By Tomica Bajsić.
In Circles
Sometimes it seems as if I’m living on borrowed time
my friends are dead and scattered across graveyards
wiped off the slate just like that, none of them even thirty
those people I used to break bread with
those people I slept in the same bunkers with
those people I walked the same grass with, climbing onto tanks and falling down
hitting my face against the ground showered with bullets and shells
(oh sweet quiet earth you know our prayers)
their ghosts still come back with the last of the echoing voices:
is there more juice? asks one who will die in an attack
take care of my brother, says another who will be killed by tank
the third one is trying to remember who he is and where he’s coming from
while his brain slowly switches off (he’d been hit in the head)
what’s over there? asks the fourth clutching a glass of red watered wine
his gaze fixed over the hill where an ambush has already been set up for him
and a fifth is silent but his eyes are able to pronounce:
Death.
sometimes it feels as if I’d broken off the chain
I wake up in the middle of the night gasping for air
hearing the hum of fourteen storeys through the open window
(the smell of burnt flesh rising out of wooden caskets)
Christ the Redeemer is a lasting fresh wound among the black clouds
electric fireflies scurry, curse and celebrate
the time when pigs fed on human flesh
down there is a house that once, a hundred years ago, used to be blue
now it is a roofless ruin with frameless windows like empty eye sockets
the inside is all wrecked but somehow at night it becomes alive
the forgotten balconies fill up with flowers and light
while round black women with turbans lean against
corroded fence and tiny echoes of their conversation
whisper that there are three hundred thousand dead people on those fields
where my boots lost their soles
where my eyes drowned into the mud of the universe
where my heart was like an iron rope cut off from its anchor
whizzing through the air in blind circles:
aimless, aimless.
The Wounded Man is Tempting God
I wandered around the forest of the enemy kingdom
and stumbled upon a piece of wire hidden in the grass
it was a buried PROM2 tripwire-activated
bounding anti-personnel mine
and in the split second before the explosion
I wanted God to make that cup pass me by
but when the detonation threw me in into the air I saw pieces
of iron, pieces of my uniform, pieces of my flesh whirling
in orbit / sand stars porcelain four winds tartan
razors ice / Joseph Conrad proposing to Freya the girl from
the Seven Islands / my enemies cats stealing the planet oxygen
digging through garbage / all lighthouses ablaze all the way
from the New Hebrides to the Pepper Coast / the President of Zimbabwe
Canaan Banana listening to the German radio / thousands of mumified fish heads
prophesying in alien tongues / Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
making airplanes out of a piece of a newspaper –
I never liked Mozart and that’s what threw me down on the ground
while the Vienna boy’s Choir sang:
“a jug goes to the water until it breaks
a jug goes to the water until it breaks”
God let that cup pass me by I thought there in the ambulance
let me live for a little bit longer at least for another 100 years
I don’t want to die now that our time has come
I wanted my medals to shine like oil platforms
lighting up the night flights over the Atlantic
and my veteran’s charisma to become electric
let my limousine slide through the crowd like Moby Dick
slid before the eyes of helpless captain Ahab
I never said I did not want to sell my soul
I was only negotiating the price
let me be invited at the presidential party
there are so many dishes I never tasted
there are so many people on this Earth whose destiny
I never took in my hands
I want to rob and preach to the robbed ones
I want to lie and laugh at the deceived ones
I want my place in the Ark so I can
watch the flood with the cocktail glass in my hands
since it is better to set fires than to be burned
it’s better to humiliate than to be humiliated
so let’s lay all the cards on the table – we have but one life
give me a hundred cannibal whores from Borneo
let me recover myself in the purifying fountains of youth
give me power to last forever like the invisible poison
in the veins of all humans
give me parts of their spines hands eyes brains hearts kidneys
my hands are the hands of the sculptor thirsty for a work
– I’ll smile at you, the green pastures of Croatia
with a smile of a harvester
in front of the hospital alley cats rummage through garbage
they have conspired to steal the oxygen of the entire planet
the iron holders on the facade are empty
fifty years ago three flags hung there
one for the gluttony another one for greed
and the third one for misery
instead of them we hoisted up our tricolor
the red is for the Christ’s mineral blood
the blood of our dead the guardian subterranean blood boiling
the white is for hope that we are fighting for a better civilization
the blue one is for our blazen adventure, for frendship firm as those
overseas telegraph cables that fishermen sometimes find
when their nets get lost somewhere
really deep
but the cats came overnight and did their dirty trick
so the red stands for gluttony once again
the white for greed
and the blue for misery
so, dear friends, one thing is certain:
those very cats are the guardians of that other world as well
these cunning cats that sometimes transform into politicians
the cats that are still rummaging through garbage
conspiring to steal the oxygen
of the entire planet.
Cardinal Kuharić at 9827
It’s Christmas Eve
and a gang of drunks is tasting bottles of Å ipon
and Silvanac at the illegal winery at the cemetery
filling plastic and glass flasks of all sizes
Cars rush over the edges of pavements
Tonight when glassy bones of old men are humming
there’s a draft in the church as someone left
the door open
Grannies are protesting angrily and justifiably so
counting who lit up more of those tiny candles
I would be also lighting tiny candles
and playing dumb
if I were old
They say this pre-holiday shopping frenzy
has been imported from the materialistic West
and that gradually every sense has been lost
of that sacred day when the Word became flesh
but if you ask me it is the poultry that fared the worst
having been decapitated
each and every one of them
Six years ago they fed us ox roast
and now they’re staging mass spectacles for us
with free sausages
and cheap pop stars
Tito fed us a pig’s head
that he stole from the attic
and our stomachs ached afterwards
for decades on end
Now it’s starting to snow and I am also drunk
like the other honest
Croats
Our path to the future is called
national-humanism
— still life
with a pig’s head
— while the Pharaoh
breathes deeply
tucked inside his winter palace
perhaps contemplating another revenge
while Cardinal Kuharić is at tel: 9872
— just a recorded Christmas message —
giving no answers.
Tito Apocrypha
Tito gnaws a pig’s head in the attic
eyeing the street in fear that his parents might catch him
I don’t give a damn / he thinks / I’ll escape on my bicycle
Tito riding a tram in Vienna under cover
wearing his best grey suit thinking:
why should I be any worse than those students?
don’t marry her
marry me
Tito riding over Mt Romanija
followed by old Nazor stumbling through the snow
Vladimir Vladimir / thinks Tito benevolently
Tito waving at the rows of kids from his Mercedes
red bandannas are tied around their necks like nooses / the Sun
will once grow dark / ponders Tito philosophically
Tito is elegant even in death
here are the mourners listed alphabetically:
bears rhinos lions / chess players
cineastes / circus acrobats / clerks
corn seller at work station no 7
Cuban cigar industry / employees of the Institute for the History
of the Working Class Movement / the English Queen
Greenpeace activists / heads of the tenant’s councils
historic figures / hippies / honour students
Ilich Ramirez Sanchez a.k.a. “Carlos” / men with moustaches
officers from firemen’s clubs / opera singers
presidents of fishermen’s societies / pretty women
primary school teachers / punks / reserve policemen
retired warrant officers / Sai Baba
soccer players / tailors
Tito showed up again in a balloon above eastern Africa
pointing his binoculars at a herd of zebras
those devils with stripes / thinks Tito to himself / they are all the same
don’t marry her
marry me
Tito says NO to Stalin and Stalin
responds I don’t care anymore / who gives a fuck
do you know how to calculate?
I have twenty one thousand eight hundred and fifty six of them
ground into the leaves of the Katyn forest / I have three hundred thousand
secretly burried ones
I have ten million of those liquidated in liquidations
I have all of their IDs / the photographs of their children / the letters
filled with unwarranted optimism / their pencils / small change
I’ve got them all neatly placed on file
We Have All Gathered Together Again
Out of tobbaco, coffee, wine,
they appear at the edge of night
like those voices you hear singing
somewhere far down the street,
but you cannot recognize the song.
(Julio Cortazar ‘Los Amigos’)
it came to me in a a dream that we have all gathered together again
at the long wooden table set up somewhere
in the middle of nowhere in the mountains
at the white wooden table covered with a chequered table-cloth
with red embroideres
we are sitting silent on a plateau surrounded with tall vegetation
focusing on the transparent lemon blossoms
floating around in the dreary May sky and
falling down
into our glasses and sticking onto the mud on our uniforms sliding
down the frozen barrels of our rifles dissapearing in the grass
among it’s shiny sharp blades wrapping around our boots
several thousand years old. some of us
drink pure wine while I drink it mixed
with bubbling water pregnant with minerals
those quartz crystals of roaring waterfalls
some pour ordinary water into wine; there is a jug on the table
that we fill at the well brimming with water as crystal
as the air around us so vacant that through it I can see the cracks
in the snow
melting as the furthest of those glassy blak mountain tops.
from here it is
perfectly clear that the Earth is round. the salty wind
that rose from the sea overnight tiptoes across its flat surface
passing through invisible labyrinths
in an attempt to surprise the German shepherd
asleep in the shadow of the only tree that grows on this plain
(none of us is worried too much about the enemy dogs.)
I light up a cigarette and throw the match into the grass filling my lungs with smoke
so powerful that it blurs my eyesight.
we’re sitting silent sensing the lava of future volcanoes churning
somewhere deep down bellow our feet
– the soil is born again having spent the entire winter locked under the snow
rolling in its sleep and sucking on dead organisms
renewing itself and sprouting roots – hardening and widening,
bearing bitter, coloured sprouts.
we sit there placidly watching the fruits of the mountain lemon tree ripening.
the food on the table is modest as it always has been:
a few loaves of bread, thirty hard boiled eggs. there are the maps
(maps of some other far regions) plus seven
Motorola radios and five to six bandages, three infra red night visors, two regular binoculars for daily observation + seven military compasses who point nowhere safe.
A Man Fell in the Street From the Red Plague
Ivana! I will build you a house from pigmented Brazilian wood
(that’s the wood that does not lose the battle with time)
a house with no sharp angles in one of the old ports from the Gold Fever era
(for everything is allowed in search for gold)
It’s a small colonial harbour with three churches:
one is the church of the black slaves, the other the church of free mulattos
and the third one is the church of white land-owners —
the name of the port is Parati!
the front door will be past-resistant
the walls would be covered in books: only valuable books,
thousands of books
titles by Melville, Conrad, Stevenson and others
notorious adventurers
I’ll build you a house from wood that cannot be eaten away by salt
or hardened by the Sun
it’s going to be a house with long windows to the east
commanding a view onto the hills and forests and steam railway
leading to the old mines
and from the west side you can see through binoculars the French castle
built to defend from pirates
and the passage leading through the islands
We’re going to eat big fish caught in the ocean – one to one.
Life will be easy for you!
So easy that your eyes will turn into clear emeralds
growing underneath the humus of Mato Grosso
instead of forest strawberries
Yes, the windows will always be open and the curtains
will travel down the corridors
white as the dresses of the old Bahian ladies whispering: candomble!
and on the ceiling I’ll build in a skylight
so our children can dream
deep dreams under that Southern Cross
40c
Crossing the street, I saw a butterfly falling somewhere between myself and a fat black lady with her hands full of plastic bags.
Lemon yellow, blue, and soft black:
I thought how come such colours on a dead butterfly and then I looked up to the tree tops, the granite hills and the clouds, and it came to my knowledge that this is the New World.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tomica Bajsić was born in 1968 in Zagreb, Croatia. He is a poet, prose writer and translator. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia. He is the editor of translated poetry in Poezija / Poetry Quarterly Magazine, Croatia, and founder of Druga priÄa /Another Story publishing. He has worked also in restoration, drawing and design and is a board member of the Croatian PEN Centre. Published in numerous anthologies and literary journals at home and abroad, his writing has been translated into German, English, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Slovenian, Slovakian and Hungarian. Južni križ / Southern Cross (1998) was awarded the Ivan Goran KovaÄić award for younger poets in 1998. Zrak ispod mora / Air beneath the sea (2009) was awarded the DobriÅ¡a Cesarić prize.
Bajsić’s books include the poetry collections Južni križ / Southern Cross (Goranovo proljeće, 1998), Pjesme svjetlosti i sjene / Songs of Light and Shadow (AGM, 2004), Pobuna objeÅ¡enih / Mutiny of the Hanged(Fraktura, 2008) and Zrak ispod mora / Air Beneath the Sea (Biblioteka nagrade DobriÅ¡a Cesarić, 2009), the travel prose work Dva svijeta i joÅ¡ jedan / Two Worlds & One More, (Naklada Ljevak, 2007) and the art and short story collection Ana i vila Velebita / Ana and the Velebit Fairy (NP Velebit, 2007).
His translations include Å panjolske pjesme ljubavi i progonstva / Spanish Poems of Love and Exile (DHK, Zagreb, 2002), Sve do srca svijeta / To the Heart of the World – the poetry of Blaise Cendrars (MD, Zagreb, 2003), the Bruce Chatwin travel book U Patagoniji / In Patagonia (SysPrint, 2006), Južna poÅ¡ta / Southern Mail, traveling through the poetry of Southern America (HDP Croatian Writers Society, 2009) and UREZI Antologija svjetske poezije o ratu, represiji, ropstvu … / Anthology of World Poetry about War, Repression, Slavery – 160 authors, 300 poems from Afganistan to Zimbabwe, from ancient Greece to contemporary days (Druga priÄa, 2010.)
He is currently working on a novel entitled Okavango.
