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for Yasi I too love small streets—those orphans who don’t want usto make a fuss over thembut are delighted when a strangershows up and walks through,by choice or chance. Big Historyis never there, though the residentsoften display a quiet dignity worthyof long years’ note. Birds alwayshop on the concrete—the scrawnytrees always seem a little nakedeven…

I have spent most of my life walkingFrom one place to another not in the naturalWorld but the built world of cities sometimesGoing from one to another then zigzaggingAround them street to street walkingEverywhere I went not briskly but saunterWas my pace and my speed resembled the turtle’sOr even the snail or sometimes even the…

Time is led by its interrogatorsinto a round room with a domed glass ceiling.Ranged along the wall, strange numerals stand,mossy columns salvaged from some forgotten god’s temple.In the center of the room, on a small table,rest two black hands, cut off at the wrists,frozen in the pose of a pianist’sthe moment before the crescendo.The hands…

Fog on everything. Mountains white.Few things more beautiful than a swollen brain lit by dye tracers,a flare opening the broken sections, filled with our history.My father tells me, “these things are hard to knowparts you can damage and be fine.” Marbles I could pick out with my fingers,blue dye soaks the tissue, until the screen…

                I walked to the lake. I passed the Hooters, the Publix, the                     McDonald’swhere I sometimes use the Internet to grade papers                when my neighbor’s Internet is down. I passed the Wendy’s,                     and the ScottishRites temple, whatever that is. When I got to the coffee shop,                I ran into Vince and John and we talked…

What’s your whisper number, honey?Your point of roll-over or sell? Adrift you lumber, money pit and money doll,dispensing a sense of portly doom, exhalinga lost wherewithal. And yet you have advantages: too big to fail,you shake down squid—wholeecologies!—with stylish slaps of a trigger tail. What means ye by beaching,bleached, titanic paradox? Malnourished, listless,you can reach…

And didn’t I make you? Didn’t I shapethe notes you bend your body round? Didn’t Itag your streets and cityscapes with hue?Even your style—which you think is yours—didn’t I hand it over, like something momma-made,big enough for you to grow into? My wordsin your mouth. The words you use every day,all that old school and…

To my young daughter, I sing the songs my mother sang to me. Which is to say: to my young daughter,I sing an eclectic selection of breakup tunes of the 1960s. Now I knowyou’re not the only starfish in the sea / If I never hear your name again,it’s all the same to me…That doesn’t…

Translated from Slovenian by Michael Thomas Taren and the author The historyof the growth of heavenis the motion of every eyelashon everyborn and unborn human face.No kitties, notrees, no herdsof wild animalsare excluded or forgotten.The historyof the growth of heaven is the imageof all pastures,the image of all shades on greenpasturesin the blaze and dusk….