The Blue Tower Read Online Free Page B

and tracked it down himself. You
track down an invention like a hunting dog. And we were
melancholy everywhere. I’ve actually chased
    Â 
Archilochus. GLADSTONE WAS A
PIG. I ONLY LIKED DISRAELI,
I hear distinctly. Just as Pogorelić
    Â 
got everything from Liszt, via living people,
so now can I drink deeply from
the English crown. That has strategic
    Â 
significance. Marco Canoni. Look it up.
O your eyes, Queen Victoria. O your
white feathers. But young dots do
    Â 
the same. They’re on the dense, on the tiny and
the fresh. I’m on the rare, the horrible and
mad. But not sold out. Not sold out.
    Â 
I’m fighting with Primož’s prediction that
I’ll end as gilding, that I’m just playing.
Deit strokes my head. Deit has a say in the catch.

THE SLAVE
A slave placates my godfather. The left sleeve is
too short. I’m with you. Root out every
half-splinter half-straw from the base of the
    Â 
brush. I’m with you.
O grain, forming a sphere from your stalk.
Destroying and building churches.
    Â 
Bending a clapper.
Spitting on crumbs pressed into the sand by a horse
hoof.
    Â 
Why did you land here and not there?
How deep do you sink?
A screw would be no fun, you saw and
    Â 
shoved off. The noises are fairy tales. So are the foams.
The light
turns around. A bird flickers like lightning and
    Â 
sings like lightning.
Copying its divine gift.
The last sap of the beams in a trench, before it pays its caste.
    Â 
I’m charming. I’ve subjugated.
I discover some change in my
hand.
    Â 
A berry falls onto a drop.
Ardent la belle, where are you?
I’ve retreated into the cream inside the bread.
    Â 
I hear the paws of Teddy, the black dog, as they
echo off the grass as off a carpet.
He also loves and desires attention.

LIME TREE
Dane was handed around by Parisian counts
who offered him trips on their yachts around Africa.
And now me: would you go with me to Kuala
    Â 
Lumpur? “Who will get it?” A pear is stuffed
with a piano, o exvalidated. The surrealists kept
everything under glass. Their piano lay alone
    Â 
amidst clouds resembling some Tyrolean fence.
A pear stuffed with a piano, o exvalidated,
accomplishes three times thirty thousand times as much
    Â 
as the queen bee in her hive. When Beatrice buys and samples
cheese (it’s true, Tonino, the serotonin in pecorino, with ruccola
and chianti make you dream towards morning
    Â 
that you’ve lost your keys, your wallet, and all your
cards) people are stunned. She takes a fig, gives it
first to me to bite a little off, then tries it
    Â 
herself, and puts whatever’s left back into the grocer’s
hand. People learn. Even in Tuscany they’ve forgotten
quite a bit. They’re only now
    Â 
discovering why Masaccio was tremendo,
why he struck Gentile da Fabriano to the quick
when still a boy, not to mention (but which
    Â 
Longhi said, long ago, though no one believed him)
what he did for Fra Angelico. He made Fra Angelico
ready for God. Till then he’d painted cliffs like
    Â 
Bosch, little monks like Bosch, and his animals
carry something in their mouths like one-headed
stars. I open the corridor. There are people
    Â 
gathering in it now, who’d also like to get bread,
while the two of us just try some, turn it,
cold-bloodedly preparing ourselves for slow food.
    Â 
The people get that instinctively, although they
had those idiotic Savoys instead of
proper noble souls. And Pan opening
    Â 
Radovljica is worth six hundred silks. Rock me,
Vintgar, little paw. There it’s blue, there it’s
cool. There an old man sits on the cliffs, eyes bulging, like some
    Â 
haggard eagle. And there I, the sun, retreated early
and left you in peace to develop. You can also
feel free to forget those five hundred postcards. A leg
    Â 
cut into a pine doesn’t bleed like a leg snagged on a
cork tree. Rabbit carries his lettuce and house
on his back all by himself. And Bloom