Ann Townsend

[from Ann Townsend's Dime Store Erotics, Silver Fish Review, 1998]

Trimmings

Restless, pulled outside by fog

and fitful rain, she carries scissors

and basket to trim the last wild things.

She crouches, wind-shaded,

before parsley, tarragon, thyme:

herbs weep into her hands,

spiders scatter across pine needles.

Half-dark, wholly cold,

the evening of first frost

falls down as rain, cool mouth

against her unprotected neck.

Across the lake her lover waits

in a room warm with smoke,

jukebox's muted melody,

deep brown bottles ranged

across the bar. Once she leaned

into his mouth, whiskey sweet

between them. The tiny napkins

beneath their drinks grew wet

with condensation. Then

their fingers touched,

an accidental convergence of the stars.

She shakes loose a bunch of sage.

It swings like a heavy skirt

in her hands, one caterpillar

dropping free. In the sky

the constellations fuzz and fade.

After the End

Because I left him there so you could see

        his body, broken by the fall, the hawk's

small relatives hopped from higher branches

        and called a kind of glee that he was dead.

               By afternoon, the ground around him dusted

with feathers and gravel kicked up, he looked

        like a bundle of rags tossed

from a car and tumbled there, but still

        graceful, neck flung back in the moss and dirt,

               and the yellow claws curled to question marks.

Then the trees were quiet, the other voices

        gone. When a car turned into the driveway,

I knew it wasn't you. They sat a while,

        four men, the same dark suits, carefully

               tended hair. Missionaries: I could tell

from the window where I stood beyond

        their line of sight. All their doors opened

as if by a common feeling, something

        unseen and insistent in the air.

               They did not see the hawk lying there, dead

from its long fall, or age, or driven down

        by the crows that nest in the pines above.

They did not see me. I stepped back, behind

        the curtain, and wished you home, who could see

               these things and know what is beloved, what is dead.

Mid-February, White Light

Country music and a black dog barking

on a chain, and the voices of grown children

complaining — Dad, when are we going to burn

this pile? — cast over from next door

on the first nearly warm afternoon.

Everyone has come out to see the sun.

Slow bees cluster at the porch step

and the cat has wakened in a pool of light.

So when the chainsaw coughs into gear,

to clear dead wood away from the gas line,

it's like some strange natural description —

the ground frozen in its dream of January

creaking beneath our feet,

the impetus of metal cutting into wood,

the urge to flight when the bee

hazards its way, wind-driven or scent-impelled,

into my hair — to touch, to continue.

Even our unmade bed, framed by the peeling

slats of the bedroom window,

looks not like a tranquil reminder

but disturbed, shaken from a measured stillness

of white sheets, pillows, red quilt

cast on the floor, a reduction from action to disorder.

Or the gift of a warm wind that feels wet.

Noelle Kocot

[from Noelle Kocot's Sunny Wednesday, Wave, 2009] The Poem of Force after Simone Weil's Essay on The Iliad

How often have I lain beneath a roof of trees and sestinas,
Sestinas and trees, the chasmus of my timid hopes decked
Out in the styles of the day,
Losing myself in novels of corporeal sunshine and a home
Where a samovar is always gurgling on the stove, and men of frivolous
      or serious wives
Tie self-strung misery around their necks. And knowledge

Is a shining lamp that lights the hieroglyphs of love and suffering, and
      no knowledge
Is enough to put it out. I used to dream of a sestina
Whose very presence would ignite the longing of an ancient wife
Who'd swim the matrices of grace into the waves that swept the deck
Of a ship leaving its home
Of drowsy cows and frogs waiting by the river as the day

Blinked over never-ending fields. But today
I feel in almost perfect balance with the world, and any knowledge
That I had or have is but a lying down in the glass casket of my
      thoughts, the long small home
I can barely even find were it not for this sestina
Crashing like painted rain against my eyes decked
With brazen orchid light. And were I not a wife

 And mother to these thoughts, I'd take my wifely
Ringless hand and draw the curtains on the days
Of an atavistic reaching out and clear the deck
For something more untoward than the acknowledgment
That we are riveted between laughter and the abyss, like characters
      in a sestina
With all the lines crossed out. I find my home

When I travel the near and distant byways, I find my home
With the wives
Of absent heroes put to sleep in the sleep of bronze, and in sestinas
That haven't borne witness to a single day
Of war, arrows flying on both sides but none to pierce the knowledge
That we ourselves are a deck

 Of marked cards that decorate
The history of our homeless
Tribe. To know
This is to understand Hector's grief for the long-robed wives
As he stood outside Troy's walls in the rising of the day
Waiting for his death, and trembling, his soul mourning its fate of
      being trapped inside a thing — to understand this is to return to an
      age of epics, not sestinas.

For now I have only the bare knowledge of all wives
Who've ever decked their homes
With the talismans of the day, and my talismans are sestinas.

Noelle Kocot

Javier Marías

[from Javier Marías's A Heart So White, tr. Margaret Jull Costa, New Directions, 1992]

Real togetherness in married couples and indeed in any couple comes from words, not just the words that are spoken — spoken involuntarily — but the words one doesn't keep to oneself — at least not without the intervention of the will. It isn't so much that there are no secrets between two people who share a pillow because that's what they decide — what is serious enough to constitute a secret and what is not, if it is not told? — rather it's impossible not to tell, to relate, to comment, to enunciate, as if that were the primordial activity of all couples, at least those who have become couples recently and are still not too lazy to speak to one another. It isn't just that with your head resting on a pillow you tend to remember the past and even your childhood, and that remote and quite insignificant things surface in your memory, come to your tongue, and that all take on a certain value and seem worthy of being recalled out loud; nor that we're disposed to recount our whole life to the person resting their head on our pillow, as if we needed them to be able to see us from the very beginning — especially from the beginning, that is, from childhood — and to witness, through our telling, all those years before they knew us and during which time, we now believe, they were waiting for us. Neither is it simply a desire to compare, to find parallels or coincidences, the desire to know where each of you was in all the different eras of your two existences and to fantasize about the unlikely possibility of having met each other before; lovers always feel that their meeting took place too late, as if the amount of time occupied by their passion was never enough or, in retrospect, never long enough (the present is untrustworthy), or perhaps they can't bear the fact that once there was no passion between them, not even a hint of it, while the two of them were in the world, swept along by its most turbulent currents, and yet with their backs turned to each other, without even knowing one another, perhaps not even wanting to. Nor is it that some kind of interrogatory system is established on a daily basis which, out of weariness or routine, neither partner can escape, and so everyone ends up answering the questions. It's rather that being with someone consists in large measure in thinking out loud, that is, in thinking everything twice rather than once, once with your thoughts and again when you speak, marriage is a narrative institution. Or perhaps it's just that they spend so much time together (however little time that is amongst modern couples, it still amounts to a lot of time) that the two partners (but in particular the man, who feels guilty if he remains silent) have to make use of whatever they think and whatever occurs to them or happens to them in order to amuse the other person; thus, in the end, there's not a single tiny corner of all the events and thoughts in an individual's life that remains untransmitted, or rather translated matrimonially. The events and thoughts of the others are transmitted too, those they've confided to us in private, that's where the expression "pillow talk" comes from, there are no secrets between people who share a bed, the bed is like a confessional. For the sake of love or its essence — telling, informing, announcing, commenting, opining, distracting, listening and laughing, and vainly making plans — one betrays everyone else, friends, parents, brothers and sisters, blood relations and non-blood relations, former lovers and beliefs, former mistresses, your own past and childhood, your own language when you stop speaking it and doubtless your country, everything that anyone holds to be secret or perhaps merely belongs to the past. In order to flatter the person you love you denigrate everything else in existence, you deny and abominate everything in order to content and reassure the one person who could leave you; so great is the power of the territory delineated by the pillow that it excludes from its bosom everything outside it, and it's a territory which, by its very nature, doesn't allow for anything else to be on it except the two partners, or lovers, who in a sense are alone and for that very reason talk and hide nothing — involuntarily. The pillow is round and soft and often white and after a while that roundness and whiteness become a replacement for the world and its weak wheel.

Javier Marías

Margaret Jull Costas

Steve Shavel

[from Steve Shavel's How Small Brides Survive in Extreme Cold, Verse Press, 2003]

How Small Brides Survive in Extreme Cold [excerpt]

2

Every word occludes another, just as

every perspective cuts across some larger circuitry — logjams

of purposiveness, the whole farrago

of incidence, everything a something

taken out of context, the stunned minnow

in the heron's crop

mouthing the vowels of horror, or the way

you wake up sometimes with a

loded word on the tongue

the odd fragment

of dream cipher (today no

kidding it was tatterdemalion).

But of the mechanism, spring-

wound, that drives these recirculating

waters, disgorged on the hill towns in

last night's storm or unlocked

from the rockface its last

blue icicle integument, trundling

past stubborn milltowns and

former milltowns, their trestles

cantilevers and

crumbling abutments,

their sullen smokestacks,

rosettes of identical split-

level around the cul-de-sac,

sluiced through the archaic reactor

whose lab-coated acolytes

scrutinize the apparatus, tending

the device

its dread core their queen

hived and bloated with light,

turning bend after bend

of perturbation to get here

where the currents slow to spread their snares

and drop their sediment —

we are all of us oblivious,

taken in entirely by the parade

of forms, the events and detritus

that drift across the meniscus of consciousness.

Only the sandpiper it seems

sees past its own reflection —

and the kingfisher, who lunges now

through the shattered pane

to that low strange corridor

its glimpse of minnow where

last year's leaves in a

spectral cortege, lit

with the amber half-light

of the after-life

leach their tannins or settle

little by little a skeletal tracery

into the bottom silt,

thick as the dust of an undisturbed

necropolis.

While above an unseen hand works feverishly

to smooth the sheet of other-being

over the ever-unmade bed of the river.

And while I'm going on like this

a something noses closer through the shallows,

something I didn't notice, nor

he me til

thwack

and recoil

the beaver startled startles back

his blackjack tail on the water's pate

then

thwack again

               KERTHUNK

in spreading rose-windows

of concussion. The Willow-Manitou

looks on and marvels.

An after-sprite of droplets shivers down.

Several weeks now he's been at it

this waterlogged carpetbagger

interloping both the banks up and down.

Daylong the air endures the rasp

and crepitation of his handiwork, a

jigsaw of precision, each chiselled branch

a deftly-placed sprag in the works.

For these two are pitted

here and everywhere

one against the other:

the curving intelligence of river,

the Cartesian architectonic

of the beaver, part iconoclast

breaking the symmetries,

troubling the face of the waters, part

masonic artificer, geometrician,

master anaesthetician, plotting and fretting

to put the river under and

three or four in confederacy

equal to an entire

army corps of engineers.

But for now the river doesn't give a damn.

Rather it is the dam that gives.

And so on and so forth through the spate of May . . .

Steve Shavel
[photo by Jenna Sunshine]

Daniel Nathan Terry

[from Daniel Nathan Terry's Waxwings, Lethe, 2012]

Photograph, 1984

Swallow this
house — bedroom window paned
like a roadside cross
erected for a reckless boy, wreath
of camera-flare, paper flower of real grief
with too bright a center, edges finally fading
in shoebox weather.
                               You know
what happened there.
                                  You know
this is more than a snap-
shot. Flat as it seems, it will swell
on your red tongue and will become
those rooms — that room with its pale boy
sinking to his knees, again, sinking
into shadowed corners.
                                     Come,
fold into black origami.
                                     Come, unhinge
your jaw like the copperhead you saw
becoming a blackbird in the woods — mouth-first,
then your throat, your white ribs and pink gut.
All that's left of you
                               must muscle through
the flapping wing, thin legs trembling,
one skeletal foot curling inward.
                                                   It's in you now —
the song, the sin, the bones, the room, him
telling you it's alright, and every man does it
when a girl leaves him empty-
handed.
             Swallow this
house, blackbird-who-became a snake. Swallow
this house and keep yourself
                                             from remembering
how to sing.

  

Evie Shockley

[from Evie Shockley's The New Black, Wesleyan, 2011]

dear ace bandage,

       the wound is hard to place.
the wound is not your job.
       i thought i needed you, but
things are already tight. you
       are like putty in my hands,
or is my thinking colored?
       flesh tone or dial tone? who
you gonna call? your pretty
       silver broach sets in, holds
you at a tension. could it
       clasp the skin together long
enough for two flaps to re-
       attach? miss match. rematch.
love. ace. deuce. game. open.

dear cuddly dharma,

       you make it easy to say no,
just. i turn a blind eye to
       temptation after staring hard
into your hydrogen smile. we
       spoon, and i hate to stir, but
fetish is always in the mix.
       even fate looks glamorous
by lamplight. spotlight. hot.
       wound or would? would or
wooden? batter batter batter!
       you have a dream of night-
marish proportions. where
       there's a will, there's aweigh.
unanchored. unmoored. off.

dear existential fallacy,

       i need you to be concrete.
you need me to liquidate
       my account. pour, pour me,
with my fluid tale. tail, to
       hear you tell it. fluent in six
currencies. dirty lucre. you
       tracking bills counterfeited
by the page. lyre, lyre, pants
       the town crier. griot. seer.
sikh. psyche. that, baby, went
       out with the dirty dishwasher.
cross my palm with olives:
       i will tell you your pastime.
your passive voice is dated.

dear gift horse,

       open wide. now bite down.
that incident was not an
       accident. don't. act like i'm
stupid. do you come with
       a saddle? which way to
the sunset? that's the thing
       about possibility: it's dark
in there. you can't judge
       an r&b song by its covers.
colors. dolores is blue: why
       must she give up her security
blanket? she's had it since
       she was born. my, what sharp
teeth you have! all the better.

dear ink jet,

       black fast. greasy lightning.
won't smear. won't rub off.
       defense: a visual screen: ask
an octopus (bioaquadooloop).
       footprints faster than a speed-
ing bully, tracking dirt all
       over the page. make every
word count. one. two. iamb.
       octoroon. half-breed. mutt.
mulatto. why are there so few
       hybrids on the road? because
they can't reproduce. trochee
       choking okay mocha. ebony,
by contrast, says so much.

Evie Shockley

Julie Carr

Julie Carr’s Sarah — of Fragments and Lines, Coffee House, 2012]

Conception Abstracts

                            Heat teems from the meat of the form

      Tame heat if tame form, if maimed form then fierce.
                       Seems eaten, this mate, this timed tenant.


Tenured member of my own passive nature, I tested the
tine of the task. Desperate for some apt rapture, tapped
the lap of the master. Faster. Water and laughter, the
last splatter of summer, later, the hot slap of not
sleeping. Walled by fault, the taut self slipped. And to
what heights after?


[untitled]

In the second week of solid rain, Sarah. You woke at dawn with 

a head of dream. Clover’s fell enthusiasm expands in the 

perpetual bath. Sarah. The lamp suspended in the garden, 

Sarah: Cheshire-like and falsely dear. We make boats of juice 

bottles, houses of cereal boxes, cats of toilet paper, eggs of 

lavender and stone. Sarah. At the festival of water we watch an 

orchestra of children sway to the music of their strings. And in 

your room you succumb. Learn as you are dying how to 

behave like one near dead. As magpie, you are eave-bound, 

acquisitive, indiscriminate. Beak clipping the scraps of your old 

existence, the strings of your future weave, Sarah. As duck you 

are industrious, with a reed in your possession, across pond 

you slide. But here, tatter-head, you are forced into days, 

broken into hours, and those hours mercilessly sliced.

Julie Carr

Arecelis Girmay

[from Arecelis Girmay's Kingdom Animalia, BOA, 2011]

Small Letter

do not go, this day, the red

of bridges, my little, stay

beside me over

the ruins of san francisco.

go, but do not go

from me, my one,

my love, my very kin

who I laughed with in our sleep

every night, my dream

beside your dream, for a year.

wrecking ball despedida, wreck

the great rooms in my chest & take

my last song, but do not leave me

on this earth, my one

without my one. how would

the hand ever live, if it knew

it would never braid your hair

again, or hold your face?

it would get up & walk

away forever then.

one by one my breaths

would go out looking: a procession

of homeless dogs,

                                                  or clouds

Robert Duncan

[from Robert Duncan's The H. D. Book, California, 2012]

Threads are spun out and are woven, from event into event. Hands work the dancing shuttles of a close net to make things real, to realize what is happening. A tapestry of a life appears in the mesh of many lives, a play. But just as when we weave a complex of lines a cloud or atmosphere appears, a texture or cloth, something more than the threads told, and out of that texture appear, not only the figures we were translating into our design, but other figures of the ground itself; so a “life” appears in the work itself. The weaving or the painting or the writing is “subjective,” is an act out of however we can do it; the “subject matter” is “objective,” is some thing or event as actual as ourselves which we reach out to capture, to draw into a texture with ourselves. In the medium, our work and this thing become mixed, changed then.  A ground appears as a new condition of what we are doing. . . .

“the mind is upborne upon the emotional surge” [Pound]

There is a threatened chastity of mind in Pound that would put away, not face, the thought of hellish things, here in considering the Divine World, as later in considering fascism, where also he cannot allow that the sublime is complicit, involved in a total structure, with the obscene — what goes on backstage. Spirit in The Cantos will move as a crystal, clean and clear of the muddle, even the filth, of the world and its tasks thru which Psyche works in suffering towards Eros. . . .

The style of the artist, his signature or control, is . . . analogous to his character, the operation of energies in repression, of challenge and attack upon the world about him . . . The grace of the artist is analogous to his nature, a given thing, the operation of energies in freedom, of response and self derivation from the world. Style, being wrested from Nature, is mastery; Grace, being given, is the service. The Art here being to keep alive in one process mastery in service, service in mastery. . . .


Paradise or first Eden survives in its never having yielded satisfaction. A rapture that leaves the poet hungry for rapture.

João Cabral de Melo Neto

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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