The Leopard Doesn't Squat, Tomaž Šalamun | translation by Michael Thomas Taren

,

.

Come, break me, reduce me. I’m becoming

the Czech’s foamy milk bowl. The siren will

kill me. Tear her dress off like Vergil to make her

a fat, abashed gelatine. I’m mashed by rocks.

She devours me like a tempest, she devours

the tattered flag. I'm an ice cream cone

melting in the child’s belly. Smashed

grapeskins. The yawning of sybaritic gazelles.

As an elephant I squirted. As a leopard I

squatted on the cow’s heart, the big one, at the edge

bordered with pearls. Bamboo was stuck in

the heart’s small nooks which on the other side

kept opening like mouths that had just passed

through the gelatine. The arrow, the wing,

the fish fins, the diamond nib of my liquified

brain. This makes the empire. Lust.

Appoint the sirens in the valleys, but I

swallow you out of myself. I enjoy

you out of myself. And I want more.

More, more, more, still more, ‘til the pain

with its heel squeezes my soul like toothpaste

from my throat. To have a good cry again and to

tremble, to shake like an overhead machine

and to sob. To need you. To need you.