Cvetka Lipuš

1.
The fallen angels of words stumble about among
the shelves for fast food. Unhurried, in the reflection from the shop window
they touch up their worm haloes.
They whisper slogans but the frightened store clerk,
a newcomer from Tomsk, silently gives change.

Hey, Madame Akhmatova, Mister Frost, you didn't properly know
each other there at the dacha, did you? Allow me, here and now,
to introduce you again: this is Anna, and this is Robert.
In a twinkling you will shake vowels,
sigh and set off for the parking lot
to look for spring in its green hairdo,
last seen in Vermont, still frozen through
from a headlong leap into the Neva.

You, my America, I cook myself in your pot,
bean by bean. My rind becomes brittle, even
my little fingers weave themselves into chitchat.
I cut the fibers of the hours against the grain,
I swim, a learner fish, into the promised future.

2.
I play, ceremonially, the little game of roots.
I try to grab each little atom of belongingness
when I involve myself in a conversation.
A little ball of genes hurled
down the two-lane bowling alley,
grandmas and grandpas just
falling on their backs.

After lunch, while each crunches
his fortune cookie, in haste
using my chopsticks I
weave myself a new portrait.

Do not look down on me like that, Anna,
tift r all you said "no heart is welded to another."
I do not know what you are doing there in the northern latitudes
with frayed tissue. Hereabouts things
are thrown away.

3.
In the parking lot a conspiracy of cars.
A sneaky vehicle is playing hide-and-seek.
To-and-fro and from side to side I grind
my soles so that my lungs burn.

Oh yes, Robert, I should have taken the road
less traveled. Whereas the pavement
clings to me like a pair of gloves. The thumb on the avenue,
the forefinger traveling to the ocean. Instead of a road map
they left for me on the passenger' s seat
a book. There in rhymes some
apples, blueberries are picked.

I take everything they offer me,
from tears to salted peanuts.
Good manners tied up like a bunch of flowers. Immediately
I spread good will over myself. Everyone who
comes in beneath the roof nods with enthusiasm
so that the prickles, the divas of Central European dramas,
stick in my throat.

4.
Hey, you two, for a moment look back at me
before I rush with my book
on my lap into the tunnel.
The words, a light over
the emergency exit.

You two there in the tempting other world
where they through their monocles stare
at us ants, and our will gets
singed: unlock an iambic stanza,
maybe even one with an inexact rhyme.

If I could only stretch my legs a little
into the unaccented syllable, in the middle of the line of verse.
After all, I feel sleepy here on this plastic
chair, arms full of merchandise,
waiting for the cashier,
who in some Indian language or other
is unceasingly mumbling into a telephone.

5.
Let's go to a symphony concert. Yup,
let' s go to a symphony concert, so that
Shostakovich, the tour de force, will surge
through our auditory canals, and nudge loose the layers
of canned laughter,
the cartridges from innumerable crime stories from our eardrums.

Yes, let' s play at little dramatics,
as though we were at the end of our rope,
as though we were a dark-skinned immigrant
clinging to his false documents
in the presence of every cop.

Oh, yeah, and then, my little fishies,
let's swim off for a quick drink.
Let's soften our foreign accents with loyalty
while there's some oxygen left. As a finale
like a crescendo someone is sure to add:
it's not so bad here, after all.

Translation: Tom Priestly

1
Without sowing, no harvest, and all the work
in vain. The expectational hectares have been reduced
to a square foot. Where is the first aid when failure clogs
our veins and we are infected with difficulties? In the
telephone book there is no entry for lost sense.
Heavy with anxieties like clouds before a storm we
drag ourselves home. Maybe we are again comforted by
the Samaritan past: there is no grammar book, no dictionary
for the Sunday dialect when the tiny shot glasses of childhood
are sipped for dessert. Milk teeth, teddy bears, roller skates,
slingshots, comic books come to settle from the depot
for improvised performances, where they bow first to the left,
then to the right, until they are finally recognized by everybody.

2
Yellowed family albums, full of starched shirts, pleated skirts,
hats, court shoes, evening coiffures, curled mustaches.
Everything polished and ironed for the descendant's eye.
You inspect faded faces, those which have carpeted
their interiors with pleading patterns, have created for
themselves miniatures of bell, those rare ones which have used
pain-free hours draped in pink promises, verbal jewels,
those full-faced ones on which fortune bas lodged like swarms
of bees, and those which have twisted their time around a glass.
The story narrates them following a fixed pattern. Christening and
funeral meal, the remainder abandoned to your own judgment. Will
your narrative be remembered in the here-and-now or will nobody
recognize your face in the assembly of dressed up spirits?

Translation: Tom Priestly