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| Aleš Debeljak ©blesok.com |
Hymn To The Favorite City
The ground is soaked with weeks of high water,
and thieves of sanctuaries beside the lagoon
are on the run, my eyes follow them,
somewhere close, a robin’s breast collapses
under the pressure of a thumb: only a little while
before the dock a slender boat leans against
is covered with drops of blood, useless
as a song two people can hardly hear. Well,
maybe it’s merely a melody without words.
This city has baptized a dozen generations
in the sacrament of war, but I go on
all the same. As if I had a choice.
The harlequin from the Palazzo Grassi,
the one who inspired Picasso, has meaning
for me only when I see you rendered blue,
faint and luxurious, with the violence
beauty uses to enter certain homes:
indivisible, unable to end, like a cloud
that houses thunder, beneath which I work
my memories and widen channels
and clear out passageways, so the voice
that surges out of you can spill downstairs
to the living room, and cross the yard
in a rush basket I can barely see.
Carried by the echo through whirlpools
Metamorphosis Of Pain
A wall, covered with reddish ivy
that survived the winter, and over there
a glance the length of the empty street
and a man who might get old—
I say might, because new skin
never fails to cover a cut,
it tingles once in a while
more gently than a mistral
blowing through the rooms.
This much we know. All the same:
in the folds of the couch there’s a book
and the sky, crushed into flocks
of birds and signs, scattered randomly
like islands in the Adriatic
or letters of poets lying open,
boys upheld by illusions of chewing
green, narcotic leaves from here
to hereafter—I among them.
I give the image, hardened in my spit,
a hundred names for god. I stand before it
like this, trembling like fingers parting curtains,
seeking comfort and a rush in my veins,
a creek in the distant hills
where everyone I know wants to end up.
Murmur of water, wellspring noise,
watering us as it waters me,
the meadow, the house, the grass,
the snow. Its sound makes a boy thirsty,
lost as he is in the landscape
of someone else’s yard. His only hope
is that those who manage to stay alive
I never look over my shoulder, no idea
where I’m headed and not an ounce of fear,
falling like fluff from an eiderdown quilt,
sinking in the afternoon air, real as an hour
of solitude or the fragrance of an herb.
My wounds are healed over and all five senses
in sync, harmonized to the birds and the sky,
the grimy wall of an underpass with graffiti
scratched in a child’s hand, announcing
I was here. But not only here, my lord, as you
know, I go where you want me to be—
tonight, for instance, I am a wave
you push across the Old Square, underground
through a parking garage, over the banks
of a lazy green river and over the files
on a drawing desk of another architect.
Come, a whisper says, and again
I flood the channel, at one with
the darkened air above the city and the steppe,
like the pillow you smooth and soften up
for someone unable to sleep,
Grass Psalm
Seekers after sources and rivers,
messengers of useless desires, traveling
merchants, a spider in its web:
they keep me company this early
evening hour, in the privacy of a groggy soul
who stands and smokes and three kids
sleeping upstairs. In a dream, my years
of devotion grind by, and an image unfolds
less real than I would want. Look at it:
translucent, not the least bit shy, it radiates
like an apparition over a desert
others have discovered; but all the same it suits me,
so big and unsatisfied, like a monologue
running without a break, it lasts
as long as the pain of harvest grass
when left to rot. Look at me as I tremble,
you cannot miss how I reach for you,
my partner I do not know. Yet you alone
can fix my sight, you’re a welcome
guest in every house, you detect
the failures in my speech, you forgive
Drowned Love
You burn me, this is my weakness.
I admit: I can’t stand that everything,
everything —words and bodies— passes
from hand to hand. Like a walk
down to the three bridges, past bookstores
and the ornaments almost invisible
on each façade, past the stains
on violins, shiny and hard
like madness, past the palaces
in no hurry to be restored,
an orchestra playing day after day
in another gazebo, another park,
when I lost my way among the streets
and wandered, ignorant, under the dome
of another sky, in another dream,
which threatens and seduces
just like you, you who lure
a trout to your hips, you who foretell
how memories twist in the genes.
You burn me, this is my weakness.
Like an omen I can’t dismiss.
A hand to another hand. Tears,
I know this too well, tears
don’t run down the cheeks,
they’re oil a downpour can’t wash off
and high tide breaks against the soul
in vain. There’s nothing else I can do:
I give you up to the current,
and I do it out of love. You vanish
Angels, Close Relatives
Homage to Marc Chagall
How there is neither anger nor bliss
on the faces of women, faces of men.
How the glow around their heads is sustained.
We accept it in slow surrender. Their destiny
pinches at the back of the neck. And how,
in their finest clothes, they fly above lost villages,
sift through flour sacks and through the hollow,
carmine sky, as the student of shadows
follows them, alone though not without trouble,
across the dunes, deserted streets, apartments
emptied in ancient ritual, so later he will know
the word for nothing, to comfort the witnesses who prove
how slight their bodies are, how they hover
within the canvas frame, beautiful and sad,
in grains of sand that sheen an hourglass,
how the wings of their coats rustle overhead
as the sand and glass are ground
beneath our feet, along our trail toward home
that doesn’t change. Without them sensing
a rapture, or rancor, the freedom our faces feel,
features never given to simple sobbing—
as if tears had some lesson to teach.
That crystal morning, snow over snow:
in capital cities they might be ashamed of it.
That conference of birds, and light upon water,
the parliament of dreams that knows no fear
of getting old, and she, alone this winter
morning, her face that sees itself within
a flower etched by ice along the glass,
her reflection thawing and piercing
the window: is she really so strange?
Outside, her shadow sputters again
like a match refusing gravity and singe.
In the vast expanse of frost and worry,
not even a minute to think, she was the one
with the courage to disobey silence, disobey
orders, she could not be voted down and said:
Look, in the shallows of this common river
the Black Sea claims as its own,
fish still wriggle out of a boy’s hands, tracing
a nearly perfect arc, and with them everything
that flows, everything that falls, rushes
without reason as one’s childhood rushes by—
look: we are not a wall but a shutter
some far-off god is opening halfway.
Translated by Andrew Zawacki and the author
Aleš Debeljak, a poet, cultural critic, and translator, has won a number of national and interenational awards for his work. He is a Director of the Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, where he lives with his wife and three children. He has translated selected poems of John Ashberry into his native Slovenian.
