Here we are. The baby needs changing. It’s early in a midweek, late summer day. The cool skepticism that blankets us all before the dew drops, before the dawn god rises reluctant from her bed, is a memory now, a feeling faded into thought. Strange hours those, empty of opinion. Strange feeling—so total then,…
How long all this will go on, the circulating blood—hauling, having its way with us, around us, skin-deep presence and us oblivious, blood that stays where it should until it doesn’t— how long its warming, halting, stock-taking, unremitting run between some bloodlike-before and, after, what then,…
Be like the grasses, which are not waiting, says the sun-whipped god. Always with her partial information. What grasses? What must we go out there and learn about now? The wild grasses— here only of the wind’s accord, happy survivors, rewarded for their ignorance, their readiness, the seeds that took —are…
“I’m not irrational. But there’ve been times When I’ve experienced—uncanniness: I think back to those days, when, four or five, I dreaded going to bed, because I thought Sleep really was a ‘dropping off.’ At night Two silver children floated up from somewhere Into the window foiled with dark, a boy And girl. They never…
Everything you touch you taste. Like moonlight you gloss over garden bricks, rusty chicken wire, glazing your trail with argent mucilage, wearing your eyes on slender fingers. I find you grazing in the cat food dish waving your tender appendages with pleasure, an alien cow. Like an army, you march on…
I used to think the Cloud was in the sky, Something invisible, subtle, aloft: We sent things up to it, or pulled things down On silken ribbons, on backwards lightning zaps. Our photographs, our songs, our avatars Floated with rainbows, sunbeams, snowflakes, rain. Thoughts crossed mid-air, and messages, all soft And winking, in the night,…
I still remember the summer we were becalmed: No breezes rose. The dandelion clock Stopped mid-puff. The clouds stood in dry dock. Like butterflies, formaldehyde embalmed, Spring kites lay spread out on the floor, starched flat. Trees kept their council, grasses stood up straight Like straight pins in a cushion, the wonky gate That…
Matthew, 2.7-12 Summoned to the palace, we obeyed. The king was curious. He had heard tell Of strangers in outlandish garb, who paid In gold, although they had no wares to sell. He dabbled in astrology and dreams: Could we explain the genesis of a star? The parallax of paradox — afar The fragrance of…
Sometimes I think I must have ground to a halt on this lot for the sake of the orange tree alone. I might have preferred the olive — rolled on a bias — but it requires labor, refinement, salt. Oranges are easy: sweetness sewn inside a roughly perfect handhold. Fruit in different stages…
The resort staff are turning off the light at the poolside bar. The iron gate around the pool clanks shut loud enough to wake the kiddos whose sleep their mothers toiled to obtain. This Saturday night is uniquely music-less, the usual spate of sounds drowned out — rough and slick alike, proclivities and druthers….
I lost my grandmother’s opera glasses … an empire in thrall to innovations offered electric shocks in the Prater for a small charge. In wedding dresses, fräuleins dove from moving trains. Scions, following the Great Somnambulator, walked out of windows (into Blush Noisette!) or stepped off bridges in uniform. Thunderclouds amassed as if looking…
Past the fences of beds we are movie sheds of sleep. We can’t stamp or clap. At best we shriek in monkey speech, our old dialect, about the latest things. And then we truly live through our own civilization. Translated by Clara Cavanagh and Michal Rusinek
