossom.
It's terrible to be a flower.
The world stopped.
Mute.
Like Velvet, I opened.
Perhaps, for good.
Before with Tomaz Brejc we talked
about the mystique of finance, about the I, the triangle,
about God.
Possible readings of chance, of Slovenian history and destiny.
Don't touch me.
I'm the greatest capital just as I am.
I'm the water in which the destiny of the world
take place for us.
I'm dizzy.
I don't understand.
I know.
Tonight, when I made love, I reported
I'm a black cube now like marble or granite
from the other world.
Birds standing with yellow feet and an immense yellow beak.
My black feathers shining.
Now, the eminent church dignitary that is they
all wanted me the blossom.
I'm the pure dark blossom standing still on the surface,
untouchable and untouched.
Terrifying.
My mind is a woman.
A male mariachi, trained to be an archer, a phone.
It has five eyes.
Two of a polecat, of a crow, and the first the terrible one
of the Cyclops.
My mind has the scent of a white flower.
It fixes green blood on black stalks.
To the black blood, it invites hungry hounds, red horses.
My mind is a sacred cow bleeding in the ellipses.
Shepherd.
The snow buried all the trees, all the trees.
I'm warming my numb hands on the fire beneath the sheepfold.
My sheep are dropping on the backs from cold.
Bleating their milk like cries, on their backs.
I've been in the mountains for ages, guarding the seven lakes.
How the Buzzards, they slew my sheep one by one
under the cross.
My suit turned white under the dark blue firmament.
Snow and ice devour everything.
They all had their moment except me.
My pleasure.
My piping.
My valley.
I've always been alone with my cruel dog who
knows my back strap to ease his hunger and warm himself,
to make the ship stop the quiet dismembering in the snow.
Functions.
To wish is to erase that.
Hit it on its white skin with a seal
and then stare into its little legs.
To spin a vase so it hisses like a spinning wheel
and destroy the anthems.
Echoes in nature are several.
One of them walks on the edge, biting milk.
The wishes to collapse in galleys, the sizzle blows,
to spill wine on a train, and wash the hands with it.
To wish wishes an engine of the head, not the heart,
is the hunger of dried fish that died
in steam boilers, the grapes fall every minute,
broadened the shoulders.
To wishes to undress a black cross body of the farmer,
to sing in clearings, to call into emptiness,
to hit horns of blood, the sound of the surf,
under the sun, the home of our disk, the gall.
To wish is to breathe, to scrape mass of burnt parallel bars
with hands, to blow, to blow, to burn meat cutting
squares until it's as black as a crickets head,
and berries in trees, not in people.
To wishes to sleep, sleep and forget about everything,
shafts of a cart are beautiful, hay on a cart
is an enemy of people.
Farmers with long beard sleep in it, holding hay forks up.
To wish is not to smoke, to cross arms on your chest
and think of the Arno, you are larger than the Danube River.
To wishes to count brothers.
There are many of them.
To run into battle with bent head
and cry out the cry of freedom that
is thwarted by four people sitting on chairs.
It walks around the world as a breed of its own
and dies out with dark circles around the waist.
To wish to grow pale with a beech tree, with a reed,
with a maple, to massage snow into shoulders, to stand,
wave at trains and weep as weep those who
are chained down with escape.
To cattle, to grow a shadow like the cloud of a mob,
to cut through the skins of drums, to fall asleep,
fall asleep.
To wishes to tear shellac of leaders,
to fall, to fall, to stare at the grape pickers ears
and called them here.
Everybody knows a little.
I know a little.
And open hands no more.
To wishes to tear apart time.
Let it be sewn together by maidens holding
rocks in the hands.
Hey Pythagoras, you rascal.
Somebody threw up on Artem's white coat.
To wish is to break a bird's neck
so it will never sing again.
To straddle a pillar instead of a windowsill
and listen to this distant ignitions.
To wish is that all the limbs would
crash onto rocks, reefs be cleared up,
a door bend than a field.
Got hears only thinned magma, nectar.
To wish is not to notice when you put
your shoe on for the last time.
To wish is to joke so much that scorpions remain
hanging on the bright glimmering hooks
until bronze covers them up.
To wish is to accept that.
My boundary stones are the sun.
The King arrives in a golden coach and falls into a pond
where cattle perish.
what's your favorite color?
My favorite color is yellow.
Would you carry a wig if your hair fell out overnight?
If my hair fell out, I'd carry a wig.
We heard you went to Portugal, could you
give us some brief impressions?
Portugal is a small country.
The people dress well.
Was it hot?
In the sun, it was hot.
Even in the shade, it was hot.
Did you have an uncle in the Air Force?
I had an uncle in the Air Force.
Did he have an influence on your taking this job?
I couldn't say he had any influence.
He soon died and then he had no influence.
Red flowers.
Red flowers grow in the sky.
There's a shadow in the garden.
The light penetrates.
There's no light to be seen.
How then can the [INAUDIBLE] there's a shadow in the garden.
All around big white stones lie scattered.
We can sit on them.
The hills are round.
And just like the hills on Earth, only lower.
They look perfectly tender.
I think we too are perfectly light.
We hardly touched the ground.
When I take a step, it seems the red flowers draw back a little.
The air is fragrant, both cool and burning.
New beings draw closer.
Some invisible hand smoothly placing them in the grass.
They're beautiful and quiet.
We are all here together.
Some of them swimming toward this place
are turned around in the air and cut off.
They disappear.
We can't see them anymore.
They grown.
Now my body feels as if it's in a fiery tunnel.
It rises like dough.
Drizzles apart in the stars.
There is no sex in heaven.
I feel no hands but all things and beings
are perfectly joined.
They rush apart only to become even more united.
Colors evaporate.
All sounds are like a sponge in the eyes.
Now I know sometimes I was a rooster.
Sometimes a row.
I know I had bullets in my body.
They crumble away now.
How beautifully I breathe?
I feel I'm being ironed.
It doesn't burn at all.
I long for solid Earth in heaven, to lick your eyelid,
and stay even so they do not rise.
To have a friend, I see the Devils head people.
I see his whole body I never thought he could come so close.
He longs for innocence as we do.
I have the sensation he was crammed
into the wall for a long time.
I had the feeling that his hands ache, that his tender,
and absorbed in thoughts.
He licks everything before killing it.
He bursts into tears, scraping meat, he's blessed.
He has no friends.
He's walking alone in the world.
I have the feeling he's saying something to me, that he's
watching me with regret.
He knows I could never sleep with him.
We're both humiliated.
He reminds me of the Englisher when he was pensioned off
and young secret police recruits.
It seems his beatitude is failing.
The souls squeal when he tortures them.
He doesn't drink them as I imagined.
It seems he derives no benefit from them.
I think he would like to have a friend
to share goods and pleasure.
He steps in the river and wets his head in it.
He doesn't know how to speak with it.
He splashes on the surface.
I will leave him as he is.
I will not talk to him.
The Boat.
Genesis is tiny silicon shifts, thinner than the nail
of one's little finger.
Are earthquakes and wars the collapse of galaxies?
A couple of swipes with a brush of the Earth skin, a diary.
What is minimal?
What proves the madness of a bad opening of a deer grazing?
The poet bestows reads lays on hands.
Yet only he who wails his vision survives.
He who has seen too much has his eyes pecked out by crows.
And rightfully so, The poet kills the deer.
Proverbs.
Who lives in the error that color is culture and fish
is nature will get sober.
The trees are hair on the skin planted by us.
In front of the eyes, it is bright.
Behind the eyes, it is dark.
Turning the head is total utopia.
Hands will be burned to let you be without hands.
You will be charged for switching rails and killing
people.
The bird gets scared.
The worm gets scared.
The brain covers up.
Mountains.
All their life on the spot, rush the distance.
Space is only for one color, white.
There are no bones for the seventh day.
Who has the same name as the other
and who has the same name as you, Mrs. Electricity.
Every mythological status is bred
to the Earth, which is hollow and surrounded
by walls of carpets of grass.
We will cut the artery so the air will rush.
Let Giants eat the sandwich.
Who's standing?
Are you the stone of a fruit dear soul?
Mandala fetus in white coffee.
Your eyes are flames the dark grains of my ladies.
Shut the slot, if you can't watch it.
Take a break.
My love is a hold up lifting you slowly, slowly,
so the air doesn't run out.
The tears you never confessed to fell into soap bubbles
in Slovenian Village Inn.
The shawl was green, red from Kashmir.
We lost it then.
But you're a cube in me, little light burning endlessly
on the grave.
I watched the ascent, the food, your blood
pulsing on different continent, tunnels
in parallel worlds collapsing.
In the fire, we saved the sizzle of your tennis shoes.
I pasted you up with resin, with tokens,
so you could breathe only through your rum bites.
I showed you or clear the sky when I starved you.
When I taped up your gargling, how much longer
will they be cut into pieces loaded among wooden logs?
Nikola Tesla.
When St Francis took off his coat he wasn't cold.
His previous life was cold.
Boiling to turn into wine.
When it turned into wine, most came to drink.
Grasshoppers, cats too.
When the Middle Ages were led around on a chain
because they used to be Lions.
People were afraid it would eat them.
Not true.
Cats never ate people.
Only those lazy little monks copied the text so
inattentively that a lot of rust appeared just
like on great ocean liners.
Truly, cats were lions, silky ones.
There were small sewing baskets beside them even
when they were grazing in the desert.
They grazed in that they licked the sand like hens
when they need calcium.
The hands like on their sides in the dark.
The lights are on in all the houses.
Nikola Tesla through hard work scratched out electricity,
just like people who felt peace separating
the pea from the pond.
All done, he said, this is electricity.
Amen.
Now turn off the lights and go to sleep.
Christ at Hermes door.
Your face is buried, ounces of ice looking out from the block.
Is that you?
Do I need a mull for God?
Sweet, sweet, both of us humble in sweet.
Gas gathers in our teeth, so that we grow blue fangs.
Who is that rubbing sand along our lips?
You're a vase.
My hands caress you, gray clay spinning on a wheel.
When I shape your mouth with my palm, it stays, explodes,
changes color, summons [INAUDIBLE] from gray.
Does the fire caress you?
Would your nails rick if they burn?
I wrap you around my forehand.
Your skin is a belt.
I think you are formed perhaps just a little hard your water.
Will it fizzing in you?
Will petals of flowers float on the surface?
Will they veer away from the sides, rushed towards them,
cool off?
Will you need me to smash you?
Will still want to run down my hands like honey?
I will carry around on my shoulder.
Agree to all roles that are wrestling sweet and light.
You're the cream with which I summon cliffs
from the Earth's bowels.
I pull them out.
When all else has melted, they don't melt.
When vanilla and liquefied wings of my wood flow at the Earth's
core, we do not combust.
Our fangs are made for this unbearable heat.
We're exhausted, allied, united like elephant and oak.
Oh, earwax of the she elephant.
Have I shoved you in it?
The tree of life.
I was born in a wheat field, snapping my fingers.
A white chalk ran across the green blackboard.
You made me lie on the ground.
I played with pearls.
I leaned fields against my ear and medals.
The stars were crackling.
Under a bridge, I carved an inscription.
I don't know how to read.
They rings the factories with salt water.
Cherries were my soldiers.
I was throwing gloves into thorn bushes.
We ate fish with golden bread knife.
In a chandelier above the table, not all the candles
were burning.
Mother play the piano.
I climb my father's shoulders.
I stepped on white mushrooms, watching
the clouds of dust, touching branches from the room's
window.
Folk song.
Every true poet is a monster.
He destroys people and their speech.
His singing elevates a technique that wipes out the Earth
so we are not eaten by worms.
The drunk sells his coat.
The thief sells his mother.
Only the poet sells his soul to separate it from the body
that he loves.
The deer.
Awe inspiring Cliff.
White desire, water springs from blood.
Let my form narrow.
Let it crush my body so that everything
is one, slag and skeletons, fistful of Earth.
You drink me as though draining off the color of my soul.
You let me up, a little fly in a tiny boat.
My head is smeared.
I sense how mountains were made, how stars have been born.
You've removed your epics from me.
There I stand.
Look, in the air within you, drained, all mine.
Golden roofs bent up beneath us.
Small pagoda leaves.
I'm in silken candies, gentle and tenacious.
I funnel the fog into your breath and your breath
into the Godhead in my garden, the deer."
This is also in Slovenian.
Najstrajšnejša skala,
bela, bela želja, voda, ki izviraš iz krvi.
Naj se mi oži oblika,
naj mi zdrobi telo,
da bo vse v enem - žlindra, okostja, prgišče.
Piješ me, kot bi mi izdiral barvo duše.
Lokaš me, mušico v drobnem čolnu.
Razmazano glavo imam,
čutim, kako so se gore naredile,
kako so se rodile zvezde.
Spodmaknil si mi svoje teme, tam stojim.
Poglej, v zraku,
v tebi, ki si zdaj zlit in moj.
Zlate strehe se ukrivljajo pod nama, pagodini listi.
V ogromnih svilenih bonbonih sem,
nežen in trdoživ.
Meglo ti potiskam v sapo,
sapo v božjo glavo v mojem vrtu, jelen.
Now, this is the longer one.
"The Fish.
I'm a carnivore but the vegetable kind.
I'm God and man in one.
I'm a chrysalis.
Mankind grows out of me.
My brain is liquefied like a flower.
So I can love better.
Sometimes, I dip my fingers in it and it's warm.
Nasty people say that the others have drown in.
It not true.
I'm a belly.
I put up travelers in it.
I have a wife who loves me.
Sometimes, I'm afraid that she loves
me more than I do her and I get sad and depressed.
My wife breathes like a small bird.
Her body soothes me.
My wife is afraid of other guests.
I say to her, now, now, don't be afraid,
all our guests are single being and for both of us.
A white match with a blue head has fallen into my typewriter.
My nails are dirty.
I'm thinking hard now what to write.
One of my neighbors here has terribly noisy children.
I'm God and calm them down.
At 1:00, I'm going to the dentist, Dr. Mena, Calle Reloj.
I'll ring the bell and ask him to pull my tooth
because it hurts too much.
I'm happiest in my sleep and when I write.
The masters passed me along from hand to hand.
[NO AUDIO]
It's 450 years, Tarzs Rebazar has been alive 600.
I don't know it.
Sorry.
I don't know if that was him in the white coat.
I still can't make them out.
When I write, I have a different bed.
Sometimes, I start pouring out more like water
because water is most loving of all, fears people.
A flower is soft this if you close your hand around it.
Flowers like hands.
I like everything.
Last night, I dreamed my father leaned across toward Harriet.
Other women frightened me.
And so I don't sleep with them.
But the distance between God and young people is slight.
There's always just the single woman in God
and that's my wife.
I'm not afraid of my guests tearing me apart.
I can give them anything.
It will just grow back.
The more I give, the more grows back.
Then it launches off as a source of help for other creatures.
On some planet, there's a central storehouse
for my flesh.
I don't know which one it's on.
Whoever drinks some of it will be happy.
I'm a water hose and God, because I love.
Everything dark in here, inside, nothing outside.
I can X-ray any creature.
I'm rambling.
When I hear the [INAUDIBLE] I know I'm in a state of grace.
I would have to consume money day and night
if I wanted to build the life and still it wouldn't help.
I was made to shine money's death.
I'll go out on the terrace.
From there I can see the whole countryside as far
as Dolores Hidalgo.
It's warm and soft like Tuscany.
Though, it's not Tuscany.
Mate, can I sit there watching?
The sun goes down and we sit and watch.
Her hands are like Shakti's.
My mouth is like some Egyptian beast's.
Love is all.
Moses wicker basket never struck the rocks.
Miniature horses come trotting out of the level countryside.
A wind blows from the Sierras.
I slide head first into people's mouths,
and kill, and give birth, kill and give birth,
because [AUDIO OUT]
--to a gallon, lost in thought you came to watch me.
I'm like an olive branch.
Your face, houses are on fire in the sun.
The bridge is pasted together, stone by stone.
And the sky keeps lying.
The hens are seizing me.
I hear the motion of soft nibs.
Smoke rises out of me.
I evaporate into you, tasting your fruit passerby.
The sheep scratches herself on the rock.
The windows are wiped in a dream.
Sweet rehearsing pours over me.
I'm folding your door latches.
I shock the black, the festive haul of your warm breath,
the impermanence of your life."
And the last one.
"Kiss the eyes of peace.
Kiss the eyes of peace.
Made stream down upon the trees.
The sun shines and no longer roars so intolerably.
The soul again hopes to sense it rips, the sap.
The cold has done me good.
If the wind blows and I walk and watch the cars,
life brings me back to itself.
It would be terrible not to recognize anyone
at the departure.
They'd be too far to touch or be felt. In the pitch darkness,
I would not hold the memory of love.
The grass ice forms on molten lava.
In time, I might again be able to slide off,
walk the roads of dust.
Shake the jacket off, if it's dusty.
There has been too much honey and grace.
That's all.
Too many blessings break a man apart."
Thank you.
[CLAPPING]