Carol Peters

João Cabral de Melo Neto

2012-01-28T17:33:00.000-03:00

[from João Cabral de Melo Neto's Education by Stone: Selected Poems, tr. Richard Zenith, Archipelago, 2005]

Party at the Manor House [excerpts]
(Congressional rhythm, Northeast accent)

1

– The sugar mill worker
   in a large or small mill
– Is the same mill worker
   with a different rhyme.
– The sugar mill worker
   in a raw mill or refinery:
– "Sugar mill worker"
   is the crucial denominator.
– Any sugar mill worker
   from any Pernambuco:
– When he says "sugar mill worker"
   will have said everything.
– Whatever his name,
   position or salary:
– By saying "sugar mill worker,"
   he will have said it all.

11

– The sugar mill worker
   in female form
– Is an empty sack
   that stands on two feet.
– The female mill worker
   is essentially a sack
– Of sugar without
   any sugar inside.
– The sugar mill worker
   in female form
– Is a sack that cannot
   conserve or contain,
– She's a sack made
   just to be emptied
– Of other sacks made in her
   nobody knows how.

2

– The sugar mill worker
   looks like us from a distance:
– Looking closer one sees
   what sets him apart.
– The sugar mill worker
   up close, to a sharp eye:
– Is in all respects human
   but at half the price.
– He is missing nothing
   that you and I have,
   down to every detail,
   like any normal man.
– He's the same, yet seems
   to have been cut out
   by the dull scissors
   of a third-rate tailor.

7

– The sugar mill worker
   looks like flesh and blood:
– Looking closer one sees
   just what substance he is.
– The mill worker's body
   when actually touched
– Proves to be different,
   of a thinner consistence.
– Its texture is rough
   and at the same time slack,
   like cheap cotton cloth
   or like cotton scraps.
– Like well-worn cloths
   torn and tattered
   to where, in our language
   cloths become rags.

12

– The sugar mill worker
   seems to be of our clay:
– Looking closer one sees
   that his clay was grayer.
– The sugar mill worker
   is shadowy and dim:
– He never learns to shine
   like the sugar mill's steels.
– He can't even shine
   like the duller copper
   of the vats he stirs
   in the smaller mills.
– He never even learns
   to shine like the hoe handles
   he dry polishes daily
   with his sandpaper hand.

13

– The sugar mill worker
   when he's at work:
– Everything he works with
   feels heavy to him.
– It's as if his blood,
   though thinner than ours,
   weighed on his body
   like juice when thick.
– Like sugarcane juice which,
   after much cooking,
   gets thicker and thicker
   until it's molasses.
– The sugar mill worker
   has a heavy rhythm:
– Like the final molasses
   leaving the final vat.

9

– The sugar mill worker
   yellowishly lives
   among all that blue
   which is always Pernambuco.
– Even against the yellow
   of the canefield straw,
   his yellow is still yellower,
   for it reaches his morale.
– The sugar mill worker
   is the quintessential yellow:
– Yellow in his body
   and in his state of mind.
– This explains his calm,
   which can appear as wisdom:
– But it's not calmness at all,
   it's nothingness, inertia.

João Cabral de Melo Neto, 1935

João Cabral de Melo Neto

2011-12-20T14:30:00.000-03:00

[from João Cabral de Melo Neto in Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry, ed. Stephen Tapscott, Texas, 1996]

Weaving the Morning

1.

One rooster does not weave a morning,
he will always need the other roosters,
one to pick up the shout that he
and toss it to another, another rooster
to pick up the shout that a rooster before him
and toss it to another, and other roosters
with many other roosters to criss-cross
the sun-threads of their rooster-shouts
so that the morning, starting from a frail cobweb,
may go on being woven, among all the roosters.

2.

And growing larger, becoming a cloth,
pitching itself a tent where they all may enter,
inter-unfurling itself for them all, in the tent
(the morning) which soars free of ties and ropes –
the morning, tent of a weave so light
that, woven, it lifts itself through itself: balloon light.

tr. Galway Kinnell

João Cabral de Melo Neto

Alice Notley

2011-12-05T14:07:00.001-03:00

[from Alice Notley's Culture of One, Penguin, 2011]

Culture of One

Marie made things in the gully: she made her life, sure, more than practically anyone else did, but she wrote things down on paper discarded in the dump and she made figures out of wood and rocks and cord and burntness and whatever. The figures didn't really look like anyone, maybe her a little, and the dogs the same color as everything with wolf mouths, I mean coyote.

Every once in a while a kid burned down her shack, while she was out foraging. Then her works both written and made out of stuff would get burnt. She'd start again. She always remembered how to do it.

Where does culture come from? It comes from the materials you do it with.

When she made the shark out of rotting wood, I guess it was just a fish. A carp, probably, but she called it a shark. She put a little woman in its mouth, but it wasn't her; and it wasn't me, whatever I say. It was the wood calling out. It was just some woman, no it wasn't even a woman.

What are you going to do when they burn up your shack? I don't care, it'll still be great here.

Marianne Boruch

2011-11-17T11:41:00.001-03:00

[from Marianne Boruch's Grace, Fallen From, Wesleyan, 2011]

A Moment

Maybe it's common, this sort
of first meeting. But once, before a guest house
in Germany, the friend
of a friend to come by, and dinner –
that's it, we'll go to dinner, have the famous
spargel, that rare white asparagus, only
in May, our evening pre-arranged by phone,
by email. I need to say again we
hadn't met. Outside I stood
at the door, it being spring, every tree
gloriously poised. And a stranger,
another woman, she too waiting
but near the curb, looking
this way and that, attentive to traffic, hours
from dusk because we were north,
near the sea. And tall, she was towering,
older than I was, hugely
made-up, such meticulous work
behind that elegant finish. Then the friend
of my friend – could that be? –his
parking, his pulling himself
out of that tiny car.
Please understand. I'm usually
right there rushing in, because the world
requires that, loves the quickening
of that. But I was
or I wasn't. Or I was small
but there is smaller. To my left, a door.
Some tree flowering at my right.
I watched as he
to that woman said my name
so charmingly, a question, tilting
his head, are you . . . ? sorry to disturb,
are you . . . ? And in that pause –
her vague focusing on him, her loose
finding him now – I leaned forward,
simply curious: what
would she say? smile? yes? tell him yes?
So the thread breaks. So water in a glass
clouds and maybe clears.
So I waited, giving up
everything, to anyone,
just like that.

Marianne Boruch

Octavio Paz

2011-10-30T18:46:00.000-03:00

[from Octavio Paz's The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987, ed. Eliot Weinberger, New Directions, 1990]

Duration

"Thunder and wind: duration."
I Ching

I

Sky black
Yellow earth
The rooster tears the night apart
The water wakes and asks what time it is
The wind wakes and asks for you
A white horse goes by

II

As the forest in its bed of leaves
you sleep in your bed of rain
you sing in your bed of wind
your kiss in your bed of sparks

III

Multiple vehement odor
many-handed body
On an invisible stem a single
whiteness

IV

Speak listen answer me
what the thunderclap
says, the woods
understand

V

I enter by your eyes
you come forth by my mouth
You sleep in my blood
I waken in your head

VI

I will speak to you in stone-language
(answer with a green syllable)
I will speak to you in snow-language
(answer with a fan of bees)
I will speak to you in water-language
(answer with a canoe of lightning)
I will speak to you in blood-language
(answer with a tower of birds)

– translated by Denise Levertov

Duración

"Trueno y viento: duración."
I Ching

I

Negro el cielo
Amerilla la tierra
El gallo desgarra la noche
El agua se levanta y pregunta la hora
El viento se levanta y pregunta por ti
Pasa un caballo blanco

II

Como el bosque en su lecho de hojas
tú duermes en tu lecho de lluvia
tú cantas en tu lecho de viento
tú besas en tu lecho de chispas

III

Olor vehemencia numerosa
cuerpo de muchas manos
Sobre un tallo invisible
una sola blancura

IV

Habla escucha respóndeme
lo que dice el trueno
lo comprende el bosque

V

Entro por tus ojos
sales por mi boca
Duermes en mi sangre
despierto en tu frente

VI

Te hablaré un lenguaje de piedra
(respondes con un monosílabo verde)
Te hablaré un lenguaje de nieve
(respondes con un abanico de abejas)
Te hablaré un lenguaje de agua
(respondes con una canoa de relámpagos)
Te hablaré un lenguaje de sangre
(respondes con una torre de pájaros)

Octavio Paz, 1936

César Vallejo

2011-10-22T16:37:00.000-03:00

[from César Vallejo's Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, ed./tr. Clayton Eshleman, University of California, 2007]

Distant Footsteps

My father is asleep. His august face
expresses a peaceful heart;
he is now so sweet . . .
if there is anything bitter in him, it must be me.

There is loneliness in the house; there is prayer;
and no news of the children today.
My father stirs, sounding
the flight into Egypt, the styptic farewell.
He is now so near;
if there is anything distant in him, it must be me.

My mother walks in the orchard,
savoring a savor now without savor.
She is so soft,
so wing, so gone, so love.

There is loneliness in the house with no bustle,
no news, no green, no childhood.
And if there is something broken this afternoon,
something that descends and that creaks,
it is two old white, curved roads.
Down them my heart makes its way on foot.

Los Pasos Lejanos

Mi padre duerme. Su semblante augusto
figura un apacible corazón;
está ahora tan dulce . . .
si hay algo en él de amargo, seré yo.

Hay soledad en el hogar; se reza;
y no hay noticias de los hijos hoy.
Mi padre se despierta, ausculta
la huida a Egipto, el restañante adiós.
Está ahora tan cerca;
si hay algo en él de lejos, seré yo.

Y mi madre pasea allá en los huertos,
saboreando un sabor ya sin sabor.
Está ahora tan suave,
tan ala, tan salida, tan amor.

Hay soledad en el hogar sin bulla,
sin noticias, sin verde, sin niñez.
Y si hay algo quebrado en esta tarde,
y que baja y que cruje,
son dos viejos caminos blancos, curvos.
Por ellos va mi corazón a pie.

César Vallejo

Joanna Catherine Scott

2011-10-07T15:20:00.002-03:00

[from Joanna Catherine Scott & John Lee Conaway's An Innocent in the House of the Dead, Main Street Rag, 2011]

In Which You Tell Me You Have Set Islam Aside . . .

I used to dream, you say, that one day
I would take a pilgrimage to Mecca,

but I have given Islam up,
I have taken my name off all the lists,

I no longer go to pray.
Although I pray to Allah in my heart,

I thank him for the Qur'an,
which I also have inside my heart.

Get knowledge and understanding,
it instructs me.

And so I read and read and think,
and argue with myself, and others too,

and have become a wiser person
on account of it.

Which is why I have set Islam aside.
What point is there,

I came to understand,
in fighting with an enemy

who has the upper hand?
What point in setting myself up

for persecution by the guards and wardens
because I wear the Muslim cap

and fast for Ramadan?
A man must act upon his wisdom.

So I have set aside the kufi.
I do not abase myself.

I have light within me, though.
They cannot take that away.

. . . And I Drive Home in the Rain

The fallen sky laying itself out
and laying itself out along the road

like grey-clad pilgrims
abasing themselves full-length

and rising,
and then the abasement

and the rising up again,
end-to-ending themselves

like inchworms inching their way
across grey countryside

toward the holy city,
pelted on, and blown up

into a thousand falling fragments
by lumbering grey trucks.

Gathering themselves together.
Shaking off the insult.

Rising and abasing.
Rising and abasing.

And being blessed for it.
And being blessed for it.

That glittering
spinning off the wheels.

Joanna Catherine Scott

Virgil via Kimberly Johnson

2011-09-16T09:29:00.000-03:00

[from Virgil's The Georgics: A Poem of the Land, tr. Kimberly Johnson, Penguin, 2009]

Book One [excerpt]

For this the golden sun maintains its orbit

marked through the zodiacal twelve in marches fixed.

Five zones comprise the firmament, of which one ever blushes

under the flaring sun, ever scorched by its fire.

Around this at the poles to right and left stretch

bleak zones, ice-crusted and dark with storms.

Between the ice and middle fire, two zones to frail humanity

by grace of God are granted. A path cuts through them both

on which oblique the ranks of constellations spin.

As the earth surges steeply up to Scythia

and the Rhipean crags, so it sinks sloping to Libya's south.

The zenith ever vaults above us, the nadir

underfoot glowers at inky Styx and shades infernal.

Vast with sinuous coils here glides the Serpent,

weaving like a river round and through the Bears –

two Bears that fear to plunge the ocean's plane.

There, they say, may lurk dank night

and the shadows ever clotting under night's shroud . . .

or else Dawn removes from us, returns their day

and when sunrise with his panting team first breathes

on us, there ruddy Vesper kindles the late hour's lights.

So we can forecast weather though the sky

equivocate, so know the harvest-day, the time to sow,

when to smack with oars the sea's treacherous slate

and when to launch the bristling fleet

or in the woods to topple the ready pine.

Not in vain do we observe the rise and set of signs

and the year, orderly in its four dissimilar seasons.

Liber I [excerpt]

Idcirco certis dimensum partibus orbem

per duodena regit mundi sol aureus astra.

quinque tenent caelum zonae; quarum una corusco

semper sole rubens et torrida semper ab igni;

quam circum extremae dextra laevaque trahuntur

caeruleae, glacie concretae atque imbribus atris;

has inter mediamque duae mortalibus aegris

munere concessae divum, et via secta per ambas,

obliquus qua se signorum verteret ordo.

mundus ut ad Scythiam Rhipaeasque arduus arces

consurgit, premitur Libyae devexus in Austros.

hic vertex nobis semper sublimis; at illum

sub pedibus Styx atra videt Manesque profundi.

maximus hic flexu sinuoso elabitur Anguis

circum perque duas in morem fluminis Arctos,

Arctos Oceani metuentis aequore tingui.

illic, ut perhibent, aut intempesta silet nox,

semper et obtenta densentur nocte tenebrae;

aut redit a nobis Aurora diemque reducit,

nosque ubi primus equis Oriens adflavit anhelis,

illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.

hinc tempestates dubio praediscere caelo

possumus, hinc messisque diem tempusque serendi,

et quando infidum remis impellere marmor

conveniat, quando armatas deducere classis,

aut tempestivam silvis evertere pinum.

nec frustra signorum obitus speculamur et ortus,

temporibusque parem diversis quattuor annum.

Kimberly Johnson

James Lord

2011-08-16T15:34:00.006-03:00

[from James Lord's My Queer War, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010]

I went along to the nearby rue Christine, No. 5, to call on Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. The two women had recently been escorted in an army plane around Germany, Miss Stein making speeches to the troops and posing on the blasted terrace of Hitler's hideaway in Berchtesgaden. The GIs apparently enjoyed Gertrude's no-nonsense, didactic but natural talk, and we were encouraged to consider her a folksy mother of us all. . . .

her rue Christine salon was regularly crowded with eager listeners to the cello voice of that imposing lady. And the presence of all those soldiers, like all the Picassos on the walls, seemed to everyone concerned a delightful and self-evident demonstration of cultural inevitability.

Miss Stein took me by the arm into the entry hall. She had read the play and had clearly read it with care. "Your writing reads well," she said, "and maybe someday writing will be a reality for you, and I have one piece of advice to give you that every writer who is going to be a real writer must be given sometime by somebody, and it is to consider your emotions more carefully. A real writer must be very sure of his emotions before putting a pen to paper, so that is what I advise you to do, to consider your emotions more carefully." . . .

Miss Stein returned with Basket on a leash . . . she spoke of the GIs who were already being shipped from home for discharge. Their visits had begun to weary her, but she was sorry to see them go. And sorry for them as well, she added, because never again in their lives would they be so happy.

At that moment there was hardly an American in uniform who didn't long to shed it as quickly as possible. We were sick of the army, sick of the war and its stresses and qualms. I disagreed with Miss Stein and said so.

She stopped abruptly and faced me on the sidewalk in the sun. Repeating what she'd already said, she dogmatically added that war possesses an irresistible appeal for young soldiers caused by the thrill of a superhuman power to kill with impunity, and because of it, because of the naive confidence that no harm can come to them, they have at their fingertips a greater power than ever in their lives they will wield again, and they are like bloodthirsty gods united in the climactic comradeship of killing, and that is why they will never again be so happy.

I was indignant at the pontifical self-assurance of the lady, solid as cement in her tweed suit, and I once more said that I disagreed with her.

She said it didn't matter because I was too young, too inexperienced, and too obutse in my emotions to realize she was right.

I stood there. I was transfixed. And then I said she was not right, she was wrong, she was a stupid old woman and didn't understand anything.

I turned away. Without waiting for her to answer, I turned away abruptly and left her standing there in the street with her white dog on the leash, walked to the rue des Grands Agustins without once glancing back, went around the corner, and I never saw Gertrude Stein again. . . .

I was shaken with anger at having been talked down to by an elderly woman. But I realized she'd been amazingly prescient and had understood the true facts of life of fighting men as well as I did, though she had never faced artillery fire or faced a Nazi tank. My irritation wanted to be vindicated even at the cost of making Miss Stein appear to have been in the wrong. So I climbed the staircase to Picasso's studio and rang the bell. He opened a crack and asked what I wanted at that inconvenient hour. When I replied that his friend Gertrude was talking nonsense, the door swung wide, and he beckoned me inside, saying to tell all, tell all. I may have fiddled with the truth, but this suited Picasso, who muttered, That slut! That pig! He said she'd always been a Fascist, had a weakness for Franco. For Pétain too. Imagine. An American. A Jew. Fat as a pig; once sent him a photo of herself standing in front of an auto, and you couldn't see the auto she was so fat. As for Toklas, that little witch, why does she wear her hair in bangs? Picasso laughed out loud. She had had a horn in the middle of her forehead. A growth like a rhinoceros. So they made the ideal couple, the hippopotamus and the rhinoceros. But then Alice had the horn cut off and her bangs are supposed to cover up the hole. And Gertrude Stein talks about my pictures as if she'd painted them herself.

His laughter suddenly ceased. He shook himself like a bather who has just emerged from ice-cold water, turned away from me, saying he had important things to do upstairs, I would have to leave.

Click here for more on Lord, Giacometti, others.

James Lord by Balthus

Robert Duncan

2011-07-31T22:17:00.000-03:00

[from The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, ed. Robert J. Bertholf & Albert Gelpi, Stanford, 2004]

[Duncan to Levertov, 13 May 1963]

convention as "form" =

goes along with the natural is formless; man puts the world in order//or(2) with God formed the world as a paradigm in the beginning and disorder enterd thru man's sin. Only by conventicle, good behaviour, does man return to the lost order. A poem (subject always to man's sinfulness) attempts to atone by obedience to prescription. Here freedom = (a) disorder or (b) sin.

organism as "form" =

all experience is formal – We feel things at all only in so far as we awake to the form. Here the form of the poem is the feeling (and where form fails, feeling fails). "Inner" and "outer" are, if we could grasp the terms of cosmic form, in tune. We have only to discover the scale (so here I am organic as well as linguistic).

"linguistic" form =

the artist uses language to make forms, and in this he [is] in a creature/creator relation to a god who is also creature/creator of the whole. Where "organic" poetry refers to personal emotions and impressions – the concourse between organism and his world: the linguistic follows emotions and images that appear in the language itself as a third "world;" true to what is happening in the syntax as another man might be true to what he sees or feels.

free verse =

the poem does not find or make but expresses, and the poem has its virtue in the ecstatic state or emotional state aroused by rhythms and rime even, where the poet can pour forth what he feels//and/or God speaks thru the poet once his voice is free. Here form = restriction I'm thinking of a Hassidic interpretation of the law against making a graven image meaning that speech should not be made in that sense but speak from the heart. Free verse just doesn't believe in the struggle of rendering in which not only the soul but the world must enter into the conception of the poem. Experience is an engagement and responsibility to outer as well as inner.

Two forms of free verse would be Amy Lowell's impressionism and Ginsberg's "Howl."

[Duncan to Levertov, 28 November 1961]

You see you have three presences for me, Denny, that touch the deepest life feeling. One is the Denise I have been able openly to speak of, the companion in art – where in certain poems of yours, by grace of your “poet,” I am brought into that heart of life that poetry opens: then this poet you are I love because you are most true. No . . . it seems more that through loving this you so I come to love what is most true. And then, sometimes you are a poetic conscience for me. Not that my truth will be like yours – but that just where I fail my own poet, I betray this love.

Then there is, related, another presence: an idea of you or something you mean to me – yet it also seems to be really you and to reach the heart. I am troubled here, Denise, to make it clear, but just as my poet has existed in the light of your poet, my self does. And the "to thine own self be true" has existed, for always now it seems, as if that meant being true in your eyes. So I am always just that shy of, just that troubled in thinking of your love or mine because so often I seem to fail so miserably to "be myself." Maybe, I wanted to say "Be loyal to my self" but also "love me as I am not my self."

The third is just your real actual presence, where I have never felt these ghosts of conscience. When I've been with you, Denny, you are at last just you and I could no possibly not be just me as I am. That's what I did want to write most – how real all the rest is – but the pure joy, all the ever-lasting delight of these times in my life when I am actually with you.

Robert Duncan, Yosemite Park, 1922

Elena Milán

2011-07-23T16:46:00.002-03:00

[from Elena Milán @ Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women, ed. Forrest Gander, Milkweed, 1993]

Alucinación I

Supongamos que una zona del mundo se ha unido
del Atlántico al Pacifico,
de Portugal al Japón;
desde el Mediterráneo y Mar del Norte,
al Artico hacia el este.
Supongamos que soplan mitos extraños
desde las viejas cavernas de Altamira
y las ruinas del Turkistán,
algo así como naves vikingas
y nuevas leyendas de tártaros y samurais.
Supongamos que el gobierno yanki no les gusta
y deciden desestabilizarlo.

Hallucination I

Let's supose a zone of the world falls together
from Atlantic to Pacific,
from Portugal to Japan;
from the Mediterranean to the North Sea
to the eastern Arctic.
Let's suppose strange myths lift
from the ancient caves of Altamira
and the ruins of Turkistan,
something like Viking ships
and fresh legends of Tartars and samurai.
Let's suppose the Yankee government doesn't please them
and they decide to destabilize it.

tr. Forrest Gander

Denise Levertov

2011-07-17T15:28:00.002-03:00

[from Denise Levertov's Collected Earlier Poems, 1940-1960, New Directions. 1979]

Sarnen

Under the harvest sun the heart
ripens on its wall,
under the heat of noon the mind
like a leaf is cool.
The angelus and the goatbell
sway across the grass;
butterflies in blue mid-air
touch and spin apart.
Any attempted dream must fall
to ruin in this light, must pass
before the mocking glance
of idle animals.
There is no need to escape
from the motionless mountain
there is no need to escape
when here the indifferent lake
accepts a nervous image,
demands no affirmation
of innocence or faith.

Switzerland, 1946

A Dream of Cornwall

Footprint of fury quiet, now, on the salt sand
hills couched like hares in the blue grass of the air
water lifting its glass . . .

1946

Kresch's Studio

Easels: a high & bare room:
some with charcoal, one with a brush,
some with loud pens in the silence,
at work. The woman
in taut repose, intent:

under violent light that pulls
the weight of the breasts to answer the long
shadow of thighs,
confronts angles with receding
planes, makes play with elements.

That they work, that she will not move too soon,
opposes (as Bartok's plucked strings oppose)
the grinding, grinding, grinding of lives,
pounding constant traffic.

On paper, on canvas, stroke, stroke: a counterpoint:
an energy opposing
the squandered energy.

New York, early '50's

Tomatlan (Variations)

. . .

iii

The green palmettos of the
blue jungle
shake their
green breasts, their stiff
green hair –
the wind, the sea wind is come
and touches them
lightly, and strokes them, and
screws them, until they
are blue flames,
green smoke, and
screws them again.

iv

At the touch
of the sea wind
the palms
shake their green breasts, their

rustling fingers –
flames of desire and pleasure. . . .

Denise Levertov

François Rabelais

2011-07-11T19:12:00.000-03:00

[from François Rabelais, Gargantua, tr. Thomas Urquhart, Peter Antony Motteux, 1500s]

There he played at flush, at love, at primero, at the chess, at the beast, at Reynard the fox, at the rifle, at the squares, at trump, at the cows, at the prick and spare not, at the lottery, at the hundred, at the chance or mumchance, at the peeny, at three dice or maniest bleaks, at the unfortunate woman, at the tables, at the fib, at nivinivinack, at the pass ten, at the lurch, at one-and-thirty, at doublets or queen’s game, as post and pair, or even at the faily sequence, at the French tric-trac, at three hundred, at the long tables or ferkeering, at the unlucky man, at feldown, at the last couple in hell, at tod’s body, at the hock, at needs must, at the surly, at the dames or draughts, at the lansquenet, at bob and mow, at the cuckoo, at primus secundus, at puff, or let him speak that hath it, at mark-knife, at the keys, at take nothing and throw out, at span-counter, at the marriage, at even or odd, at the frolic or jackdaw, at cross or pile, at the opinion, at ball and huckle-bones, at who doth the one, doth the other, at ivory balls, at the billiards, at the sequences, at bob and hit, at the ivory bundles, at the owl, at the tarots, at the charming of the hare, at losing load him, at pull yet a little, at he’s gulled and esto, at trudgepig, at the torture, at the magatapies, at the handruff, at the horn, at the click, at the flowered or Shrovetide ox, at honours, at the madge-owlet, at pinch without laughing, at tilt at weeky, at prickle me tickle me, at ninepins, at the unshoeing of the ass, at the cock quintin, at the cocksess, at tip and hurl, at hari hohi, at the flat bowls, at I set me down, at the veer and turn, at earl beardy, at rogue and ruffian, at the old mode, at bumbatch touch, at draw the spit, at the mysterious trough, at put out, at the short bowls, at gossip lend me your sack, at the dapple-grey, at the ramcod ball, at cock and crank it, at thrust out the harlot, at break-pot, at Marseilles figs, at my desire, at nicknamry, at twirly whirlytrill, at stick and hole, at the rush bundles, at boke or him or flaying the fox . . .

François Rabelais, 1494-1553

Denise Levertov

2011-07-04T17:50:00.006-03:00

[from Denise Levertov's Selected Poems, New Directions, 2002]

Relearning the Alphabet

(June, 1968 – April, 1969)

For G. who could not help it, I. who saw me, R who read me, and M. for everything.

"The treasure . . . lies buried. There is no need to seek it in a distant counter . . . It is behind the stove, the center of the life and warmth that rule our existence, if only we knew how to unearth it. And yet – there is this strange and persistent fact, that it is only after . . . a journey in a distant region, in a new land, that . . . the inner voice . . . can make itself understood by us. And to this strange and persistent face is added another: that he who reveals to us the meaning of our . . . inward pilgrimage must be himself a stranger"
– Heinrich Zimmer

Joy – a beginning. anguish, ardor.

To relearn the ah! of knowing in unthinking

joy: the belovéd stranger lives.

Sweep up anguish as with a wing-tip,

brushing the ashes back to the fire’s core.

To be. To love an other only for being.

Clear, cool? Not those evasions. The seeing

that burns through, comes through to

the fire’s core.

In the beginning was delight. A depth

stirred as one stirs fire unthinking.

Dark dark dark . And the blaze illumines
dream.

Endless

returning, endless

revolution of dream to ember, ember to anguish,

anguish to flame, flame to delight,

delight to dark and dream, dream to ember

that the mind’s fire may not fail.

The vowels of affliction, of unhealed

not to feel it, uttered,

transformed in utterance

to song.

Not farewell, not farewell, but faring

forth into the grace of transformed

continuance, the green meadows

of Grief-Dale where joy grew, flowering

close to the ground, old tales recount,

and may be had yet for the harvesting.

I, J

Into the world of continuance, to find

I-who-I-am again, who wanted

to enter a life not mine,

to leap a wide, deep, swift river.

At the edge, I stand yet. No, I am moving away,

walking away from the unbridged rush of waters towards

‘Imagination’s holy forest,’ meaning to thread its ways,

that are dark,

and come to my own clearing, where ‘dreamy, gloomy,

friendly trees’ grow, one by one – but

I’m not looking where I’m going,

my head’s turned back, to see

whom I called ‘jester’: someone dreamed

on the far bank: not dreamed, seen

in epiphany, as Picasso’s bronze Head of a Jester

was seen.

I go stumbling

(head turned)

back to my origins:

(if that’s where I’m going)

to joy, my Jerusalem.

Weeping, gesturing,

I’m a small figure in mind’s eye,

diminishing in the sweep of rain or gray tears

that cloud the far shore as jealous rage

clouds love and changes it, changes vision.

Caritas is what I must travel to.

Through to the fire’s core,

an alchemy:

caritas, claritas.

But find my face clenched

when I wake at night

in limbo.

Back there forgetting, among the

letters folded and put away.

Not uttered.

‘The feel of

not to feel it

was never said . . .’ Keats said.

‘Desolation . . . Absence an absolute

presence

calling forth . . .’ the jester said

from the far shore (‘gravely, ringing his bells,

a tune of sorrow.’ I dance to it?)

‘You are offhand. The trouble

is concealed? Isak said,

calling me forth.

I am called forth

from time to time.

I was in the time

of desolation.

What light is it

waking me?

Absence has not become

a presence.

Lost in the alphabet

I was looking for

the word I can’t now say

(love)

and am called forth

unto the twelfth letter

by the love in a question.

Honest man, I wanted

the moon and went

out to sea to touch

the moon and

down a lane of bright

broken vanishing

curled pyramids of

moonwater

moving

towards the moon

and touched

the luminous dissolving

half moon

cold

I am

come back,

humbled, to warm myself,

honest man,

our bed is

upon the earth

your soul is

in your body

your mouth

has found

my mouth once more

– I’m home.

Something in me that wants to cling

to never,

wants to have been

wounded deeper

burned by the cold moon to cinder,

shrinks as the disk

dwindles to vision

numb not to continuance

but to that source

of mind’s fire

waning now,

no doubt to wax again –

yet I perhaps not be there

in its light.

Hostile. Ordinary. Home.

Order. Alone. Other.

Hostile longing. Ordinary rose, omnivorous.

Home, solitude.

Somnolence grotto.

Caught. Lost. Orient almost,

volition.

Own. Only.

Pain recedes, rising from heart to head

and out.

Apple thunder, rolling over the

attic floor.

Yet I would swear

there had been savage light

moments before.

P, Q

In childhood dream-play I was always

the knight or squire, not

the lady:

quester, petitioner, win or lose, not

she who was sought.

The initial of quest or question

branded itself long since on the flank

of my Pegasus.

Yet he flies always

home to the present.

Released through bars of sorrow

as if not a gate had opened but I

grown intangible had passed through, shadowy,

from dark of yearning into

a soft day, western March;

a thrust of birdsong

parts the gold flowers thickbranching

that roof the path over.

Arms enfold me

tenderly. I am trusted, I trust

the real that transforms me.

And relinquish

in grief

the seeing that burns through, comes through

to fire’s core: transformation, continuance,

as acts of magic I would perform, are no longer

articles of faith.

Or no: it

slowly becomes known to me:

articles of faith are indeed

rules of will – graceless,

faithless.

The door I flung my weight against

was constructed to open out

towards me.

In seeing

to candleflame’s

blue ice-cavern, measureless,

may not be forced by sharp

desire.

The Prince

turns in the wood: ‘Retrace

thy steps, seek out

the hut you passed, impatient,

the day you lost your quarry.

There dwells

a secret. Restore to it

its life.

You will not recognize

your desire until

thou hast it fast, it goeth

aside, it hath

the cunning of quicksilver.’

I turn in the forest.

About me the tree-multitudes

twist their roots in earth

to rip it, draw

hidden rivers up into

branch-towers.

Their crowns in the light sway

green beyond vision.

All utterance

takes me step by hesitant step towards

– yes, to continuance: into

that life beyond the dead-end where

(in a desert time of

dry strange heat, of dust

that tinged mountain clouds with copper,

turn of the year impending unnoticed,

the cactus shadows brittle thornstars,

time of

desolation) I was lost.

The forest is holy.

The sacred paths are of stone.

A clearing.

The altars are shifting deposits of pineneeedles,

hidden water,

streets of choirwood,

not what the will

thinks to construct for its testimonies.

Relearn the alphabet,

relearn the world, the world

understood anew only in doing, under-

stood only as

looked-up-into out of earth,

the heart an eye looking,

the heart a root

planted in earth.

Transmutation is not

under the will’s rule.

Vision sets out

journeying somewhere,

walking the dreamwaters:

arrives

not on the far shore but upriver,

a place not evoked, discovered.

Heart breaks but mends

like good bone.

It’s the vain will

wants to have been wounded deeper,

burned by the cold moon to cinder.

Wisdom’s a stone

dwells in forgotten pockets –

lost, refound, exiled –

revealed again

in the palm of

mind’s hand, moonstone

of wax & want, stone pulse.

Vision will not be used.

Yearning will not be used.

Wisdom will not be used.

Only the vain will

strives to use and be used,

comes not to fire’s core

but cinder.

Sweep up

anguish as with a wing-tip:

the blaze addresses

a different darkness:

absence has not become

the transformed presence the will

looked for,

but other: the present,

that which was poised already in the ah! of praise.

Denise Levertov

Eileen Myles

2011-07-04T01:33:00.002-03:00

[from Eileen Myles's Cool for You, Soft Skull, 2000]

After work I found a little bar that reminded me of Boston's stockbroker scene. An old little bar tucked away. I got used to going there after work and stuffing my face with pretzels and chicken wings. Some guy would offer me a drink. Sure gin and tonic. He'd usually lose interest fast, I was so boring. I'd just stand there and smoke. How did I ever survive. I closed the place one night with a guy. I was really bombed. I wanted to go a little farther with somebody. He had short hairs combed onto his forehead a little bit. He was a businessman, a salesman. Really creepy, in the beginning, but I got used to him. Writer, huh. Astronaut, marine biologist, what the fuck. I'll buy you some more, he said. I was shaking my pack. What do you smoke, Parliaments. I nodded. He threw them down on the table. He smoked Newports. I've got a great idea, Arlene. Since we're both kind of new around here, why don't we go to Fisherman's Wharf and get some seafood. Whaddya say. He lifted his glass and threw back the ice, but his little eye was looking at me like one of those whales that surface for a moment. I'm kind of broke, I said. My treat, Arlene. I'm really enjoying talking to you here. I shrugged and we were off.

I think it's a sin. It was a sin when Leon touched my body. I just thought you're lying here and you're lying. You just can't get up. I'd like to pick up the cup he brought me, to lift it again. We sat down at a table in this huge restaurant. It was black outside. We were near water. I'm a girl. He would light my cigarette. I couldn't read the menu. My head was swimming. I got another drink. I was obedient to the situation. I tasted it. It was like everything was liquid, everywhere. We got these big bowls of soup, red in tureens with thousands of fish with legs in them. Shrimps, everything bobbing. It was probably delicious but it seemed awful. My drinks kept lining up around me. Don't you have any money, he asked at some ridiculous time. He was presenting me with a bill. His face was wide. His hair was short. I think his name was Martin. Marty. I think we even got a drink at the end, one of those double shot things like a rusty nail. Amazing. He carried me out. The bed was spinning at his motel. Take your dress off, he said. I'm comfortable, I said. Do you want to take a shower, he asked. I just wanted to lie in the dark. He took his shirt off. His pants. He had socks on still and BVDs. He had little skinny legs and one of those old men wide flat bodies with a little belly. It was just like if he lied down flat he'd be big pancake. His nakedness was really creepy. Just seeing his body made me feel stronger. But somehow I got my dress off. I feel like a man. Just to be even remembering this. Then he pulled his underpants off. A little dick. He kept putting spit on it and whacking it. It was like it didn't matter what I saw. It was weird. C'mon help me, he said. So I helped him. He didn't want to kiss me. He didn't want to hold me. His little dick wouldn't get hard. Get down there, he said. Just kiss it, he asked. It was like his spit I couldn't stop thinking of. The dick, that little thing was nothing. It was dark. I mean it was pretty dark, just from outside. I remember sucking on his stupid little dick. Rub your tits against my leg. C'mon. I had really small breasts. I tried. It was like touching someone. Shake your tits. Pull yourself up a little bit, so I can see them. I couldn't do it. C'mon shake your tits. It felt stupid. I couldn't do it. Why was the salesman demanding a show. Why did I have to do it. Shake them, shake them, please. He was jerking himself off by now. Shake your tits, shake your tits. The cars going by made scars on the walls. It was dark. C'mon shake. I shook.

Eileen Myles

Christopher DeWeese

2011-07-01T15:16:00.000-03:00

[from Christopher DeWeese, this poem also appears in crazyhorse, Issue 79]

The Pier

There is no amusement
a pier can’t do better,
I mean you could think of anything
then improve it
by standing it up
on some timbers
above the mumbled water.
You could take your children
and leave them there,
come back a few years later
and they would all be interns
of one sort or another.
Clouds robe the fog
as if the salted air
were whispering secrets
to itself again,
a blue and hungry wind
teaching the boat-light
a little beginner’s semaphore.
The edge of understanding
scoots a few inches closer,
planning a family
from two parts hesitation,
one part otter.
It’s covered in barnacles
like the kind of shadow
that clanks and rattles,
this ghost I have
all over my arms.
I’m sitting here inland,
stuck deep in the memory
of what it is I’m missing.
Gulls replace the stars
with their messy warbles.
Out my darkened window,
trains fill in the harbor.

Christopher DeWeese

Mario Vargas Llosa

2011-06-30T23:00:00.000-03:00

[from Mario Vargas Llosa's The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, tr. Alfred MacAdam, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986]

He swallowed the last mouthful and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. The semi-darkness in the room had at first hidden the flies, but now he could see them. They formed a constellation on the walls and ceiling, and they strolled arrogantly over the plates of food and the fingers of those eating. All the houses in Quero had to be like that: no light, no running water, no drainage, and no bath. Flies, lice, and a thousand other bugs must be part of the poor furniture, lords and masters of pots and pelts, of the rustic beds pushed up against the daub-and-wattle walls, of the faded images of the Virgin and of saints nailed to the doors. If they had to pee at night, they probably wouldn't feel like getting up and going outside. They pee right here, next to the bed where they sleep and the stove where they cook. After all, the floor is just dirt, and dirt soaks up urine, leaving no trace. And the smell doesn't matter much because it disappears, mixed in with the other smells, thickening the multiple smells of garbage and filth that make up the household atmosphere. And if at midnight they had to shit? Would they have enough energy to go out into the darkness and the cold, the wind and the rain? They'd shit right here, between the stove and the bed.

As they walked in, the lady of the house, an old Indian woman all wrinkly and rheumy, with two long pigtails that bounced off her shoulders as she walked, put some cavies that had been walking loose in the room in a corner behind a trunk. Did the animals sleep with her, cuddled up against her old body in search of warmth? How many months, how many years had that lady been wearing those skirts she had on, which no doubt had grown old with her? How long had it been since she had washed herself from head to toe with soap? Months? Years? Had she ever done it in her entire life? The dizziness of the mountain sickness disappeared, replaced by sadness.

Yes, Mayta, millions of Peruvians lived in this same grime, in this same abandonment, amid their own urine and excrement, without light or water, living the same vegetable life, the same animal routine, the same elemental existence that this woman was living. This woman with whom, despite his efforts, he hadn't been able to exchange more than a few words, because she barely knew any Spanish. Just looking around here justified what they had done and what they were going to do, didn't it? When Peruvians like this woman came to understand that they did have power, that all they had to do was become aware of it and use it, the whole pyramid of exploitation, servitude, and horror that was Peru would collapse like a rotten roof. When the understood that by rebelling they would finally begin to humanize their inhuman lives, the revolution would be unstoppable.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Paul Celan

2011-06-28T17:33:00.003-03:00

[from Paul Celan's Poems of Paul Celan: Revised & Expanded, tr. Michael Hamburger, Persea, 2002]

Your Hair above the Sea

Your hair too hovers above the sea with the golden juniper.
Together with it turns white, but I dye it stone-blue:
that city's colour where last I was dragged to the south . . .

With ropes they bound me and knotted a sail to each one
and spat at me from their misty mouths and sang out:
"O come over the sea!"
But I as a dinghy painted my pinions purple
and wheezed a breeze for myself and before they slept sailed away.
Now it is red I should dye them, your locks, but I like them
stone-blue:
O eyes of the city where, felled, I was dragged to the south:
With the golden juniper now your hair too hovers above the sea.

Dein Haar Überm Meer

Es schwebt auch dein Haar übern Meer mit dem goldnen Wacholder.
Mit ihm wird es weiss, dann färb ich es steinblue:
die Farbe der Stadt, wo zuletzt ich geschleift ward gen Süden . . .

Mit Tauen banden sie mich und knüpfen an jedes ein Segel
und spieen mich an aus nebligen Máulern und sangen:
"O komm übers Meer!"
Ich aber malt als ein Kahn die Schwingen mir purpurn
und röchelte selbst mir die Brise und stach, eh sie schliefen, in See.
Ich sollte sie rot dir nun fárben, die Locken, doch lieb ich sie
steinblau:
O Augen der Stadt, wo ich stürzte und súdwarts geschleift ward!
Mit dem goldnen Wacholder schwebt auch dein Haar übern Meer.

Paul Celan

Mark Salzman

2011-06-17T13:53:00.002-03:00

[from Mark Salzman's True Notebooks, Knopf, 2003]

At half past ten, Mr. Sills wandered past the library and looked inside. The boys were all working, but Mr. Sills did not seem impressed. To me, it looked as if he was searching for any excuse to throw us out. He stood motionless in the doorway for two or three minutes, then returned to his office without any comment. My relief must have shown when he left, because Francisco asked, "Wha'chu trippin' about? He can't do nothin' to you!"

"I'm not used to being watched like that."

"Try takin' a shit that way." Francisco slapped his pencil down on the table and looked around the room. "What the fuck's that, Chumnikai? Some kinda bird?"

"It's a penguin."

"What you drawin' a penguin for, fool?"

"In school the other day the teacher asked us what animal we thought we were most like. I said penguin."

"Fuckin' Chumnikai!"

"Fuckin' Javier."

"Why a penguin?" I asked.

Patrick shrugged. "Because a penguin is small, it has wings but it can't fly, and it can withstand cold temperatures. That's me." He began crossing out the drawing, but pressed so hard with the pencil that the tip snapped. He froze, bracing for my angry reaction.

Francisco winced; he also seemed to expect the worst. "Damn, Chumnikai! You fucked up his pencil!" I sensed that this was more of a plea than a reprimand. Francisco seemed to assume that I, as an adult, would naturally go ballistic over a small infraction; he was trying to keep me from taking it out on the whole class.

I handed Patrick a fresh pencil, told him not to worry about the broken one, and asked if he'd finished his essay.

"Yeah – I'll read it if you want." As he had never volunteered to read before, I took this as a gesture of gratitude.

"Go ahead."

It was a Thursday, around mid-October of '94. It seemed like a normal day, but something happened that day that changed my life forever. I used to be a good kid doing good in school, but that changed. I arrived at my cousin Ryan's house. He was about fifteen at the time, bald-headed, and wore khaki pants and a white shirt. He told me that a group of his friends were coming over to kick it and drink. Ryan's friends were different. They were from a gang. A gang I used to see on the store walls when I was young.

Soon the house was filled up with gang members. It seemed like they were like one happy family having fun, and I wanted to be part of that family. I was sitting on the couch drinking. The air was filled with smoke from the cigarettes, and loud and noisy from the guys who were yelling and singing because we were all drunk from drinking forty ounces, tequila, and vodka. I was a little dazed when I saw a guy who was about twenty, stalky-looking, and had a fade. John was his name. He asked me if I wanted to join. I thought about it for a while. I mean it seemed OK, because we were all talking, dancing, drinking, just having fun. I told him I'd join. So he told me to just hold on tight, and suddenly, two guys just rushed and jumped me. They beat me for about twenty seconds, then they stopped. All of them in the room were watching me. ALL EYEZ ON ME. They shook my hand and gave me a name. Now I was a part of their family. It was about 2:30 p.m. I had to pick up my brother from school. I told John that I was going to walk to the school. But he insisted that he drive me there to pick him up. We went and when I saw my old friends at the school, I felt different. I was from a gang now. I felt like I had power. People would fear me and my friends when we went into places. Little did I know how much trouble I got myself into. I now have enemies I haven't met before, police watching me, endangering my family, and sending me to a place like this. Sure, I thought it was cool three years ago, but I didn't know it could put me in jail. If I had the chance to go back to that day and not join, I would. And maybe I wouldn't be in a place like where I am today.

. . .

Deep down inside, this angry person awakens. Another day facing perpetual incarceration behind no mercy walls, as we are inmates.

Deep down inside this angry person there is an image of a rejoiceful person who's facing perpetual incarceration behind no mercy walls. Just like your fellow inmates, as you think about the happiness in the past you'll like to shout out for mercy upon your life. But living in darkness for so long, you're taught not to express certain emotions. The voice no one hears is the voice that yells out for freedom in the mind of a forbidden child. Struggling to survive in an ongoing war that seems to have led me and my fellow troops to a meaningless situation. But as I'm found innocent in God's prison, the light should shine on this voice of mine that people just can't seem to follow and understand and I could say farewell to all my hidden voices. And the loneliness in my life shall run for cover.

. . .

"So you sayin' we deserve to get locked up for life for one mistake we made?" Victor asked, getting heated up.

"I'm sayin' if you want the benefit, you gotta face the consequences. Same goes for society. They want the benefit of lockin' kids up and throwin' away the key? They playin' they cards wrong. They gonna face the consequences."

I asked him what he thought the consequences of adult sentences for juvenlies would be.

"Most of us gonna get out someday, right? Teen gangbangers be steppin' out of the pen after twenty, thirty years of livin' like animals, comin' of age in a place where nobody trusts nobody, bein' treated like less than a piece of shit. Wha'chu think they gonna do? Most they family be dead by then. What they got to live for? Revenge. Nothin' else."

Mark Salzman

Nick Lantz

2011-06-16T19:12:00.004-03:00

[from Nick Lantz’s We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, Graywolf, 2010]

“Of the Parrat and other birds that can speake”

      “It is for certain knowne that they have died for very anger and
      griefe that they could not learn to pronounce some hard words.”
                     – Pliny the Elder

When you buy the bird for your mother
you hope it will talk to her. But weeks pass
before it does anything except pluck the bars
with its beak. Then one day it says, “infect.”

Your mother tells you this on the phone,
and you drive over, find the frozen meals
you bought for her last week sweating
on the countertop. “In fact,” she says

in answer to your question, “I have been
eating,” and it’s as you point to the empty
trash can, the spotless dishes, that you
realize the bird is only saying, “in fact,”

that this is now the preamble to all
of your mother’s lies. “In fact,” she says,
“I have been paying the bills,” and you
believe her until you find a cache

of unopened envelopes in the freezer.
More things are showing up where
they shouldn’t. Looking out the back
window one evening you see craters

in her yard. While she’s watching TV,
you go out with a trowel and excavate
picture frames, flatware that looks like
the silver bones of some exquisite

animal. You worry when you arrive
one day and see the open, empty cage
that you will find the bird dead, stuffed
in an oven mitt and left in a drawer,

but you find it sitting on her shoulder
in the kitchen. “In fact,” she says,
“he learned to open the cage himself.”
The bird learns new words. You learn

which lies you can ignore. The stroke
that kills her gives no warning, not –
the doctor assures you – that anyone
can predict such things. When you

drive home that night with the cage
belted into the passenger seat, the bird
makes a sound that is not a word
but that you immediately recognize

as the sound of your mother’s phone
ringing, and you know it is the sound
of you calling her again and again,
the sound of her not answering.

Lightly at First, Then Rapture

      “I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable
      than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it
      started.” – Donald Rumsfeld

Beyond the blue chalk line
of the highway, acreage
of corn, stalks cuckolding
one another in the wind.
Closer, the yard crusts
over with rotten plums;
a delirium of squirrels
natters in the upper limbs.
And here in the kitchen
the dishwasher jet thuds
its muted round, too like
the sonogram heartbeat.
When the washer finishes,
even sound will abandon
the house. Each dawn
is a piece of dark flint
hefted under dim light.
But not to worry. My
neighbor tells me that
any time now, an angel
will sound a few notes
on its bleating trumpet.
Jesus will poke the divine
straw into the atmosphere
and suck the righteous
up to heaven, their bodies
jangling like pennies
through the Hoover tube.
Whether we’re taken
or not, says my neighbor.

Nick Lantz

Hans Ostrom

2011-06-16T03:04:00.000-03:00

[from Hans Ostrom's The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, Dog Ear, 2005]

Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven

They call each other E. Elvis picks
wildflowers near the river and brings
them to Emily. She explains half-rhymes to him.

In heaven Emily wears her hair long, sports
Levis and western blouses with rhinestones.
Elvis is lean again, wears baggy trousers

and T-shirts, a letterman's jacket from Tupelo High.
They take long walks and often hold hands.
She prefers they remain just friends. Forever.

Emily's poems now contain naugahyde, Cadillacs,
Electricity, jets, TV, Little Richard and Richard
Nixon. The rock-a-billy rhythm makes her smile.

Elvis likes himself with style. This afternoon
he will play guitar and sing "I Taste a Liquor
Never Brewed" to the tune of "Love Me Tender."

Emily will clap and harmonize. Alone
in their cabins later, they'll listen to the river
and nap. They will not think of Amherst

or Las Vegas. They know why God made them
roommates. It's because America
was their hometown. It's because

God is a thing
without feathers. It's because
God wears blue suede shoes.

Hans Ostrom

Larry Levis

2011-06-11T16:04:00.001-03:00

[from Larry Levis’s The Afterlife, Iowa, 1977]

The Double

Out here, I can say anything.
I can say, for example, that a girl
disappearing tonight
will sleep or stare out
fixedly as the train moves her
into its adulthood of dust
and sidings.

I remember watching wasps
on hot evenings
fly heavily over chandeliers
in hotel lobbies.
They’ve torn them down, too.
And the elderly drunks
who seemed not to mind anything,
who seemed to look for change
in their pockets, as they gazed
at the girl in the Pepsi ad,
and the girl who posed for the ad,
must all be dead now.

I can already tell that this
is no poem to show you,
this love poem. It’s so
flat spoken and ignorable,
like the man chain smoking
who discovers he’s
no longer waiting for anyone,
and goes to the movies
alone each Saturday, and grins,
and likes them.
This poem so like the hour
when the street lights turn
amber and blink, and the calm
professor burns another book,
and the divorcee waters her one
chronically dying plant.
This poem so like me
it could be my double.

I have stood for a long time
in its shadow, the way I stood
in the shadow of a dead roommate
I had to cut down from the ceiling
on Easter break, when
I was young.

That night I put my car
in neutral, and cut the engine
and lights to glide downhill
and hear the wind rush over
the dead metal.
I had to know what it felt
like, and under the moon,
gaining speed, I wanted to slip
out of my body and be
done with it.

A man can give up smoking
and the movies, and live for years
hearing the wind tick over roofs
but never looking up from
his one page, or the tiny
life he keeps carving over and
over upon it. And when everyone
around him dies, he can move
a grand piano into
his house, and sit down
alone, and finally play,
certain that no one will
overhear him, though he plays
as loud as he can,
so that when the dead come
and take his hands off the keys
they are invisible, the way air
and music are not.

Larry Levis

Robert Creeley

2011-06-07T15:22:00.000-03:00

[from J. D. McClatchy's The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Vintage, 2003]

For Love

for Bobbie

Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above
the others to me
important because all

that I know derives
from what it teaches me.
Today, what is it that
is finally so helpless,

different, despairs of its own
statement, wants to
turn away, endlessly
to turn away.

If the moon did not . . .
no, if you did not
I wouldn't either, but
what would I not

do, what prevention, what
thing so quickly stopped.
That is love yesterday
or tomorrow, not

now. Can I eat
what you give me. I
have not earned it. Must
I think of everything

as earned. Now love also
becomes a reward so
remote from me I have
only made it with my mind.

Here is tedium,
despair, a painful
sense of isolation and
whimsical if pompous

self-regard. But that image
is only of the mind's
vague structure, vague to me
because it is my own.

Love, what do I think
to say. I cannot say it.
What have you become to ask,
what have I made you into,

companion, good company,
crossed legs with skirt, or
soft body under
the bones of the bed.

Nothing says anything
but that which it wishes
would come true, fears
what else might happen in

some other place, some
other time not this one.
A voice in my place, an
echo of that only in yours.

Let me stumble into
not the confession but
the obsession I begin with
now. For you

also (also)
some time beyond place, or
place beyond time, no
mind left to

say anything at all,
that face gone, now.
Into the company of love
it all returns.

Robert Creeley, 1973

Anne Carson

2011-06-03T18:10:00.000-03:00

[from Anne Carson’s Nox, New Directions, 2010]

Anne Carson's Nox

1.1 History and elegy are akin. The word “history” comes from an ancient Greek verb ίστωρειν meaning “to ask.” One who asks about things – about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell – is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.

. . . The phoenix mourns by shaping, weighing, testing, hollowing, plugging and carrying towards the light. He seems to take a clear view of necessity. And in the shadows that flash over him as he makes his way from Arabia to Egypt maybe he comes to see the immensity of the mechanism in which he is caught, the immense fragility of his own flying – composed as it is of these ceaselessly passing shadows carried backward by the very motion that devours them, his motion, his asking.

1.2 Autopsy is a term historians use of the “eyewitnessing” of data or events by the historian himself, a mode of authorial power.

. . . Note that the word “mute” (from Latin mutus and Greek μύειν) is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.

5.4 . . . Always comforting to assume there is a secret behind what torments you.

7.1 I want to explain about the Catullus poem (101). Catullus wrote poem 101 for his brother who died in the Troad. Nothing at all is known of the brother except his death. Catullus appears to have travelled from Verona to Asia Minor to stand at the grave. Perhaps he recited the elegy there. I have loved this poem since the first time I read it in high school Latin class and I have tried to translate it a number of times. Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy. No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind. I never arrived at the translation I would like to do of poem 101. But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends.

Anne Carson

Michael Walsh

2011-06-03T15:36:00.001-03:00

[from Michael Walsh's The Dirt Riddles, Arkansas, 2010]

Morning Milkings

Mother slaps every sleeping cow
with a chapped, leathery hand.
Once, twice, as many times as it takes.
Then, with the lightest touch, she announces
to the first startled flank
her bucket, her brown paper towels, her iodine,
her plastic syringes for the sick.
She washes each udder,
overripe and leaking
faster in the rag
with each wipe, careful
of any touchy warts.
One long squeeze
into her palm and she's done.
The milk's ripe and opaque
in her lifeline,
no flecks of red
today, no odd clots.
A skeptic, she pushes
her greasy glasses
back up her nose, closer
to her nearsighted eyes,
then tosses the sample, quick as spit.

After His Lessons from the Belt

my mother would always sit on the bed
and spread out the great map
of his fault lines – that webwork
of unpredictable tensions.

We studied where the quakes
were most likely to occur: in barns, fields
near sheds.

We learned to sense the shifting,
the slow grind of plates, the opening
chasms of his hands.

Quilt Rags

Every time we molt our blue jeans,
Grandma takes the busted pairs.
First she trims that feathery fringe
from the worn-out knees.

Then she hangs them
over a cardboard box, unravels
long, golden threads from the seams,
and razors the empty legs

down to spare parts, squares
and triangles for her quick pins.
The awkward crotch she cuts last,
pulls out the zipper like a gizzard.

Miller Williams & Michael Walsh

Julie Carr

2011-05-30T14:51:00.001-03:00

[from Julie Carr's Sarah – Of Fragments and Lines, Coffee House, 2010]

Western Wind: An Ode

One's mother's brain's
like one of those egg sacs

that lists by slack waves of seaweed and gull-prints –
still speaking abundance – found washed up to rotting

wood of a trap

Trees without leaves and dogs without leashes
simmering wheels of company cars

The body's a hole through which other bodies move

Lines for a Storm

So he plucked out his feathers, went and sat by a tradesman's shop
and wept.

With the sunflower nodding and the sirens on steady, she wakes to
answer the phone.

Kissing the deck with superstitious ardor, the hand with his cap on
is filmed.

And he walked the globe with feet of lead, and she in a window
of dust.

Pale blue lines between banks of dark cloud had no choice but to
become America.

Wept and wailed until he lost his senses – when the cook came by he
gave her pepper when she asked for salt, wheat when she asked for rice.

Two thousand soldiers in the Union army suffering from nostalgia.

And though many of the afflicted were hospitalized, the most serious
cases were allowed to return home.

Running as ocean-froth or cloud-wisp in storm-wind, a memory of
her small lap her salt scent her blue beads and her eye, blinking.

Parents, advised to train their children to master their emotions, sent
them from home so they might grow accustomed to movement and loss.

And she, in this torrent, dissolves.

Julie Carr

Elizabeth Alexander

2011-05-23T16:15:00.001-03:00

[from Elizabeth Alexander's Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010, Graywolf, 2010]

Fugue

Virginia Woolf, incested
through her childhood, wrote
that she imagined herself
growing up inside a grape.
Grapes are sealed and safe.
You wouldn't quite float
in one; you'd sit locked
in enough moisture to keep
from drying out, the world
outside through gelid green.
Picture everyone's edges
smudged. Picture everyone
a green as delicate
as a Ming celadon. Pic-
ture yourself a mollusk
with an unsegmented body
in a skin so tight and taut
that you'd be safe. You could
ruminate all night about
the difference between "taut"
and "tight," "molest" and "incest."
"Taut" means tightly-drawn,
high-strung. What is tight
is structured so as not to
permit passage of liquid
or gas, air, or light.

Six Yellow Stanzas [excerpt]

4.

Photograph:
my yellow moon-
pie face, yellow baby
screaming in the middle of the bed.
You could pass for Spanish,
a man says, as a compliment.
You a high-yella gal, and I like that,
says a suitor. Yellow!

I dreamed I had a yellow baby.
In the dream I didn't feed it.
It dried flat on the blacktop
like an old squashed frog.
I tried to revive it with lemonade
by the dropperful,
but that was the end
of my yellow dream baby.

5.

My thigh next to your thigh.
Your black thigh
(your dark brown thigh)
next to my black thigh
(which is "yellow"
and brown, and black).
Sunless flesh or sunshine flesh.
I startle myself
with my yellowness
next to your black
but say none of this,
and lick your skin 'til yellow-
black sparks fly,
a hive of bumblebees
which hum at your body
and do not sting.

6.

Egg yolk, crocus, buttercup, butter,
dandelion, sunflower, sunbeam, sun,
chicken fat, legal pads, bumble-bee stripes,
a bowl full of lemons, grapefruit peel,
iris hearts, pollen, the Coleman's mustard can,
the carpet and sheets in my childhood bedroom:
things that are yellow and yellow alone.

Elizabeth Alexander

Samuel Amadon

2011-05-21T14:07:00.000-03:00

[from Samuel Amadon's Like a Sea, Iowa, 2010]

The Barber's Fingers Move October

If I watch two white cats play in a window
which is not the window I should be watching

when a window I watch through is the window
I should be washing, then we know today

is going to be a difficult to listen to all his talking
when his shirts are open, when is face is

pulsing. Would anyone like to see my thumbs
lonely, or growing from one leg to the next

brownstone overflowing with people unprepared
for how happily I'm going to be making lunch

look like a portrait of milk next to seventy-two
days of tomato soup, each peppered

with less cooking makes for opportunity to see
my foot pressed against Grant's Tomb

which is just to say mustache. But
could landmarks be what I've been neglecting

to mention, how unproductive never leaving
the house might actually be what you were

meaning? I'm sorry. Sometimes listening takes
stealing a bus, or finding a way to parking lots

large enough in which to fishtail.
A reason for snow having not come. This year

is going to be a good idea becomes better
after sharing it with stringers, or settle down

before you worry yourself into a newspaper
subscriber who won't take the time to more

than rinse a mug. Isn't water what we were after
all I can't remember, but believe as a child

I was a vision of not really the strongest swimmer
on his hands, collecting grass for filters because enough

with the ceiling fan it's summer Sam no one but me will
believe you are robot who prefers a beach in tight

khakis with no belt because it's back home holding
his project in rotation, which is sort of like me

now, see how I can make my chair stop or keep
my chair spinning, either way I must be up for something

has made one white cat try hard his face against
the glass until a vein appears which, followed, leads

us back to apparently my bicycle was taken off
the shelf. What if I rode it with my knees spread down

the four flights of stairs out this building
into the street without checking the car's side

mirrors for if I still pedal with my mouth open?
Better you leave it too precarious in the doorway

for me to follow after the door is knocked
by the wind from a window I will open now

that it's safe to say this has been a full morning
of staring through the half-reflection of my face

figuring out how it would sound
to understand every word you were saying.

Samuel Amadon

Heather McHugh

2011-05-20T15:35:00.000-03:00

[from Heather McHugh's Upgraded to Serious, Copper Canyon, 2009]

About the Head

In the old days it was all
phrenologists and mentalists,
feelers for speed bumps.

Several rubbers later there was lunch,
and the diamonded mind
and the spaded heart
were equally sedated,

and the club,
the club in whose name
so much was done, the club that could trace
its roots back to an ash tree,
and its branches up to an ash cloud,

the club that let in and that disallowed
the thoughts of so many –
ingeniously giving members
bullhorns for our little voices,
leather for our liabilities of skin –
the products of its expertises hooking
dugs to suction-cups
and penises to clever
lover-tubes, docilities
to stanchions – keeping the consumer
from those messy overflows – oh yes,

the clickogenic club – it's now on its way
out, going the slope of the oil- and
cowmen, under a wave of nouveau
spunk, as reproduction comes
in plastic, tungsten,
dazzleworks of circuitry – no
boring boards! The club with all its antique
codes and codicils will have to

club itself out, out of courtesy, on the path
to a virtually productive heaven – let the gentlemen
agree. Their sons, the slackers with the liquor, hand it on
to generation Z, that need not multiply or sleep. The stock
of alphabets runs out, the line of swollen lifetimes hits
the point of several seconds flat, and any smidgen
beats a bludgeon. Just a blip behind the eyes

works better than a bruiser with a bat.

Heather McHugh

Chase Twichell

2011-05-17T19:04:00.000-03:00

[from Chase Twichell's Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems, Copper Canyon, 2010]

Snow Light

I stop, winded, the air sifting down.
Here is the peculiar light I hoped for.
The branches of the pines are lobed with snow,
each shape intact, and brightened from within.

I walked among these flickering trunks in fall,
the grass grown stiff and noisy underfoot,
and found a mystery, a tree, a flowering quince,
all pale and fragrant, out of season.

It gave off this light.
What is holy is earth's unearthliness.
Love, could we describe it,
would break apart, lucency and force.

A starling rasps from his white precinct.
Far back in the woods, the snow is falling again,
perhaps into your life. The wind returns
to chisel its drifts and ribbing.

Forgive the rounded burdens of the branches.
They do not suffer, suffused in this light.
They are not sorrows,
though that is the meaning we give them.

Six Belons

The ruckled lips gaped slightly, but when
I slipped the knife in next to the hinge,
they closed to a stone.
The violence it took to unlock them!
Each wounded thing lay in opalescent milk
like an albino heart,
muscle sliced from the roof-shell.
I took each one pale and harmless
into my mouth and held it there,
tasting the difference between
the ligament and the pure, faintly
coffee-colored flesh that was unflinching
even in the acid of lemon juice,
so that I felt I was eating
not the body but the life in the body.
Afterward my mouth stayed greedy
though it carried the sea rankness
away with it, a taste usually transient,
held for a moment beyond its time
on mustache or fingertip.
The shells looked abruptly old,
crudely fluted, gray-green, flecked
with the undersea equivalent of lichens,
and pearly, slick, bereft of all their meat.
The creatures themselves were gone,
the succulent indecent briny ghosts
that caused this arousal, this feeding,
and now a sudden loneliness.

Chase Twichell

Timothy Donnolley

2011-05-14T21:26:00.001-03:00

[from Timothy Donnolley's The Cloud Corporation, Wave, 2010]

No Mission Statement, No Strategic Plan

When loathing's narwhal thrusts its little tusk
      deep into the not-for-profit of my thought
and anchors in the planks across which I have

stomped unfathomable hours, and thanklessly;
      when I feel the panic of it struggling to dislodge
and all the damage done to the ship thereby –

the prow, to be exact, if we agree this is a ship,
      and now I fear we have no choice – when lost
in drear blue Baffin Bay, if night's first voice

says Quick, we're sinking, yank that narwhal out,
      it must be night's second, less impetuous voice
saying Not so fast. Why not leave it where it is?

Montezuma to His Magicians

If they are gods, if they have
divinity in them, then why

when we lay at their feet
garlands of quetzal feathers

and gold coins do they leap
upon the gold as dazzled

monkeys might and tread
on sacred plumage like dust?

Globus Hystericus [excerpt]

2

Daybreak on my marshland: a single egret, blotched,
trudges through the froth. I take its photograph
from the rooftop observation deck from which I watch

day's delivery trucks advance. I take advantage of
the quiet before their arrival to organize my thoughts
on the paranormal thusly: (1) If the human psyche

has proven spirited enough to produce such a range
of material effects upon what we'll call the closed
system of its custodial body, indeed if it's expected to,

and (2) If such effects might be thought to constitute
the physical expression of that psyche, an emanation
willed into matter in a manner not unlike a brand-

new car or cream-filled cake or disposable camera,
and (3) If the system of the body can be swapped out
for another, maybe an abandoned factory or a vale,

then might it not also prove possible for the psyche
by aptitude or lather or sheer circumstance to impress
its thumbprint on some other system, a production

in the basement, or in a video store, as when I find you
inching up steps or down a shady aisle or pathway,
dragging your long chains behind you most morosely

if you ask me, the question is: Did you choose this, or was it
imposed on you, but even as I ask your hands move
wildly about your throat to indicate you cannot speak.

Timothy Donnelly

Maureen N. McLane

2011-05-13T14:20:00.000-03:00

[from Maureen N. McLane’s World Enough, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010]

Passage III [excerpt]

wavelap and lakeslap lick
         the ear; the air carries
                  stripes in the
         low precincts of sky –
a mower blares somewhere
         above A and
                  shuts off a
         shock of
                  silence
into which the wave-
         slaps surge

•

to enter the water
in Mayan
to die

•

over there the gray
         gathering
                  sheath meant
                           rain
but our private sun
         continues to sign-
post a clear day at least
         for us.
an earthquake
         in China
                  means
         precisely what
                  to me
         wondered Adam Smith –
the world disappearing
         the instant my tooth aches: Sartre

my skin some days
                  extends
         as wide as the sea
and the waves of the world
         roll through, equable
                  terrible
but I am living this narrow
         life and no other
         except yours I imagine
                  some days we’re graced
                           or grazed by a shared bullet

•

today no thrush silvered the air
         in the woods
the wind blowing hard
         against the bike
passing a stretch of field
         where tractors for miles around
                  come to die
the iron congregation rusting
         faithful as the grass.
the cows at Saywards Farm seemed
         too confined
why aren’t they grazing in the field and why
         are their calves
                  wired in –
late last night
         after the sunset
         I did not see
the lake took on that babyish hue
         I so love and I saw
a sole balloon aloft lifting over Vergennes
         puffing by Camel’s Hump
and heading east –
         we have harnessed the air
                  for our pleasure
                  our leisure a rhyme
         with the weather
                  clearing as if the
                  skies cared
                  or could

•

radios and weathervanes
conduct the air
disperse manes

•

mountains deforested
         by distance
Hokusai shapes cut
         against the
         sky the clouds
                  address just
                  so
and through the same air
                  the radio pours
         its usual brew of cheer & death
         what wonder little schizo
                  you reel so
         in the fractured world
the sky bends to my way
         and to yours and to home
         sweet home

Terrance Hayes

2011-05-03T20:36:00.000-03:00

[from Terrance Hayes's Lighthead, Penguin, 2010]

Anchor Head

Because keyless and clueless,
because trampled in gunpowder
and hoof-printed address,

from Australopithecus or Adam's
dim boogaloo to birdsong
and what the bird boogaloos to,

because I was waiting to break
these legs free, one to each
short, to be head-dressed in sweat,

my work, a form of rhythm
like the first sex, like the damage
of death and distance

and depression, of troubled
instances and blind instruction,
of pleasure and placelessness,

because I was off-key and careless
and learning through leaning,
because I was astral and pitchforked

and packaged to a dim bungalow
of burden and if not burden,
the dim boredom of no song,

I became a salt-worn dream-
anchor, I leaped overboard
in my shackles and sailed

through my reflection on down
to ruin, calling out to God,
and then calling out no more.

Deborah Digges

2011-05-03T14:33:00.002-03:00

[from Deborah Digges's The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart, Knopf, 2010]

Dance of the Seven Veils

I did not pick one violet
this year nor place each small bouquet
in little china pitchers
shaped like flutes or doves.
But hid among the dandelions,
long fields of green and dandelions,
islands of gold.
Oh my sirens, my harbingers of spring.
And since I'm not Odysseus
and unafraid, my small boat sallied sideways
on the sand.
They came in droves to greet me.
I took my sisters' faces in my hands.
We crept the cliffs and sang the peasant's clock,
a rainbow locked, diphthong of lust,
peacocks' fanfare,
voices outrun the holy.
And thus we called the mighty in.
And true indeed, unfaithful every one –
the men – and who could blame them?
We were so beautiful, the very center of us edible,
our lion hair, our leaf-like swords,
all of us swinging lanterns,
dancing the dance of the Pleiades,
the seven sisters weaving silk out of our stories,
dance of the seven veils.
They thought of us – imagine -
their korasions, their robber brides.
Possessed they were and we would have it so.
And when the men, they stayed
too long, when we grew tired of them –
each fat in love, drunk on our milky wine,
we let our hair shriek white,
the filaments that shine like fog
over a dawn sea, sparks at sunrise,
ready we were to just be old again and bald.
We shook our heads, let go the seeds,
slid fast and empty to the underworld.
But as they slept across the decks,
half in, half out of hammocks, ransacked the hulls,
we did, repaired their masts.
And heaved their ships to other oceans.

Kathleen Graber

2011-05-01T19:07:00.002-03:00

[from Kathleen Graber's The Eternal City, Princeton, 2010]

The Third Day

        And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb
        yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his
        kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was
        so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding
        seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed
        was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
        And the evening and the morning were the third day.

        – Genesis 1:11-13

This morning I locked myself out again, realizing just
as the door of the complex's communal laundry clicked shut
behind me that my keys were still atop the triple loader.
I'd been thinking about the senator I'd seen last night on television
& the language – terroristic, Islamo-fascist enemies of freedom –
he'd used to describe those whose ideologies conflict so starkly
with his own. And Augustine's question: is evil a thing in itself,
or merely, as he came to argue in the end, the absence of good.
Later, when I finally find a neighbor – glad she's home,
glad she is willing to lend me her keys so I can retrieve mine –
we stand a few minutes chatting. She's from Minnesota
& dislikes the winters here. Her eyes rest on a plastic toboggan
& the bicycle beside it, training wheels rusting in three inches
of mud. It's February & we've had rain all week. The temperature
is already above fifty & although the limb-whips of the willow
are bare, its trunk is splotched & spongy with pale green moss.
I can see that the kids who like to roughhouse after school
have shattered someone's terra cotta planters & a small holly –
its roots dressed now in only their own black ball of dirt,
its carnelian beads aglitter – has been tossed out onto the walk.

Augustine was haunted by his gang's adolescent theft of pears,
a transgression nearly without motive: the pears were so hard
& so ugly, inedible, in fact, that he knew, even as he took them,
that there were better ones at home. It's difficult to say
what he means by unmaking, but this is what sin is & does,
he warns, as we stray disordered, away from the perfection
which made us toward the nothing from which we are made.

By late afternoon, the sky brightens & they are all at it again,
using slingshots made from forked twigs & rubber bands
to pelt one another with the sharp pods of the sycamores.
What would we do without our fellows? Adam,
the Saint argues, took the apple even though he knew
the serpent had deceived her, for he could not bear imagining
Eve lost in the wilderness alone. A small child is beating a tree
with a baseball bat trying to knock more ammunition loose,
& the prickly spheres, which horticulturalists call fruit,
dance & dangle – like the thurible the Monsignor swung
sometimes at mass. I sat in the pew beside my grandmother.
The words being spoken were Latin. I studied the bright cloaks
in the windows & the scuffs on my shiny black shoes.
Across the open field, a beagle, caught up too tightly
in the rope which has been used to tether him to a porch,
starts to howl & the squirrels scatter. And an old nest, dull
& high up – still holding only a few fists of air – begins to quake.

Kathleen Graber

Sandra Beasley

2011-05-01T00:27:00.000-03:00

[from Sandra Beasley's i was the jukebox, Norton, 2010]

Signs

The day before his appointment they went
to the orchard. They always went in June,

and driving up they listened to Patsy Cline
because they always listened to Patsy Cline.

He stayed in the trees until she said Come down
and on the last rung this new thing – her hand

pressed against his back, as if he were a child
who needed catching. He hated her. And

she lifted the basket of cherries to show him
their pale skins, hemorrhaged with sweetness.

Signs

Before he would leave he'd empty his pockets
onto the dresser and she'd seen it, that last night,

every coin landing face down. Don't go, she'd said.
And he'd laughed like he always did at her signs:

crows on the lawns, a hang-up call, salt on the floor.
He'd left before dawn, wanting her to sleep in.

She should have known as soon as she broke eggs
for an omelet and the pink embryos cam sliding out;

she should have cleared out her freezer, knowing
the casseroles would come. With all her signs,

why did she put on the cheap bra that morning?
She remembers the chaplain at her door,

holding his hat like an apology. How he'd
placed his hands on her shoulders and she'd said

God. Under his hands, her flesh welling past
nylon straps: that dumb beast in harness, that hope.

Sandra Beasley

Nicole Cooley

2011-04-30T18:21:00.001-03:00

[from Nicole Cooley's Milk Dress, Alice James, 2010]

Suitcase

Gold-zippered, blue plaid, gilded with initials: suitcase
we were told to pack in case of a new attack. Girl's suitcase,

my grandmother's gift for those first sleepovers.
I fill it with duct tape. Cipro hidden in the suitcase.

The pediatrician refused but, yes, I begged, cried.
In the Before, this would be my daughter's suitcase.

While she slept inside me, I'd pack each silky nightie.
In the third trimester, I'd lie in bed and arrange the suitcase.

Now: Swiss Army knife. Distilled water. Potassium iodide
to carry with us at all times, in case of –

tablets to swallow as the subway fills with smoke.
This city permanently on Orange Alert, the ready suitcase

waiting while I nurse my daughter, watch the news.
In the After, another day of jewel blue sky, I pack the suitcase,

seal the windows, as told, against possible chemical attack,
but still we breathe in the burning, the ash, the soot.

Plan an evacuation route. The city shuts tunnels,
cuts us off. We're packed and ready, with our suitcase.

I watch the news. I already know I won't have another child.
Packed and ready for the next attack: our suitcase.

You must be ready, the TV tells us. To leave your life,
for the safety of your family. I lay my daughter in the suitcase

stamped with my initials, N.R.C., letters engraved long ago
on a headstone, and now not mine, not hers, no one's suitcase.

Nicole Cooley

Chŏng Chŏl, Pak Illo, & Yun Sŏndo

2011-04-24T15:27:00.004-03:00

[from Pine River and Lone Peak: An Anthology of Three Chosŏn Poets, tr. Peter H. Lee, Hawaii, 1991]

Chŏng Chŏl

Sijo

51

Let us strain sour wine and drink
Until our mouths become sour.
Let us steam bitter herbs and chew them
Until they turn sweet.
Let us walk around
Until the nails in our clogs have worn flat.

62

Let forty thousand pecks of pearls
Rest on the lotus leaves.
I box them and measure them
To send them off somewhere.
Tumultuous rolling drops –
How zestful, graceful.

lotus leaf trichomes

65

I press the second note on the third string
Of the Black Zither.
The sound surges like a stream freed of ice
Rushing up from the shallows.
Distant raindrops, too, play in concert;
They beat on lotus leaves.

Pak Illo

Early Red Persimmons (1601)
[Chohongsi ka]

4

When a crow joins
A flock of phoenix,
It’s like a single rock
In a pile of white jade.
Enough! Phoenix too are birds.
Why not mingle with them and play?

crow feather

Twenty-nine Songs on the Standing Rock (1629)
[Ibam isipku kokk]

15

Let me ask you again quietly
How many thousands of years old you are.
Your age is surely great,
And mine small.
Now let us grow old together,
You and I.

17

With my small thatched hut
Set among boulders,
My feeble eyes are used to
The colors of bamboo and pine.
Here I cannot tell
When spring goes and autumn comes.

Songs of the Five Relations (after 1634)
[Oryun ka]

48

When heaven begot men,
Marriage thus began.
Heaven fixed worthy matches,
Important are man and wife.
Make a morning of your life
And harmonize like small and large zithers together.

Yun Sŏndo

The Angler’s Calendar (1651)
[Ŏbu sasi sa]

37

The sun’s fair rays are shining,
Water shimmers like oil.
Row away, row away!
Should we cast a net,
Or drop a line on such a day?
Chigukch’ong chigukch’ong ŏsawa.
The Fisherman’s Song stirs my fancy;
I have forgotten all about fishing.

60

Where is it, where am I?
Are heaven and earth separate?
Moor the boat, moor the boat!
Since the west wind’s dust can’t reach us,
Why fan off the empty air?
Chigukch’ong chigukch’ong ŏsawa.
Further, since I have heard no words,
Why should I bother to wash my ears?

hair cells of a guinea pig's inner ear

João Cabral de Melo Neto

2011-04-17T01:02:00.000-03:00

[from João Cabral de Melo Neto's Selected Poetry, 1937-1990, ed. Djelal Kadir, Wesleyan, 1994]

The Lesson of Poetry

1.

The entire morning spent
like a motionless sun
before the blank page:
beginning of the world, new moon.

You could no longer trace
so much as a line;
neither name nor flower
bloomed in the table's summer,

not even in the paper's midday
brightness, paid for
daily (even though paper
accepts any kind of world).

2.

All night the poet
at his desk, trying
to save from death the monsters
germinated in his inkwell.

Monsters, worms, phantoms
of words – meandering,
urinating on the paper,
smearing it with their carbon.

Carbon from the pencil, carbon
of obsessions, carbon
of extinct emotions, carbon
consumed in dreams.

3.

White struggle on the paper
which the poet resists,
white struggle of blood
flowing from his saltwater veins.

The physics of fear discerned
in daily gestures; fear
of things that never alight and yet
are immobile – unstill still lifes.

And the twenty words collected
in the saltwater of the poet,
to be used by the poet
in his efficient machine.

Always the same twenty words
he knows so well: their operation,
their evaporation, their density
less than the air's.

– translated by Richard Zenith

Psychology of Composition [excerpt]

V.

I live with certain words,
household bees.

From the clear day
(white parasol)
those lucid spindles
retrieve the filaments of honey
(from the day that unfolded
also like a flower)
that by night
(pit where the aerial
flower goes to rest)
will persist: golden
taste, and sour,
against the sugar of putrefaction.

– translated by Djelal Kadir

contemporary Vietnamese poets

2011-04-13T21:18:00.001-03:00

[from Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry, ed./tr. by Nguyen Do & Paul Hoover, Milkweed, 2008]

Nguyen Do & Paul Hoover

Three Variations at Sixty-Five Years Old [excerpt]
– Van Cao

I fall into a spiderweb
It wraps me tightly
no way of getting out
I’m like a silkworm
in this life

I want to break the net
but my arms are far too few!

Van Cao

Women Carrying River Water
– Nguyen Quang Thieu

Long, black, and bony, their toenails splay wide as a hen’s.
For five years, fifteen years – thirsty years and half my life –
I’ve seen them carry water from the river.
Their hair flows down their soft, wet backs,
one hand supporting the thin shoulder poles,
the other clinging to the whiteness of clouds.
The river hides its face in its banks then turns and runs on.
The men leave home silently, carrying fishing poles and dreams of the ocean.
The spiritual fish turn their faces away to weep.
Buoys made of corn sink in the river’s flow.
Angrily and sadly, men are leaving the home
that I have seen for five years, fifteen years – thirsty years and half my life –
following these women who carry river water like naked children
who run along with their mothers and soon grow up.
The girls will always lay poles on their shoulders and go to the shore.
The boys will always leave home silently, carrying fishing poles and ocean dreams.
And the spiritual fish will always turn their faces to weep
in front of the bait, dumbstruck as it gazes from its fishhook.

Nguyen Quang Thieu

Collected Short Poems [excerpt]
–Tran Dan

A circle of people always surrounds a naked man.

Creation is total force, action, and suddenness including the
scrotum, which is involved in creation also.

Building a poetry collection is like breaking into a prison.

Tran Dan

To Suddenly Remember
          – Thanh Thao

like someone beating a drum, the rain dropped on my waterproof
          army poncho
which was torn and badly needed mending
my friends were like forest trees, day by day diminishing
the war cut them down
like an electric trimmer
but now they’re all at peace
I remember also that evening, as a child,
the sweetness of the banana in my mother’s hand,
even sweeter when she carried me on her back!
the road over the dike echoed the soul of the river
dark brown sails and bamboo shadows floating slowly
a bridge where an older man got tired
and lay down to rest but not sleep
the room where he keeps only the barest necessities
the ripe smell of bananas
some old chairs
and a small ancient teapot
the aged sunlight
an evening of summer rain
and the bomb’s echoes from the Duong bridge that sounded like
          rolling thunder
my parents lived there in a home
a ten-square-meter country
but because of our greater home
my parents didn’t prevent me
from going into battle
not hoping for a brave death or “rainbow”
I’m the hand on a compass
that only turns toward our room
where everything is old

Thanh Thao

Dana Levin

2011-04-09T19:52:00.005-03:00

[from Dana Levin's Sky Burial, Copper Canyon, 2011]

School of Flesh

         Blush for a cheek of stone.

         Blush for the lips sewn tight with thread, no speech
for the dead
         maker –

         You’ve got the razor. You can make each suture
snap.

         And watch the mouth
bloom up with foam,
         as if he’d drowned himself in soap –

         You lift the neck and let the head drop back.
The mouth yawns wide its prize –

         White thrive.
The larval joy.
         Hot in their gorge on the stew of balms,
a moist exhale –
         as of there were a last breath, a taunt
coiling
         into your inner ear, Good Dog, you dig your hands in,
up-cupping
         the glossal
bed –
         saying, Graduate
of the School of Flesh, Father Conspirator –
         I will

         bite the tongue
from the corpse –

This from That

Aurelian,
              who studies the emergence of butterflies
from chrysalides,
              of fighter jets
from number chars,
              of syllables
from kettledrums –

                            –

              Insects that pupate in a cocoon
must escape from it
              says Wikipedia.

              Wikipedia, which says:
Whilst inside the pupa

              Says: digestive juices, to destroy much
of the larva's body

              larva meaning
its own –

              which has been instructed
to leave a few cells intact for

              holometabolous
total change,
              through the nutrients of suffering, of the self-

              carnivore –
(lumbering up,
              hoisting my flesh from the floor – )

                            –

I study ziggurats
              from cigarettes. Smoke

the effluvium of fire, the
              fire in the mouth from

cigarettes, from
              ziggurat

              striking dry tinder from the tongue –

"It is queer to be assisting
              at the éclosion

                            –

              of a great new mental epoch,"
wrote William James
              in 1906:

eclosion, verb eclose,
              "emergence from concealment" –

which is what "religion and philosophy" do,
              which is what certain

insects do,
              even people, slipping their suits, and what we need

              is a new mental epoch –

whatever lies
              beyond

              self-liquidation –

                            –

Aurelain.
              Who studies

              concerto notes
from finger-scales,
              survivor guilt
from firestorms,
              apologies
from bombing runs –

              Through the open back door,
bending a petunia,

Papilio machaon
              drinking deeply

              and long.

Staged Right

2011-04-04T22:47:00.003-03:00

I like it comes first, I
try to feel shocked. No more a
dependent nor child, the truth is, I'm
an adult with a drink at a bar, my
free will invites me. On me
I hear him say. I feel his
fingers, my bicep squeezed. Next
emotion fresh out of the
limbic Crash goes the glass into the bar
well swells contentedly, contracts
resentfully, a regular pulse, it
splays his fingers loose, the remaining
pressure only to my shoulder, no capture like
before, he chatters on as caged
parrots do once they yield. Who
ricochets flash through the scrum
are you stools clear on both
sides putting your hands on? Hands rise
his from me first, others toward
him, partway. He & I hold our
ground, focused on the
roughhousing an apron comes, scowl-browed
bartender our expulsion bound. I
spit hard (benny from my
brothers), beer-fed eructation, my
mouth still pursed, shoulder bag to hip,
whiskey cross-eyed, Desolation Valley in my
short-term future. I'm
such a proto-mock Penelope
toe-tapping, sequin-bowtied, no
apocryphal Odysseus back, posturing
danger-scripter, semi-tanked.
Curtseying strangers clear a path, I
zag out blinking, alone so long the
taste of violence rushes me, then no
nothing beyond the gap.
No applause.

Naomi Shihab Nye

2011-04-04T00:28:00.002-03:00

[from Naomi Shihab Nye's Honeybee, Harper Collins, 2008]

Running Egret

We want our nature to have a face.
An eye we can look into,
not like ours – clearer. Strong body
moving swiftly over land, belonging to no one.

Nonpartisan egret,
beyond everything that burden us,
unexpected, unpredictable,
sheer motion – flash of white –
creatures with a silence
wider than our own.

There are days we wake and need an egret.

The Little Bun of Hours (excerpt)

Days that felt like sheet cakes in long silver pans
frosted or not, plenty of cake no matter who appeared,
a sift of powdered sugar, and the knife
laid casually by. Maybe a sack of French bread
broken in half. I liked the small stacked plates
on the counter, the way you drove around in a box
without going anywhere. We could send
the bears to school and write notes for them
to take home to their mothers, who were camels
and rabbits. Sometimes I looked at a clock.
When you were four, lightning cracked my brain
and I could see all the way till now, this fist of days
before you leave. It took away my sleep, my confidence,
who were we before you? . . .

Nathaniel Mackey

2011-03-31T23:35:00.009-03:00

[from Nathaniel Mackey's Splay Anthem, New Directions, 2006]

Eye on the Scarecrow

    — “mu” twentieth part —

      The way we lay
we mimed a body
    of water. It was
this or that way
                         with
        the dead and we
      were them. No
                              one
    worried which . . .
      Millet beer made
our legs go weak,
                             loosed
our tongues. “The dead,”
                                           we
          said, “are drowning
      of thirst,” gruff
        summons we muttered
    out loud in our
                             sleep . . .
      It was a journey we
were on, drawn-out
    scrawl we made a road
of, long huthered hajj
                                   we
        were on. Raw strip
      of cloth we now rode,
          wishful, letterless
                                       book
            the ride we thumbed . . .
        Harp-headed ghost whose
          head we plucked incessantly.
    Bartered star.        Tethered
                                                run . . .
      It was a ride we knew we’d
    wish to return to. Every-
        thing was everything.
nothing no less. No less
                                         newly
      arrived or ancestral, of
        late having to do with
    the name of parts . . .
      Rolling hills rolled
up like a rug, raw sprawl
                                          of a
        book within a book
      without a name known as
          Namless, not to be
arrived at again . . .
                                  It was
    the Book of No Avail we
were in did we dare name
it, momentary kings and
                                          queens,
    fleet kingdon. Land fell
away on all sides.

                               Past
Lag we caught ourselves,
    run weft at last
adequate, shadowless,
                                      lit,
      left up Atet Street,
    legs tight, hill after
          hill after hill.
        Had it been a book Book
of Opening the Book it
      would have been called,
                                             kept
under lock and key . . .
                                      Hyperbolic
      arrest. Ra was on the
                                        box.
    It was after the end of
the world . . . To lie on
      our backs looking
    into the dark was all
        there was worth
                                  doing.
each the aroused eye
one another sought,
    swore he or she
                           saw,
    we lay where love’s
pharaonic torso lay
      deepest, wide-eyed
                                     all
night without sleep . . .
                                      “String
    our heads with straw,” we
said, half-skulls tied with
     catgut, strummed . . .
                                         Scratched
    our strummed heads, memory
made us itch. Walked out
weightless, air what eye
                                         was
      left . . .

                Someone said Rome,
    someone said destroy it.
Atlantis, a third shouted
                                       out . . .
      Low ride among ruins
notwithstanding we flew.
    Swam, it often seemed,
underwater, oddly immersed,
                                               bodies
          long since bid goodbye,
                                                 we
    lay in wait, remote muses
        kept us afloat. Something
called pursuit had us by
      the nose. Wafted ether
                                           blown
low, tilted floor, splintered
        feet. Throated bone . . .
    Rickety boat we rode . . .
                                             As
      though what we wanted
was to be everywhere at
                                          once,
an altered life lived on an
                                         ideal
        coast we’d lay washed up
          on, instancy and elsewhere
                                                      endlessly
      entwined

Rainer Maria Rilke

2011-03-29T15:47:00.000-03:00

[from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, 1923]

Freilich ist es seltsam, die Erde nicht mehr zu bewohnen,
kaum erlernte Gebräuche nicht mehr zu üben,
Rosen, und andern eigens versprechenden Dingen
nicht die Bedeutung menschlicher Zukunft zu geben;
das, was man war in unendlich ängstlichen Händen,
nicht mehr zu sein, und selbst den eigenen Namen
wegzulassen wie ein zerbrochenes Spielzeug.
Seltsam, die Wünsche nicht weiterzuwúnschen. Seltsam,
alles, was sich bezog, so lose im Raume
flattern zu sehen. Und das Totsein ist mühsam
und voller Nachholn, dass man allmählich ein wenig
Ewigkeit spúrt. – Aber Lebendige machen
alle den Fehler, dass sie zu stark unterscheiden.
Engel (sagt man) wüssten oft nicht, ob sie unter
Lebenden gehn oder Toten. Die ewige Strömung
reisst durch beide Bereiche alle Alter
immer mit sich und übertönt sie in beiden.

Schliesslich brauchen sie uns nicht mehr, die Früheentrückten,
man entwöhnt sich des Irdischen sanft, wie man den Brüsten
milde der Mutter entwächst. Aber wir, die so grosse
Geheimnisse brauchen, denen aus Trauer so oft
seliger Fortschritt entspringt – : könnten wir sein ohne sie?
Ist die Sage umsonst, dass einst in der Klage um Linos
wagende erste Musik dürre Erstarrung durchdrang;
dass erst im erschrockenen Raum, dem ein beinah göttlicher Jüngling
plötzlich fúr immer enttrat, das Leere in jene
Schwingung geriet, die uns jetzt hinreisst und tröstet und hilft.

Vicente Huidobro

2011-03-28T18:07:00.003-03:00

[from Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, 1931]

CANTO VII
Al aia aia ia ia ia aia ui Tralalí Lali lalá
Aruaru urulario Lalilá Rimbibolam lam lam Uiaya zollonario lalilá
Monlutrella monluztrella lalolú Montresol y mandotrina Ai ai Montesur en lasurido
Montesol Lusponsedo solinario Aururaro ulisamento lalilá Ylarca murllonía Hormajauma marijauda
Mitradente Mitrapausa Mitralonga Matrisola matriola
Olamina olasica lalilá Isonauta Olandera uruaro Ia ia campanuso compasedo
Tralalá Aí ai mareciente y eternauta Redontella tallerendo lucenario Ia ia Laribamba Larimbambamplanerella
Laribambamositerella Leiramombaririlanla lirilam Ai i a Temporía
Ai ai aia Ululayu lulayu layu yu Ululayu
ulayu ayu yu Lunatando Sensorida e infimento Ululayo ululamento
Plegasuena Cantasorio ululaciente Oraneva yu yu yo Tempovío Infilero e infinauta zurrosía
Jaurinario ururayú Montañendo oraranía Arorasía ululacente Semperiva ivarisa tarirá
Campanudio lalalí Auriciento auronida Lalalí Io ia iiio
Ai a i a a i i i i o ia

Vicente Huidobro

2011-03-24T22:07:00.005-03:00

[the essay "Creationism" from Vicente Huidobro's Manifestos, original published in 1925; translation by David M. Guss in The Selected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro, New Directions, 1981]

At the end of 1916 I landed in Paris, into the world of the magazine Sic. I barely knew the language, but soon realized that I was dealing with a very futurist scene and one can't forget that just two years before, in my book Pasando y pasando, I had attacked futurism as being too old-fashioned, at the exact moment the whole world was crying out for the birth of something completely new.

I searched everywhere for this created poetry, without relation to the external world, and, when at times I believed I had found it, I soon realized that it was merely my lack of knowledge of the language which had made me see it where it was totally lacking or simply existed in small fragments, as in my earlier books of 1913 and 1915.

Have you noticed the special power, the near-creative sense that pervades the poetry written in a language you are just beginning to utter?

You find fantastic poems which just a year later make you smile.

Gathered around Apollinaire, who was such an undeniable poet, and yet apart from him, one found several earnest searchers; unfortunately, most of them lacked the holy fire, since nothing could be more false than to believe that inspiration is to be found lying in the street. True poetic inspiration is the rarest thing that exists. And I'm not using the word poet here in the intimate sense it holds for me, but rather in its habitual sense, since, for me, there has never been a single poet in the history of the planet.

Today I affirm completely, as I did ten years ago in the Atheneum in Buenos Aires: "There has never been a single poem written in the world, but only some vague essays on how to write one. Poetry is yet to be born on our globe. And its birth will be an event that will revolutionize mankind like the greatest earthquake." I sometimes wonder if it will not go by unnoticed.

Let's make it clear, then, that each time I speak of "poet" I simply use the term to be understood, like stretching a rubberband to encircle those who are nearest the importance which I assign it.

During the period of the magazine Nord-Sud, of which I was one of the founders, we all had more or less the same orientation in our outlooks, but were far enough from another at the core.

While others were making oval skylights, I was making square horizons. As all skylights are oval, poetry continues to be realist. As horizons are not square, the author offers something created by himself.

When Horizon Carré (Square Horizon) came out, here is how I explained the title in a letter to friend an critic Thomas Chazal:

Square horizon. A new fact, invented by me, created by me, which couldn't exist without me. I want, dear friend, to capture in this title the whole of my aesthetics, which you have been aware of for some time now.

This title explains the basis of my poetic theory. Condensed within it is the essence of my principles.

1. To humanize the object. Everything that passes through the body of the poet must be subjected to the greatest possible amount of his heat. Here something as vast and enormous as the horizon is humanized; it becomes intimate, thanks to the adjective SQUARE. The infinite nests in our heart.

2. The indefinite becomes precise. In shutting the windows of our soul, whatever was able to escape, gasify, and unravel, remains enclosed and is solidified.

3. The abstract becomes concrete and the concrete abstract. This means the perfect balance, since if the abstract leaned toward the more abstract, it would dissolve in your hands or filter through your fingers. And if you made the concrete even more concrete, it would help you drink wine or furnish your home, but it would never furnish your soul.

4. Whatever is too poetic to be created is transformed into something created by changing its common value, so that if horizon was poetic in itself, if horizon was poetry in life, by qualifying it with square, it stops being poetry in art. From dead poetry it becomes living poetry.

The few words explaining my concept of poetry on the first page of the book we are speaking of, tells you what I wanted to accomplish in those poems. It said:

To create a poem by taking the elements of life and transforming them to give them a new and independent life of their own.

Nothing descriptive or anecdotal. Emotion must be born from the creative strength alone.

Make a POEM like nature makes a tree.

In the end, it was my exact concept before arriving in Paris: the act of pure creation which you will find, as a true obsession, in every aspect of my work from 1925 on. And this is still my concept of poetry. The poem created in all its parts, as a new object.

I will repeat here the axiom I gave in my talk at the Atheneum in Madrid in 1921, and finally in Paris, in my speech at the Sorbonne, an axiom which sums up my aesthetic principles: "Art is one thing and Nature another. I love Art very much and Nature very much. And if I accept the representations that a man makes from Nature, it proves I love neither Nature or Art."

In two words and to conclude: the creationists are the first poets who have brought to art a poem invented in all parts by the author.

Here, in these pages about creationism, is my poetic testament. I bequeath it to the poets of tomorrow, to those who will be the first of this new species being, the poet, this new species to be born soon; I can feel it. There are signs in the sky.

The near-poets of today are very interesting, but their interests do not interest me.

The wind points my flute toward the future.

Paul Harding

2011-03-01T21:27:00.000-03:00

[from Paul Harding's Tinkers, Bellevue Literary, 2009]

Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas. Maybe you would not even feel that, as you struggled in clothes that felt like cooling tar, and as you slowed, calmed, even, and opened your eyes and looked for a pulse of silver, an imbrication of scales, and as you closed your eyes again and felt their lids turn to slippery, ichthyic skin, the blood behind them suddenly cold, and as you found yourself not caring, wanting, finally to rest, finally wanting nothing more than the sudden, new, simple hum threading between your eyes. The ice is far too thick to chop through. You will never do it. You could never do it. So buy the gold, warm it with your skin, slip it onto your lap when you are sitting by the fire and all you will otherwise have to look at is your splintery husband gumming chew or the craquelure of your own chapped hands.

Nicanor Parra

2011-02-11T15:26:00.002-03:00

[from Nicanor Parra’s Antipoems: How to look better & feel great, anti-translator Liz Werner, New Directions, 2004]

Apropos of Nothing

WE HAVE TO PAVE OVER the mountain range
but the choice isn’t between cement and blood
as I thought in 1970
it must be paved over with violets
we have to plant violets
we have to cover everything with Violetas Parra
humility
            equality
                         fraternity
we have to fill the world with Violetas

0

THE CHILEAN GOLDFINCH – in my book –
has an obligation to keep quiet
until he has regained his liberty
and not to think about anything but
freedom
             the door of the dungeon
action, not just more delicious words
either he wins back the name “bird,”
that means love of liberty,
or he deserves to be called reptile
the last straw
is to start singing lyrics of the blind
as though in Chile there was nothing wrong

0

I NEARLY screwed myself over being so sincere
optimism got me nothing but trouble
for being compassionate – for being humble
the kick in the ass was double
That’s what you get for being a fool, it’s clear
That’s what happens when you preach the upstanding and good

Luckily everything’s changed as much as it possibly could
now that I steal
silver and gold patron-saint charms by the truckload
and eat for a hundred, instead of for one:
everybody respects me for real
now that I don’t ask for or show mercy

Across the river in la Chimba I’m the favorite son
now that I’ve lost my faith
I’m waiting for them
to canonize me any minute. Amen

0

A PARTY OF 17 DELINQUENTS
was surprised yesterday
in the area surrounding the Capital Building
transporting oranges
and a copy of the Holy Bible

3 of the extremists fled
not without first battling the police
who found themselves obliged to act in self-defense

the group of subversives was found dead

0

MAKE SURE TO SAY BROTHEL and not whorehouse
rather than prostitute, say escort
Our Lord
              instead of Jesus Christ
Milky Way – not pie in the sky

the word makes the man
don’t ever call it sun
                                say king of stars
when you say Military Decree
you’ll see how your popularity soars
but say coup d’etat and they’ll look down their noses

it’s ugly to say wop
Italian citizen is your best choice
it’s more respectful
                              and much more Christian

yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the truth
the man who says steed instead of horse
already has his future guaranteed

0

POETRY POETRY it’s all poetry
we make poetry
even when we’re going to the bathroom

Christ of Elqui’s own words

to piss is to make poetry
as poetic as strumming a lute
or shitting poeticizing farting
and so we’ll just see what poetry is

Prophet of Elqui’s own words

0

DESTROY THIS PAPER after reading it
poetry is tailing you
and me too
                  it’s after all of us

Tomas Tranströmer

2011-01-24T14:02:00.002-03:00

[from Tomas Tranströmer's The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, tr. Robert Bly, Graywolf, 2001]

Allegro

After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
"We do not surrender. But want peace."

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.

Octavio Paz

2011-01-05T14:42:00.000-03:00

[from Octavio Paz's The Collected Poems: 1957-1987, ed. Eliot Weinberger, tr. Eliot Weinberger, New Directions, 1987]

Sunstone [excerpt]

. . .

I travel your body, like the world,
your belly is a plaza full of sun,
your breasts two churches where blood
performs its own, parallel rites,
my glances cover you like ivy,
you are a city the sea assaults,
a stretch of ramparts split by the light
in two halves the color of peaches,
a domain of salt, rocks and birds,
under the rule of oblivious noon,

dressed in the color of my desires,
you go on your way naked as my thoughts,
I travel your eyes, like the sea,
tigers drink their dreams in those eyes,
the hummingbird burns in those flames,
I travel your forehead, like the moon,
like the cloud that passes through your thoughts,
I travel your belly, like your dreams,

your skirt of corn ripples and sings,
your skirt of crystal, your skirt of water,
your lips, your hair, your glances rain
all through the night, and all day long
you open my chest with your fingers of water,
you close my eyes with your mouth of water,
you rain on my bones, a tree of liquid
sending roots of water into my chest,

I travel your length, like a river,
I travel your body, like a forest,
like a mountain path that ends at a cliff
I travel along the edge of your thoughts,
and my shadow falls from your white forehead,
my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces
and go with no body, groping my way,

. . .

Pablo Neruda

2010-12-27T20:48:00.002-03:00

[from Pablo Neruda's Confieso que he vivido, tr. Carol Peters, Plaza & Janés, 1998]

I examined [the toilet] with curiosity. It was a wooden box with a hole in the middle, very like the unit I was used to in my rural childhood, in my country. But ours sat over a deep pit or over a stream of running water. Here the receptable was a simple metal cube under the round hole.

The cube appeared clean every day without my knowing how the contents disappeared. One morning I rose earlier than usual. I stood astonished at what was happening.

From deep inside the house, like a dark moving statue, came the most beautiful woman I had seen up until that point in Ceylon, a Tamil, of the pariah caste. She wore a red & gold sari of the stiffest fabric. Above bare feet she wore heavy anklets. On either side of her nose shone two red studs. They must have been ordinary glass, but on her they seemed rubies.

She headed toward the privy with solemn steps, without seeing me, without giving the slightest sign of my existence, & disappeared with the sordid receptacle on top of her head, moving away at her godlike pace.

She was so beautiful that in spite of her humble task she stayed in my mind. As if she were a wild animal, arrived from the jungle, belonging to another existence, a separate world. I called to her without effect. Later I left some gift in her path, silk or fruit. She passed without hearing or looking. That miserable route had been transformed by her dark beauty into the obligatory ceremony of an indifferent queen.

One morning, totally determined, I took her tightly by the wrist & stared at her, face to face. I had no language to speak to her. Without a smile she allowed me to lead her & quickly she was nude on my bed. Her narrow waist, her full hips, the abundant swell of her breasts, made her the equal of thousands of sculptures in the south of India. The encounter was of a man with a statue. She stayed the whole time with her eyes open, passive. It made me despise myself. It did not happen again.

Octavio Paz

2010-12-25T14:09:00.001-03:00

[from Octavio Paz's The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987, Bilingual Edition, ed. Eliot Weinberger, tr. Eliot Weinberger, New Directions, 1990]

Motion

If you are the amber mare
              I am the road of blood
If you are the first snow
              I am he who lights the hearth of dawn
If you are the tower of night
              I am the spike burning in your mind
If you are the morning tide
              I am the first bird's cry
If you are the basket of oranges
              I am the knife of the sun
If you are the stone altar
              I am the sacrilegious hand
If you are the sleeping land
              I am the green cane
If you are the wind's leap
              I am the buried fire
If you are the water's mouth
              I am the mouth of moss
If you are the forest of the clouds
              I am the axe that parts it
If you are the profaned city
              I am the rain of consecration
If you are the yellow mountain
              I am the red arms of lichen
If you are the rising sun
              I am the road of blood

Omar Pérez

2010-12-23T14:57:00.000-03:00

[from Omar Pérez's Did You Hear About the Fighting Cat?, tr. Kristin Dykstra, Shearsman, 2010]

Some call it the Game, others the Flower or the Mirror. All agree that it deals with an instrument for mutation, a fan that becomes sword, then branch -- dry or covered in flowers -- then a sudden flame, then silence. A fan for a journey.

The creature arrives on the Island with the purpose of mutation, yet the waters of the amniotic ocean cause it to forget. The creature arrives on the Island without a purpose. Later it learns: praxis, poeisis, Kyrie eleison, benedictus qui venit in nomine domini. I can't give you anything but love baby. Il faut être absolumment sincère, Cubanness is love, women are in charge.

The word is there in the game, but it is not the game. Morality and the cyclical working of consciousness are there in the game, but they are not the game. Nation is a woman bearing corn, liberty one of the childish watchwords that the players exchange. The creature practices forgetting and its body catches flame with a memory, one that lances the Island and the water separating it from other islands. O, lightning spreading across the surface of the waters! O creature upright in the body of the lightning!

"It is a technique for sincerity that comprehends all techniques," said the Man of the island mountain.

"I want to learn it," the Creature blurted.

"It's easy. Anchor the improvisational. For example, a kiss. Improvise the anchored. For example, a mountain on an island. Deal a death blow to discernment."

"And my thoughts?" the Creature protested.

"They're worthless. Consider them insects on the bark of a growing tree. That is the sublimity of thought, if you're interested in knowing it."

"I have questions to answer," the Creature reflected.

"Don't answer anything. Don't react to proofs. Another Creature awaits you now. Show it what you have forgotten."

Pablo Neruda

2010-12-20T16:44:00.000-03:00

[from Pablo Neruda's The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (Bilingual Edition), ed. Mark Eisner, tr. Stephen Kessler, City Lights, 2004]

It Means Shadows

What hope to consider, what pure foreboding,
what definitive kiss to bury in the heart,
to submit to the origins of homelessness and intelligence,
smooth and sure over the eternally troubled waters?

What vital, speedy wings of a new dream angel
to install on my sleeping shoulders for perpetual security,
in such a way that the path through the stars of death
be a violent flight begun many days and months and centuries ago?

Suppose the natural weakness of suspicious, anxious creatures
all of a sudden seeks permanence in time and limits on earth,
suppose the accumulated ages and fatigues implacably
spread like the lunar wave of a just-created ocean
over lands and shorelines tormentedly deserted.

Oh, let what I am keep on existing and ceasing to exist,
and let my obedience align itself with such iron conditions
that the quaking of deaths and of births doesn't shake
the deep place I want to reserve for myself eternally.

Let me, then, be what I am, wherever and in whatever weather,
rooted and certain and ardent witness,
carefully, unstoppably, destroying and saving himself,
openly engaged in his original obligation.

Audre Lorde

2010-12-18T20:30:00.003-03:00

[from Audre Lorde's The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems 1987-1992, Norton, 1993]

The Electric Slide Boogie

New Year's Day 1:16 AM
and my body is weary beyond
time to withdraw and rest
ample room allowed me in everyone's head
but community calls
right over the threshold
drums beating through the walls
children playing their truck dramas
under the collapsible coatrack
in the narrow hallway outside my room

The TV lounge next door is wide open
it is midnight in Idaho
and the throb easy subtle spin
of the electric slide boogie
step-stepping
around the corner of the parlor
past the sweet clink
of dining room glasses
and the edged aroma of slightly overdone
dutch-apple pie
all laced together
with the rich dark laughter
of Gloria
and her higher-octave sisters

How hard it is to sleep
in the middle of life.

Rubén Darío

2010-12-05T18:31:00.003-03:00

[from Rubén Darío, tr. Lysander Kemp, in Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, Texas, 1996]

To Roosevelt [1905]

The voice that would reach you, Hunter, must speak
with Biblical tones, or in the poetry of Walt Whitman.
You are primitive and modern, simple and complex;
you are one part George Washington and one part Nimrod.

You are the United States,
future invader of our naive America
with its Indian blood, an America
that still prays to Christ and still speaks Spanish.

You are a strong, proud model of your race;
you are cultured and able; you oppose Tolstoy.
You are an Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar,
breaking horses and murdering tigers.
(You are a professor of Energy,
as the current lunatics say.)

You think that life is a fire,
that progress is an irruption,
that the future is wherever
your bullet strikes.
No.

The United States is grand and powerful.
Whenever it trembles, a profound shudder
runs down the enormous backbone of the Andes.
If it shouts, the sound is like the roar of a lion.
And Hugo said to Grant: "The stars are yours."
(The dawning sun of the Argentine barely shines;
the star of Chile is rising . . .) A wealthy country,
joining the cult of Mammon to the cult of Hercules;
while Liberty, lighting the path
to easy conquest, raises her torch in New York.

But our own America, which has had poets
since the ancient times of Nezahualcóyotl;
which preserved the footprints of great Bacchus,
and learned the Panic alphabet once,
and consulted the stars; which also knew Atlantis
(whose name comes ringing down to us in Plato)
and has lived, since the earliest moments of its life,
in light, in fire, in fragrance, and in love --
the America of Moctezuma and Atahualpa,
the aromatic America of Columbus,
Catholic America, Spanish America,
the America where noble Cuauhtémoc said:
"I am not on a bed of roses" -- our America,
trembling with hurricanes, trembling with Love:
O men with Saxon eyes and barbarous souls,
our America lives. And dreams. And loves.
And it is the daughter of the Sun. Be careful.
Long live Spanish America!
A thousand cubs of the Spanish lion are roaming free.
Roosevelt, you must become, by God's own will,
the deadly Rifleman and the dreadful Hunter
before you can clutch us in your iron claws.

And though you have everything, you are lacking one thing: God!

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

2010-12-04T22:00:00.001-03:00

[from Carlos Drummond de Andrade, tr. Mark Strand, in Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, Texas, 1996]

Um boi vê os homens
An Ox Looks at Man

They are more delicate even than shrubs and they run
and run from one side to the other, always forgetting
something. Surely they lack I don't know what
basic ingredient, though they present themselves
as nobel or serious, at times. Oh, terribly serious,
even tragic. Poor things, one would say that they hear
neither the song of air nor the secrets of hay;
likewise they seem not to see what is visible
and common to each of us, in space. And they are sad,
and in the wake of sadness they come to cruelty.
All their expression lives in their eyes — and loses itself
to a simple lowering of lids, to a shadow.
And since there is little of the mountain about them —
nothing in the hair or in the terribly fragile limbs
but coldness and secrecy — it is impossible for them
to settle themselves into forms that are calm, lasting,
and necessary. They have, perhaps, a kind
of melancholy grace (one minute) and with this they allow
themselves to forget the problems and translucent
inner emptiness that make them so poor and so lacking
when it comes to uttering silly and painful sounds: desire, love,
jealousy
(what do we know?) — sounds that scatter and fall in the field
like troubled stones and burn the herbs and water,
and after this it is hard to keep chewing away at our truth.

Pablo Neruda

2010-12-04T15:27:00.001-03:00

ten ways of looking at a stanza
from Pablo Neruda’s “Walking Around”

[Pablo Neruda]

Por eso el día lunes arde como el petróleo
cuando me ve llegar con mi cara de cárcel,
y aúlla en su transcurso como una rueda herida,
y da pasos de sangre caliente hacia la noche.

[Google translator]

So on Monday as oil burns
when he sees me coming with my convict face,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and take[s] steps of hot blood into the night.

[John Felstiner]

That's why Monday flares up like gas
when it sees me coming with my jailhouse face,
and howls like a wounded wheel as it goes by,
and makes hot bloody tracks toward night.

[Forrest Gander]

That’s why Monday burns like kerosene
when it sees me show up with my mugshot face,
and it shrieks on its way like a wounded wheel,
trailing hot bloody footprints into the night.

[W. S. Merwin]

For this reason Monday burns like oil
at the sight of me arriving with my jail-face,
and it howls in passing like a wounded wheel,
and its footsteps towards nightfall are filled with hot blood.

[Jerome Rothenberg]

So the day called Monday started burning like oil
when it sees me pull in with my face of a jailhouse,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks of hot blood in the direction of night.

[Ben Belitt]

That’s why Monday flares up like an oil-slick,
when it sees me up close, with the face of a jailbird,
or squeaks like a broken-down wheel as it goes,
stepping hot-blooded into the night.

[Robert Bly]

That's why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

[Donald Devenish Walsh]

That is why Monday day burns like petroleum
when it sees me coming with my jailbird face,
and as it passes it howls like a wounded wheel,
and it takes hot-blooded steps toward the night.

[Nathaniel Tarn?]

This is why, Monday, the day, is burning like petrol,
when it sees me arrive with my prison features,
and it screeches going by like a scorched tire
and its footsteps tread hot with blood towards night.

Pablo Neruda

2010-12-03T18:11:00.000-03:00

[from John Felstiner's Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu, Stanford, 1980]

Walking Around

It so happens I'm tired of being a man.
It so happens I walk into tailorshops and movies
all shriveled up, impervious, like a swan of felt
steering through waters of origin and ash.

The smell of barbershops makes me break out sobbing.
All I want is the quiet of stones or wool,
all I want is to see no stores or gardens,
or merchandise or eyeglasses or elevators.

It so happens I'm tired of my feet and fingernails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I'm tired of being a man.

Still it would be delightful
to frighten a notary with a cut lily
or do in a nun with one smack of an ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
screaming until I died of cold.

I just can't go on as a root in the dark,
swaying, stretching, shivering with sleep,
downwards, in the soaking guts of the earth,
absorbing and musing, eating every day.

I don't want so much misery for me.
I can't go on being root and tomb,
isolated cellar, warehouse of frozen
stiffs, dying of grief.

That's why Monday flares up like gas
when it sees me coming with my jailhouse face,
and howls like a wounded wheel as it goes by,
and makes hot bloody tracks toward night.

And shoves me to certain corners, certain dank houses,
to hospitals with bones coming out the window,
to certain shoestores reeking of vinegar,
to streets as frightful as crevices.

There are sulfur-colored birds and hideous intestines
hanging from the doors of houses I hate,
there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that must have wept for shame and horror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and poisons, and navels.

I'm walking around with calm, with eyes, with shoes,
with rage, with forgetfulness,
I walk along, I go past offices and orthopedic shops,
and backyards with clothing hung from a wire:
underpants, towels, and shirts that weep
slow dirty tears.

2010-11-17T13:43:00.000-03:00

from Tadeusz Różewicz in Postwar Polish Poetry, ed Czeslaw Milosz, University of California, 1983]

To the Heart

I saw
a cook a specialist
he would put his hand
into the mouth
and through the trachea
push it to the inside
of a sheep
and there in the quick
would grasp the heart
tighten his grip
on the heart
rip out the heart
in one jerk
yes
that was a specialist

Anna Świrszczyńska

2010-11-16T22:03:00.001-03:00

[from Anna Świrszczyńska in Postwar Polish Poetry, ed Czeslaw Milosz, University of California, 1983]

The Same Inside

Walking to your place for a love feast
I saw at the street corner
an old beggar woman.

I took her hand
kissed her delicate cheek,
we talked, she was
the same inside as I am,
from the same kind,
I sensed this instantly
as a dog knows by its scent
another dog.

I gave her money,
I could not part from her.
After all, one needs
someone who is close.

And then I no longer knew
why I was walking to your place.