Eyes, Ears, Mirrors Poem by Branko Čegec

forty green dragons are greeting my blunt arrival.
I am going just like that. I spread like the wind of a
Peleponnesian crane,
deep eye for literature, split surface, split surface, every
comma, eggplant, green pepper, south, gorgonzola is
strabismal and persistent
crystals of workers' children and semantics that cannot
be stopped
I say to myself that history is really the only omnipresent
alternative, with which the green old folks of the
dragons, hip - hop,
spill all over the melancholic surface of the innocent, pale
syphilitic ljubljanica, full of the seas and of the coasts by
which
shy ships of cocaine & laški golding land.
the river only moans, with dry lips and slow jerks.
where is that ugly ststue of history at all?
I used to have it in my left pocket, but it fell out.
I used to have it in my eye, in my ear, in my rotten
Converse sneaker,
Full of Balkan sweat and cheap European antiperspirants.
Where is that wild and endemic high-heeled shoe
Europe at all?
in the north, west, east, south and in between.
wherever I am alone. I refract in the mirrors,
in the multi - colored silence of my own musical memory
which does not let me speak.just as it does not let any
foreigner.

1986

Translated by Miljenko Kovačićek