Klemen Pisk: Poems

KLEMEN PISK

Snail He then sees a slimy snail behind a shrub – it’s enormous. He calls out “What a snack it’ll be!” as he prepares the fire on which he’ll cook the snail. The flames of the fire gnaw and crack while the snail looks on and on. He is trying to think of a word that rhymes with “snail.” He finds one. “Grimail, Grimail!” he shouts. I ask him what it means because I have never heard such a word. “Ha ha, you don’t know? So you are the idiot, not I! Ha ha, you don’t know what they called friends of the prominent writer, Grimm?” He then throws himself on the snail - this one was as big as a boar – and throws it against a hard rock until his spirit expires. Poor snail! It seems like so short a time ago since I saw him last, chewing that bitter grass, grazing amongst the bees on a nearby hill.

Translated by Lena Nemeth

1

I Feel the Rythm Night club – medium cool, as many guests as seeds in a one -kilo pumpkin, sticky tracks of strangers, sprang up from beery leaks, reddish emptiness on a spotty face, stumbling among electrified cables, Bulgarian nodding and clapping with greetings, snapping one’s fingers. They are swaying nervously from imaginary pleasures, when, with a fifth increased by a chord, I am playing the whole tone scale. Changed in a fraction of second I become a mixolydian construct. Musician’s sweaty life is a painful feeling of timeless dying of tones, permanent repetition of a scheme and banging his head against the wall after failed improvisation. I fraternize with mosquitoes flying around the spotlights, I will die fallen, I will perish in rot of disgust, go down with leprosy, go blind by marching of cufflinks along the guitar. My life broken three times, my longing modulated four times- these are things worth breathing. I give a jazz apple pie, I baked it on that day, when I realized how wretched is to help you , unbridled. May I smear you with a blues, anoint with a cantata, may I pour a classical twelve-syllable over you, you won’t obey me. From me you only want and don’t want, want and don’t want, want and don’t want, this rhythm in which it confirms with negation and affirmatively disappears.

Translated by Malgorzata Wiklacz

2

Ding Somewhere deep inside crowded thoughts high in the skies of undreamed kingdom lives a sanctimonious ding. In the glass pieces of nerve endings, inside the clatter of brain's interior in the cytoplasm, in the protoplasm erythrocytes, leukocytes- ubiquitous ding. Shuddering in my bed I am pulling my thighs close, cramming my head on the pillow to silence the pain he gives me, biting. He puffed up like a turkish pasha and struggles me with his severe strictness, synthesis of nasty phonemes I kick, I kneel, I cry, I tremble I smash the furniture I lose balance I stagger toward the door, to escape him While the ding is yellow and triply rhymed.

Translated by Urszula Kawecka

3

The Hermit and the Essence A hermit was engulfed in an avalanche and waited under the snow to be saved. However, no one came. If only a St. Bernard appeared with a little barrel of rum hanging from his neck and dug him out – thought the hermit – or perhaps, he believed – God lived somewhere in the mountains and would watch over his fate, he allowed himself to contemplate the insignificance of his existence, how short-lived it is, its heavy extravagance, and how it is impossible to discern the variety of its natural forms The hermit closed his eyes. still concious; he felt that snow surrounded him on all sides he suddenly understood how simple it is to live – realizing this only now underneath the snow The hermit was silent. Fighting in his thoughts with snow and Earth. And the Earth turned according to plan in order to consume him.

Translated by Krzysztof Pawlowski

4

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