TO DIE IN ŠOTOVENTO Poem by Milorad Stojević

(Sottovento, on the zig-zag route: Glavotok-Milohnići-Linardići-Žgaljić-
Bajačić-St. Chrysogonus'- the cyclamen field and prosciutto at Klisko's)



Bitching at my tools I made good
Ones nonetheless. Walking shoes. With solid heels.
Scented like glue and women's brushes.
Leather for shoe-tip made in one piece.
The heart unfeeling returns it as an image
In the second part of the pair, too.

I passed through deaths in them -
Exchanging them for slippers
Of fake felt, damp, from the cold karst.
(Like darling copperplates by M. C. Crnčić
Of those telling moments we imagine -
The one, maybe, when Vladimir Lunaček put
Left hand to forehead for him. In his accustomed, writerly way).

In engravings we are of dust. Sometimes
They are ours after break-ins to
Abandoned out-of-town apartments.

From the next-door poems footsteps clatter
Around the memories and short-cuts more
Deceptive and deceiving than
Our soles. Which we displayed like gifts
Willed to us in an early Romanesque church
Sheep have moved into. Grazing day-long
On cyclamens around the humble groves with the scent
Of parting ways. I said already, long before,
In unfinished market squares, it is hard
To die in Šotovento. Even in the jeep
Inflaming our flanks.

That's so. They're echoing.