HAMLET'S SPANISH BOOTS Poem by Taja Kramberger

Difficulties refused to agglutinate.
The stool was aglow, but Holan had no shoes
to walk away with,
to push off the sickly lump of lard.

Hamlet took them as booty
in that long night, starting in 1949
and finishing only in 1964,
and left him
all by himself in the elegiac lounge of dissonance, in
the malign wrinkle of Central Europe.

The Prague river glasswork over Kampa
still features all these images, as though
the treetops were still chewing them, very slowly
puffing them out of their pipes of memory,
filled long ago but never
smoked to the end.