By Ella Longpre
for Tomaž
next time I think you and I will be inside the building when it goes up
like inside a bell where the threat of its sound keeps you from growing out
the walls make sure you don’t join it
instead now we drive away toward the stables where the maria are asleep, cold, walking
along the peninsula in a dream there’s a field where we crashed
and the blood from your palm on the bathroom sink
I waited in the woods under some immeasurable hour that recurred at different levels of brightness
where the pipes stood in the outline of what used to be the house
and rang sometimes in the wind
moving through the bell
there is a new constellation because we changed our names
return to me my eye, under it, at the spot
where you usually spot the doe
I don’t see the wolf, either, just
the mountain and the snow pulled tight
across the hollow where the ribs stop holding nothing
the horse or the bell’s
breaking off a geranium leaf, something indiscreet in the scent
Originally appeared in The Volta's Evening Will Come: Tribute to Tomaž Šalamun, February 2015.