The Anniversary
Jack Sprat’s Power Warns
You Organize Peas At The End Of The Night

The Anniversary

Death is a turbot, switched off.
The voice breaks apart. One hundred

and five years of ground lost. The alive
little woodstove sputters.

The Ganges is a dense elder tree. How is it,
that we ladled with a spoon:

lords; ghosts. They fought back like
cooks in the branches. You ran away from

the theater? You did not suffer the death of
your friend? It ignited. Fat

dripped from your father’s body.
In Persia, Zoroasters no longer feed

the birds. I called for him.
I never saw him again.

Jack Sprat’s Power Warns

Masonry’s evenings, wall’s hatcheries,
I am Tantalus’ nephew

and the son of cold capital.
Shepherdess! I stretch

and contract you. The artificial
ear in the mold. Here

on the tables, sense is burning.
Russians flood

the flaw from the outside, and still get
hit by it, moth’s chitin.

We restored the heavens to order with
bitter ink from the skies.

The layer is rainbow. The bullfinch is
the signatory on the flag.

You Organize Peas At The End Of The Night

Great-grandmother milled a man and
devoured him. She hung over a fence.

He said “Pump!” and disappeared.
Death mixes up coffee and cotton.

Certainly, if he blows, he is bound to be
confused. He has no taste for croissants,

you know. Death is worn out; gasoline
is poured out. She likes to bear crosses

and problems. She stuns Death too. Over
and over, again. Let’s applaud her. Death

drags her to a sidewalk, by the throat.
She is pale; she got it wrong. There’s

no vineyard. But he’s thrown off. And the heart
begins, to tick again, the lithely, little crocodile.

Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun (1941–2014) published more than forty
books of poetry in Slovenian and English. He was born in Zagreb, Croatia.
His first collection of poetry, Poker, was published in 1966. He was
renowned among his generation as a leader of the European avant-garde,
and revered as a teacher by many young poets in the U.S. and Slovenia.
His most recent books, published in English posthumously, are Andes
(2016) and Druids (2019). Opera Buffa is the last collection of poems
Salamun completed in his lifetime. He died December 27, 2014. 


Matthew Moore is a poet, editor, and translator. His poems appear
in literary journals and magazines including Fence, Interim, Lana
Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, Second Stutter, and West
Branch. From 2012 to 2020, he was a co-editor of the online poetry
journal Flag + Void. He is the translator of Tomaz Salamun’s Opera
Buffa, forthcoming from Black Ocean. He was born in Illinois.