MEANDERINGS OF REAL HISTORY Poem by Damir Šodan

Everything will flow.
Suede
I slowed the ball down!
What else was I supposed to do?
(Just to feel that at least something was under my control.)
Then I jumped on my bicycle
and headed off to Albert Heijn
for some South African red
(God bless N. Mandela and H. Masakela!)
and then back home and straight out to the balcony
where I sat on the stool remembering
my late grandma and Tadija Bojkanov
an excellent tenor and her courtier
who was never to be (around 1928
in the village of K. in the Dalmatian hinterland
now dead as a stone) and in the same breath
for some reason also the great Dutch doctor
Nicholaas Tulp from one of Rembrandt's
paintings, a pioneer surgeon, the first one
to cut primates open, but that is altogether
a different story that calls for an additional narrative
frame and that is why I am already watching
the fireworks down above the harbor
(the sky bursting with fiery planktons . . .)
looks like the Italians are going to make it
to the top this year again although we are at the North Sea
never mind the geography being still an issue
only on the pages of parochial small print
where Jela, the fair maiden, still weaves her goblins
and deer come off the tapestries
to drink from the palms of humble proletarians
whereas here the Game compresses the world,
for it is a noose, a deposit, a harmolodics . . .
and there is no way you can escape it,
not even boarded in a casket
ridden with heavy nails.