It happens in winter, at dawn, that a taxi takes you to the airport (yet another festival). Half-awake, you recollect that Andrzej Bursa used to live right here, just outside. He once wrote: the poet suffers for millions. It is still dark at the bus stop, a few people huddle in the cold, seeing them…
The scent of gasoline crickets Vladimir Holan Poor people wait by the border and look hopefully at the other side The scent of gasoline crickets skylarks sing the abridged version of a hymn Both sides of the border face east The north is east And the south is east One car holds a giant globe…
We drove through Sambor quickly, almost instantly, it took five minutes. But my mother, as I recall, passed her exams here. Dusk fell without funeral marches. A lone colt danced on the highway, though it didn’t stray far from the mare; freedom is sweet, so is a mother’s nearness. Over fields and forests gray silence…
When night draws near the mountains are clear and pure — like a philosophy student before exams. Clouds escort the dark sun to the shaded avenue’s end and slowly take their leave, but no one cries. Look, look greedily, when dusk approaches, look insatiably, look without fear. Translated by Clare Cavanagh
The air is sharp with dust: it’s hard to breathe. The sky’s scraped white with it, the light turns gold And ominous. I cough and cough and cough. It blows each year from Africa, a seethe That Pollocks the parked cars with ochre, rust, The powdered pigments for the nimbus on The icon of a…
When I was small, my grandmother, who taught piano, told me someday I would learn to “read” music; I was astonished! What ogres, what emperors, what gingerbread, what coffins of glass? Perched on five telephone wires, birds noted their gibberish, like an unspooled Phaistos disk. When grown-ups crescendo-ed overhead, when discords tensed for the felted…
Even though she has set down The unwieldy entablature And walked back into her life, Her posture, Her disheveled intricate coiffure, Betray preoccupation. Preparing dinner, she slices The fluted celery stalk into drums, The mushrooms into ionic capitals. She is too old to be young anymore, The moonlight petrifies. She has left…
Hat on the bed, A peacock feather Dragged indoors From the blue-eyed weather, Reflection smashed, A baker’s dozen, Chain letter from An estranged cousin, The bumbershoot Bloomed in the hall, The ladder’s lintel, The owl’s call, The horseshoe’s frown, The salt knocked over & not tossed across The left shoulder, A…
(with a nod to X.J. Kennedy) The rope that makes of air a sphere, Or else a grin from ear to ear, Is something earth-bound feet must clear When the parabola swings round. Right before the snapping sound, You have to float above the ground. The trick is tempo, neither slow Nor…
Next time her skull is sliced open, she must have a mind limber as rubber, bending to the pain. Under the bright lights of the icy theater she will melt, allowing the saw’s buzz to fade into the sound of the surgeon entering her interior, surveying the field of tumors for the bad one. When…
She wanted a crypt like the temple of Dendur, an enormous monolith unshakeable as their marriage. He favored the granite sarcophagus gaily decorated with Victorian swirls and oak leaf cornices. She wanted poplars tall and straight—leafy and shameless as Italian trees of summer, if sadly deciduous. He preferred cypresses, their constancy through the seasons: shrubs—yew…
1. Precocious in her dotage, she teeters like a top unravelling, now spinning, now faltering, now lunging across living room carpets, over William Morris tendrils and Bokara medallions, past the leather sofa and beyond, arriving at the south window. She stoops over the hope chest with her watering can, drenching the amaryllis, dotting orchids and jade with ice, then pruning the cactus…
