You’re preoccupied.
You came to see me.
I’m like an olive branch, your face.
Houses are lit in the sun.
The bridge is stuck together stone by stone
and the sky bites.
Hands claim me.
I hear the movement of soft tips.
I’m smoked.
I evaporate into you and savor
your fruit, pedestrian.
A sheep scratching itself against a rock,
the windows are rubbed in sleep.
I’m spilled by sweet training.
I’m twisting your bolts.
I’m seizing the black, silken
chamber of your warm breath,
the temporariness of your life.
Blackbird
An online journal of literature and the arts
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Contributor's Notes
Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry.
Brian Henry
Brian Henry is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Permanent State (Threadsuns, 2020), and the prose book Things Are Completely Simple: Poetry and Translation (Parlor, 2022). His translation of Tomaž Šalamun’s Kiss the Eyes of Peace: Selected Poems 1964-2014 is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2024. He also has translated Aleš Debeljak’s Smugglers (BOA Editions, 2015) and six books by Aleš Šteger, most recently Burning Tongues: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2022). He is the recipient of numerous awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a grant from the Howard Foundation, the Best Translated Book Award in poetry (2011), and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award (2003).
Tomaž Šalamun
Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) published fifty-two books of poetry in his native Slovenian. His poetry has been translated into over twenty-five languages and received numerous awards, including the European Prize for Poetry, the Jenko Prize, the Mladost Prize, and the Prešeren Prize. In the 1990s, he served for several years as the Cultural Attaché for the Slovenian Embassy in New York, and later held visiting professorships at various universities in the United States. Kiss the Eyes of Peace: Selected Poems 1964-2014 is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2024.
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