Mario Suško Poems

U mojem je mozgu zvuk
kad držim oči zatvorene, visina
njegova sve jača i jača,
budim se, hoteći ga izvući
poput čarobnjaka što poteže
nit iz svojih nacerenih usta
s uredno nanizanim sjajnim iglama.

Nekoć sam prekrasno zviždukao,
pjesme Modugna, Endriga, ali
ne više. Sad samo šištavi zvuk
izlazi, kakav je djed
proizvodio kad se vratio doma
nakon operacije raka na grlu.
Katkad bih se gotovo smijuljio
nakon sto mi je htio nešto kazati,
oni siiisss i iiiizzz sve vrištaviji,
postajući manični zviždeći kotlić.

Natrag sam u hotelu, u krevetu,
ostrugavši šest mjeseci blata, gledajući
kako ga grkljan kade usisava;
pometnuo sam samoga sebe,
ali ne mogu spavati, nakon osamnaest
sati puzanja, bježanja, hodanja, letenja,
budući nema zvuka projektila,
haubica, samo udaljeno zujanje
strujnih žica. Tišina je postala
moja mukotrpna zveka, mrtvačko zvono.

U inom svijetu poslije, gdje rak
ne dolazi od stresa, friganih živaca
običavala je majka reci, il kratkog
spoja u umu, pa sam kao dječak
često mislio kako je oblik
ludila, nego od zidova,
cigareta (djed nikad nije pušio),
kemikalija sto svojataju nevinost
na omotima, čujem kako titraj
sunčeve boje bljesne, režući mi dah,
čini da moja glava eksplodira
poput lubenice na tržnici raznesene
zrnom snajperiste, njezino vodenasto
meso pljusnuvši na moju izblijedjelu
košulju, kao da je slikar poprskao platno,
dok sam ja, moje uši zaslijepljene
vriskovima, pokušavao otkinuti
histerično crne koštice, preobražene
nenadano u mahnite smolaste krpelje.

Zvučni valovi proždiru živčano tkivo
u mojem mostu, glava mi poskakuje
kao da je krpena lutka dok ju pritišćem
na jastuk, potežući beskrajan nevidljiv
kirurški konac iz grla s treperavim
iglama, izmjeničnom staničnom
strujom što tresti u djedovim jabučicama.
...

There is a sound in my brain
when I keep my eyes closed, its pitch
getting higher and higher, so I
wake up, wishing I could get it
out like a magician that pulls
a thread out of his grinning mouth
with shining needles strung on neatly.

I used to whistle beautiful songs,
Modugno's, Endrigo's, but I cannot
do that any more. Only a hissing sound
comes out, the kind my grandfather
would make when he got back home
from his throat cancer operation.
Sometimes I would almost chuckle
after he tried to tell me something,
those sszzzs and eeezs becoming shriller,
turning into a manic whistling kettle.

I am back in a hotel, in bed, having
scraped six months of dirt, watched
it being sucked by a tub gullet;
I aborted myself, but I cannot
fall asleep, after eighteen hours
of crawling, running, walking, flying,
because there's no sound of shells,
machine guns, just a distant hum
of electric wires. Silence has become
my torturous clang, my passing bell.

In another world after, where cancer
does not come from stress, fried
nerves as my mother used to say,
or the shortcircuited mind, so I
often thought when young it was
a form of madness, but from the walls,
cigarettes (grandfather never smoked),
chemicals claiming innocence
on food packages, I hear the tone color
of the sun flare, cutting my breath,
making me see my head explode
like a watermelon shot by a sniper
at the market place, its watery
pulp landing on my faded shirt,
as if a painter splashed his canvas red,
while I, my eyes blinded by screams,
tried rabidly to pluck off black pits
suddenly turned frantic shellacked ticks.

Sound waves eating my nerve fibers
in the pons, making my head bob,
that of a rag doll, as I press it against
the pillow, pulling the unending invisible
suture out of my throat, the needles
twinkling, the intermittent cell current
that blares in my grandfather eyeballs.
...

Eternity is God's oblivion, you said,
a faint smile crossing your lips.
That's why we are left with history,
not to forget what we cannot be.

You were taping your grandmother's bracelet,
a gold arabesque snake, onto your abdomen,
and I could see four or five hairs
curling upward, as if trying to explore
the air above the waistband of your panties,
two silver rings you'd already parted with
lying like eyeballs on the bare kitchen table.

Futile words and useless acts, I thought,
we needed to assuage the fear. Not
of dying but living the absence of living
,
like a frog I once saw on television
that suspends its being through the winter.

The following morning you left the city,
your face behind a fogged bus window
a featureless apparition, forcing me
to feel my chapped lips and blow you a kiss.

Two days later I managed to climb
into the attic of an abandoned building
and peer stupidly through my binoculars
at the checkpoint, praying that I see
your rings on the guard's fingers,
for that would have meant you were safe,
somewhere beyond our crazed reasoning.

A figure that leaned in perfect harmony
with his AK-47 against a barrel
smoked a cigarette, his derisive stare
telling me he somehow sensed I was there,
then stretched his arms, and I saw only
two blackleathered fists up in the air.
...

I came upon a man in black who sat on a tank,
tending his sheep that grazed impassively
around the craters and among dead bodies.

I am looking for my son, I said squinting.
The bullets in his cartridge belt slung
over his shoulder shone in the sun like teeth.

He smiled, chewing a cigarette to the other
corner of his mouth, and motioned with his hand
to the field. Plenty to choose from, he said.

The sheep were moving away towards the shade
of a big oak tree, the bodies following
on all fours. I strained my ears to hear the bell

I knew. He slid down and stared at me.
Is that your stomach growling, he asked.
I am just trying to find my son, I whispered.

You want me to shoot one? he spat out the butt
and stomped it with his boot that was like my son's.
We are talking about some good meat, he grinned.

The shirt looked familiar, but I couldn't tell.
My sheep started to fan out and I suddenly heard
a dog yelp behind me. He whistled, the sound

thin and piercing, making the bodies stop.
I felt the sweat run down my buttocks and legs,
as if someone punctured holes in my ribs.

Have you seen my son, I uttered, not knowing
whether any sound left my mouth. You never had
a son, he yelled and cocked his submachine gun.

The boots were the same, and so was the shirt.
And the Mickey Mouse watch on his hand was the same.
Tell you what, he said and laughed. I'll be your son.
...

my talking was to deliver me from fear,
my gestures, from despair of being
forsaken, the messages like those of a dog
barking and wagging its tail, something
God by design makes us choose at random.

ill-prepared for the merchants of fate
I bought shadows at the market to throw off
my pursuers, but they followed my scent
to the river, flashlights ice-skating
on the surface, frogs in the reeds their music.

once across I watched my clothes float
downstream, hugging the rocks, uncoupling,
disappearing as if devoured by the river's
whirling maw. I scrubbed my skin
with mud and stones to have my memory

bleed away with the smell, as my eyes played
hide-and-seek with glow-worms and tracers,
carrying me home to my bed to retrieve
a brick heated in the oven and wrapped
in my mother's old shawl to warm up my feet.

it was the gleaming steel sun in the morning
with two holes staring at my eyes when I
forced them open, and a voice of the shadow
that made the light disperse off its edges,
Shall I kill him or make him swim back,

and another, its fist sprinkling my forehead
with sand as if it passed from the bulb
of an hourglass, Let's hear his story first.
so I talked and wagged my tail through the woods
and the valleys, across the fields and the ocean.
...

Grandmother and I shared a small crammed room.
I slept on the sofa, she, in a high white bed.
She died when I was thirteen years old.
It was a cold gray January afternoon,
the kind that made your nostrils glue together
and the eyes burn from the coal smoke
belched by asthmatic chimneys in the street.

I came back from school and found my aunt
sitting on a rickety chair in the hall.
She pressed my stiff hands against her cheeks,
whispering, You'll be alone tonight, my dear,
but I thought only of her soft velvet skin.

She took me into the room and to the bed
where my grandmother lay in her long blue dress,
with a small bouquet of satin violets on the pillow
and two wavering candles on the marble top table.
The curtains were drawn, the wall mirror covered.

It was grandma's shoes that kept me transfixed,
pointed black caps sticking up like crows' beaks,
and when my aunt went to close the cupboard door
which always squeaked open mysteriously on its own
I spat silently three times to chase away bad luck.

The cupboard was a giant magic hat, things inside,
never seen, like a gold rabbit's foot she smuggled
through the German checkpoint, an endless source
of her night stories. After each she'd kiss me
and say softly, Adesso dormi e fai un bel sogno.

My mother was to arrive by a late train, so I
had to sleep at my place. I stood guard, the major
in the third room, requisitioned for war veterans
by the commissariat, listening to patriotic airs.
I pretended to be asleep when mother tiptoed in.

I tried to remember every song my grandmother sang
to me in Italian, about her homeland, lost love,
and that morning I awoke in the frigid room, alone,
with a shameful erection. I propped myself up,
looking at her waxed face, and saw her wink at me.

Two days later I raided the cupboard, digging
out a pistol lighter, cancelled banknotes, letters,
sepia photos of sailing ships, a cracked telescope,
an old broken compass; I got so angry I ran down
to the shed in the yard, dragged out my treasure,
a wobbly corroding bike with no brakes, and rode it
around the oak tree until I was blinded by tears.
...

Majka će sjediti za stolom
u hladnoj bijeloj kuhinji,
čekati da joj donesem
knjigu u kojoj pišem
kako sam iskopao njezine kosti
da ih doma odnesem.

Bit će tamo, rekonstruirana
poput pročelja kuca,
dok ću se ja pitati koje je stablo
u parku sto nikad vise mladice
neće pustiti lijes njezin bilo.

Ruka će moja mirisati na zemlju
i trulo lišće dok okrećem
stranice, tražeći neki dokaz
koji neće prebojena istina biti.
Znadući gdje ona doista jest
zaboravit ću možebit gdje ja jesam.

Kazat će, nikad nisam razumjela
tvoje pjesme, i ja ću gledati samoga
sebe kako blago zatvaram knjigu
u njezinu krilu, gradim se da imam
krivu stranicu, krivu kuću i krivi grad.
...

Mother will sit at the table
in the cold white kitchen,
waiting for me to bring her
my book in which I write
how I dug up her bones
to take them back home.

She'll be there, reconstructed,
like the faces of the houses,
with me wondering which tree
in the park that will never sprout
twigs again was her coffin.

My hand will smell of dirt
and rotten leaves as I turn
the pages looking for some proof
which is not a painted-over truth.
Knowing where she truly is perhaps
I'd forget where I must be.

She'll say, I've never understood
any of your poems, and I'll see myself
closing the book gently in her lap,
pretending I have the wrong page,
the wrong house, and the wrong city.
...

each time I blink
memories hunt me
a pack of relentless wild dogs
after my throat
where lungless syllables dream
of roaring
while they
their tongues stuck out
seem but silent
shadows
of the clouds
the wind plays with

this is not me
this is not real
I keep repeating
to other animals
behind the gauze
that graze on indifferently

my eyes are fixed
on my own shadow already overtaken
its legs up in the air
like those of my wooden horse
after I with one sweep of my hand
decided to win the battle

now if I stop
do not move and do not wink
will they run by and ahead
and I know
what was to happen
will have happened
the glass shards in my cheeks
the powder odor in my nostrils
the light blaze in my pupils

enough to make
a hand flip
the page

and
relegate everything to
fugue
...

kad god trepnem
pamćenje me goni
čopor nesmiljenih divljih pasa
ustremljenih na moj grkljan
gdje besplućni slogovi sanjaju
o rici
dok oni
isplaženih jezika
čine se nijemi
sjenama
oblaka
kojima se vjetar poigrava

ovo nisam ja
ovo nije zbilja
opetovano govorim
inim životinjama
s one strane gaze
što ravnodušno pasu dalje

pogled je moj
prikovan na vlastitu mi sjenu već uhvaćenu
noge joj u zraku
poput onih mojega drvenoga konja
nakon što sam jednim zamahom ruke
boj odlučio dobiti

sad ako stanem
ne maknem se i ne trepnem okom
hoće li me pretrčati
i ja znati
što se imalo zbiti
moralo se zbiti

komadi stakla u mojem obrazu
smrad puščana praha u nosnicama
bljesak svjetla u zjenicama

sve to dostatno
da ruka okrene
stranicu
i preda sve
zaboravu
...