In what world do you think I would say such a thing? We waded through possibilities to absurdity’s shore. In youth, I often ran through fearsome rows of corn. That is not metaphor. Primary trouble rests its case. People were after monuments: Less talk, more rock. A neighbor nearly knifed me open for others to…
1. The Empire of Flora A tossing garden in a rising wind, an air of expectation. And Claire tutoring me on the landscaping: pagoda plants, crotons, a kind of blue ginger; over there, African lilies, bellwethers of spring. When she points me to liriopes, I expect the terrace to be inhabited by a feminine miniature,…
These bareback races are medieval in the modern sense: a bribe, a ruse, the occasional fall, fracture, and a bullet —but also in the sense of a retrieval of standards and emblems, the use of symbol, allegory, amulet, the team colors you cannot refuse. Tomorrow the terracotta dust will plume for about two minutes taking…
1 A girl puked on the tour bus on the switchback up Vesuvius. Her mother looked the other way —out the window. Where else? Wildflowers, hardy and tender, seemed unaware of the perils of flourishing in cinder. We trudged, as through beach sand, and when we got back on, sand had been shoveled onto the…
Two sounds in the house lately: clanking barbells and electric guitar behind garage and bedroom doors. J.’s mesocosm failed; he flagrantly excused himself on the basis of gender, as the gathering of mud and spores, weeds and worms for “nurturing” is not the métier, apparently, of boys. Dear A., I myself was quite taken with…
And that is why I paced the corridors Of those great museums Gazing at paintings of a world In which David is blameless as a boy scout Goliath earns his shameful death While eternal twilight dims Rembrandt’s canvases The twilight of anxiety and attention And I passed from hall to hall Admiring portraits of cynical…
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…
