Matej Krajnc
FOUR POEMS AS ONLY CARY GRANT COULD WRITE THEM
HOUSEBOAT
Sometimes the names of boats seem
too feminine. For example: The Daisy, The Virgin …
Just take a walk along the riviera and look around!
Well, there are little boats, of course, but
no tree ever bows before them.
(It's an abnormally stupid song:
if the boat sails the sea,
how would the trees ever bow
before it? And the wind doesn't care,
if it's the motorboat. Fuck it,
it sighs, just pour enough gas
into that painted corpse!)
No seagull ever flies so low as to see,
what in fact is happening
on those boats. The tourists take photographs.
The tourists still take photographs. The tourists
undress themselves. And then
there's another scene in the car.
NORTH-NORTHWEST
The buses circle
and the tourists get their legs bent;
they don't know,
how to be careful
amidst all that traffic.
Taxis. Buses. Downtown trains.
They all love the legs of tourists.
Strange,
I wonder,
shouldn't they be more interested
in their money?
SLYVIA SCARLETT
I'd like to kiss you,
but what I'd love even more is to tear out your heart,
beautiful, beating,
the throbbing dynamite of your chest.
DESTINATION TOKYO
I bend to the East.
No, pardon me,
to the entrance.
I made that up.
I'm not crazy,
I just roll my eyes strangely,
and, as I've never learned to ride the bicycle,
I may look crippled.
I can't even walk upwards,
my knees get cracked
and then I limp for seven days at least.
I made that up too.
The wind is such,
that I bend.
2006
Translated from Slovenian by author