By Tomaz Salamun
Translated by Michael Biggins
Quick ostrich. Quick ostrich. Quick sand. Quick sand.
Quick lime. Quick grass. The white juice from celeste Aida,
and forgot-to-take-it dries up. The one
trampled by sheep (down below), Grischa and Beatrice
(up above) converse. They'd recognize each other in
a cover, a box, a jacket, a picture, in moss and trampled
dirt. At this angle of the sky
no pictures are allowed. Corpses are wrapped up like
sheaves. Dismiss the footprint. Wipe your eyes.
Stop pilfering. Grapshot gets tangled up.
I go paying visits with my lives.
Here I just romped and touched the rug
with a yellow shoulder. I don't know what a word is.
To cry out moth! when on your white towel you see
a scorpion? El Alamein! Where is the difference?
Rommel was kissing heaven's dainty hands, and yet
from his airplane above the Sahara, my uncle
Rafko Perhauc still blew him to bits.
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From Zagreb-born Salamun's The Blue Tower.
Thursday was beautiful and quiet around here. It was dry, temperatures in the mid-50s, and the neighborhood woods were full of animals preparing for winter -- families of deer, squirrels, chipmunks, woodpeckers, a hawk -- plus a rabbit in a sunny front yard that I may not see again this season because the clocks going back over the weekend will change my schedule. Most of my indoor excitement involved chasing cats off heating vents until the sun warmed the house to their liking.
My laundry movie this week was Reversal of Fortune because it was on cable and I realized I only had it on homemade videotape. I haven't seen it in nearly two decades, and I was interested by how despicable I found both Von Bulow and Dershowitz this time around (last time I thought the movie really thought the former was innocent and the latter was a hero for defending him). There's really no protagonist, since Sunny is not only in a coma but really not presented as anything but a pathetic socialite.
Evening TV was this week's episode of Deep Space Nine, "Babel," which I believe I only ever saw when it first aired; it was much better than I remembered, but I've felt that way about every DS9 episode I've watched since it went off the air. We'll see how I feel about "Move Along Home." Then we watched the BC/FSU game, which had lots of mistakes. A few more Kings Dominion photos since the trees were so lovely, especially from the 1/3-size replica Eiffel Tower:
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