Sunday, February 28, 2010
Twelve March Poems
"March Snow"
There is something hopeful about March,
something benevolent about the light,
and yet wherever I look snow
has fallen or is about to fall, and the cold
is so unexpected, so harsh,
that even the spider lily blooming
on the windowsill seems no more
than another promise, soon to be broken.
It is like a lover who speaks
the passionate language of fidelity, but
when you look for him, there he is
in the arms of winter.
-- Linda Pastan
* * *
"March morning unlike others"
Blue haze. Bees hanging in the air at the hive-mouth.
Crawling in prone stupor of sun
On the hive-lip. Snowdrops. Two buzzards,
Still-wings, each
Magnetized to the other,
Float orbits.
Cattle standing warm. Lit, happy stillness.
A raven, under the hill,
Coughing among bare oaks.
Aircraft, elated, splitting blue.
Leisure to stand. The knee-deep mud at the trough
Stiffening. Lambs freed to be foolish.
The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled
Out into the sun,
After the frightful operation.
She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun,
To be healed,
Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind,
Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling
Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little.
While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know
She is not going to die.
-- Ted Hughes
* * *
"Sunny Day in March"
Even the weathercock turns with the sun on such a day.
It must be spring. Outside the cellar wall the cat
has found himself shelter. He's asleep, no doubt,
but his fur is well puffed up and his paws
well tucked under. A fly has been tempted out
from a crack in the warm plank wall -- starts
buzzing. Soon stiffens. It's too cold.
-- Olav H. Hauge
translated from the Norwegian by Robin Fulton
* * *
"A Death in March"
The rind of the trees weepy with sap. No spigot to carry it off.
From here to the other side, ice is motley. The river's current
expression: a stutter of ice cakes on the shore. Fret of spume.
fugacious erasure of mud and broken branches.
We feel the setback. Want the spectacular squalor
of Spring: its colourless smear. There's no word for that.
For snow falling, fugue slow, through fog. Earth and air
unable to settle what it's to be. Now is after. Or, ahead?
Interrugnum: Its beauty is brutal. A raw wind through bereft.
-- Anne Compton
* * *
"Spring Equinox Full Moon"
I breathe to you
love in the south of the many
months of spring
hibiscus in dark hair water
at the source
shadows glistening to hips
thighs slender sunset shining shores
fingers rolled fragrant leaves
presence of deep woods
earth veiled in green drift
that hides running
of small airs
untraceable fine sounds
passing as on a face
feet first drops of rain on a mountain
hands greeting flowers
holden stolen flowers
closed eyes of every creature
sepia and amber days
back
of tall tree
arms' glide
voice of rain forests
birds in tree heights
throat of palm
wrist of palm
palm of palm
morsel breasts
melon navel waist of high waterfall
surf laughter face hearing music
body of flight
secret
beach
away from you on a corner of the earth
I want to think for six hours of your hair
which is the invention of singing
daughter of islands
born in the flood of the fish harvest
I see long mornings
lying on your hair
I remember looking for you
-- W. S. Merwin
* * *
"March 2003"
In March exact shadows on snow,
blue in the spectrum overtakes lavender;
the pillows of vapor at a slow bedroom gallop.
Up, up, the whistle pierces; the burn
of one and one, couples the rising
yearn, twin twine, dare,
and thickening flash in shoals.
Even deep-rooted conifers,
their green wax fangs open,
hustling in the languorous swells.
-- Ruth Stone
* * *
"Unknown Things"
were set before me on earth .
But once I touched them I'd known them
right back from the blinding sight I caught
of the glacier by whose foot red and golden
birds foraged in the shadow of tall mammoths
and the noise I heard from the bells and the smell
of church porches, earth in March, so many springs . . .
Every day tools they were. A hammer, a saw and
the things which people during the time they have on earth
learn the names of, and cut into each other with.
-- Henrik Nordbrandt
translated from the Danish by Robin Fulton
* * *
"March 21"
The vernal equinox is to blame
for the celestial uproar, Anne
Carson said, and nothing surprises
me more than the streaks of white
sunlight this morning with Dexter
Gordon's version of "Tangerine"
in my mind the day is a rhyme
the pencil broke, no need to shout,
I want a girl to write sonnets about
in college & love is the food
that nourishes what it consumes
in springlike days in furnished rooms
I'm hungry, please come and touch me
and I'll whisper your name the only
thing missing in this picture is you
-- David Lehman
* * *
"March"
A bear under the snow
Turns over to yawn.
It's been a long, hard rest.
Once, as she lay asleep, her cubs fell
Out of her hair,
And she did not know them.
It isk hard to breathe
In a tight grave:
So she roars,
And the roof breaks.
Dark rivers and leaves
Pour down.
When the wind opens its doors
In its own good time,
The cubs follow that relaxed and beautiful woman
Outside to the unfamiliar cities
Of moss.
-- James Wright
* * *
"If I Could Paint Essences"
(Hay on Wye)
Another day in March. Late
rawness and wetness. I hear my mind say,
if only I could paint essences.
Such as the mudness of mud
on this rainsoaked dyke where coltsfoot
displays its yellow misleading daisy.
Sch as the westness of west here
in England's last thatched, rivered
county. Red ploughland. Green pasture.
Black cattle. Quick water. Overpainted
by lightshafts from layered gold
and purple cumulus. A cloudness of clouds
which are not likie anything but clouds.
But just as I arrive at true sightness of seeing,
unexpectedly I want to play on those bell-toned
cellos of delicate not-quite-flowering larches
tht offer, on the opposite hill, their unfurled
amber instruments -- floating, insubstantial, a rising
horizon of music embodied in light.
And in such imagining I lose sight of sight.
Just as I'll lose the tune of what
hurls in my head, as I turn back, turn
home to you, conversation, the inescapable ache
of trying to catch, say, the catness of cat
as he crouches, stalking his shadow,
on the other side of the window.
-- Anne Stevenson
* * *
"Three Things That Make Me Outrageously
Happy in March"
about opening, blooms pulse into view
a few at a time against the night sky. Some
morning, a creamy tsunami
sweeps over the chain-link fence in a spring
seizure of yearning. Drenches the passerby in
dizzying scent and charges winter's
dark air without warning.
ribs of Styrax japonica open to rain. Their
delicate green incipient leaves
reverse the gradual losses of autumn. remember
this overture to the Japanese Snowbell
symphony in May when it's time to clean up
the carpet of dried flowers and pods, time to
cart uprooted seedlings away.
kissed by lazy California sun, glow like
moons in every supermarket, I go
crazy, buy all I can carry. At home, they
tumble from the sack to kiss my eager lips, and as
that nectar of the gods floods my veins, I live
in lovers' paradise every juicy moment
of Seattle rains.
-- Madeline DeFrees
* * *
"March"
A Caribbean airflow
shampoos the brook.
The deepsea deepwarm look of
sky wakes green below
amid the rinds of snow.
Though all seems melt and rush,
earth-loaf, sky-wine,
swept to bright new horizons
with hill-runnel, and gash,
all soaked in sunwash,
far north, the ice
unclenches, booms
the chunks and floes, and river brims
vanish under cold fleece:
the floods are loose!
The sullen torn
old skies through tattery trees
clack, freezing
stiffens loam; the worn
earth's spillways then relearn
-- Margaret Avison
* * *
* * *
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Fifteen Poems from Europe
"The Dump"
O glorious dump, how shall I sing your praise!
You lie in the flickering sunset, sprawling, dishevelled;
A subfusc cat, immaculate in evening dress,
Tweaks at your swelling paunch, deft as a pianist.
The rotting backs and shattered glass of mirrors
Enclose a wormwood's straggling roots;
You are as grand as Venice! (No, far grander!)
The cat is your gondolier, and sings a serenade.
The ruined wreck of an ottoman
Lies cramped in a pool of lilac shade,
Whispering tales of hookahs by the Golden Horn
To lionising clumps of willowherb.
July bobs to admire its face in shards of glass.
A crow dives slowly, then plumps down,
And struts upon you, stately as Sulla,
Holding doom, or mercy, gripped in each claw.
You're peaches' slimy shreds, and berries' slippery bubbles,
Lost lenses, torn book-covers, broken medals;
Your skin is leprous; you're pink and blistered
As a child inundated in scalding soup.
You're Dionysus ritually dismembered,
You're a microcosm in a make-up mirror.
But I say this to you: shake your sleepy limbs,
Get up on your feet, and walk. And then,
You monster, incubus of night,
Open your tattered mouth and speak.
O glorious dump, shake out your limbs and walk!
Sing of the days spent lying in the sun,
Your body warm, your giant's brain crackling, burning,
Yet unifying all that you survey.
May great thoughts bloom and rot in you
As you feast on vodka droplets, chicken bones.
O glorious dump, get to your feet and sing!
O Rosa mystica, he gods must hear your voice.
-- Elena Shvarts, Russia
translated from the Russian by Catriona Kelly
* * *
"Night Breeze"
Unexpectedly the windows open
Wide during the night. The rectangle
Swallows the bedroom, it's a different night where
Life turns inside out like a glove. A veined hand
Emerges, leaf of a negative
Hope on the phantom wall
Pointing towards what? The cliff of a lake
Sea-snows, lunar suns. A rough but tender
Tongue darts from it, paying no attention
To the guard-rails of speech.
Come unstuck, drawings, framed mirrors
The scribblings of the world
Slip from the walls docile and unafraid
Their fibers will be ripped.
A lamp gleams its star's hope in their wake
The sheets knot themselves for an escape
Exchange close body heat
For the sweet cold freedom of the clouds.
-- Claire Malroux, France
translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker
* * *
"Masterpiece"
The only masterpiece
I ever created
was a picture of the moth Thysania agrippina
in pastel on gray paper.
Because I was never
much good at painting. The essence of art
is that we aren't very good at it.
The moth Thysania agrippina
rose from the stiff gray paper
with outstretched, comb-like antennae,
with a plush bottom resembling the buttocks
of the pigwidgeons of Hieronymus bosch,
with thin legs on a shrunken chest
lie those on Breughel's grotesque figures
in "Dulle Griet," it turned into Dulle Griet
with a bundle of pots and pans in her bony hand,
it turned into Bodhiddharma
with long sleeves,
it was Ying or Shade
and Yang or Light, Chwei or Darkness
and Ming or Glow, it had
the black color of water, the ochre color of earth,
the blue color of wood,
I was as proud of it as an Antwerp councilor
or the Tenth Patriarch from the Yellow River,
I sprinkled it with shellac, which is
the oath that painters swear on Goethe's Science of Colors,
and then the art teacher took it to his study
and I forgot all about it
the way Granny used to forget
her dentures in a glass.
-- Miroslav Holub, Czechoslovakia
translated from the Czech by Dana Habova and David Young
* * *
"Relativity"
(Homage to Maurice Cornelius Escher)
Picking up green bottle ends and golden shells
on the beach may be an innocent act, full of beauty
for the walker who uses his eyes. But it can also be
a treacherous episode, if your wandering thoughts frame
an alien face, unknown to the bodies that are yours
and which concern you.
But that does not make less beautiful or strange your objets trouves,
stored in the tubular glass belly of your hope.
Now, the figures you see when you rub your eyes
are green snow crystals, a negative looked at through the microscope
of a hurricane's eye. Your life like a drawing
where you see two faces: an old woman and, afterward, the woman when young;
a rabbit if you look at it with the left eye (and this is love
entirely); if with the right, a duckling's beak aimed
directly at the open heart of a patient in theater.
Even so, although we stayed on the edge, we were afraid
of the trucks backfiring.
Today, a calm mind sees how past and future rush by
haughty and utterly opposed. Let us not cease to thank the man
who painted it: spring, the present, the dividing line.
-- Anna Aguilar - Amat, Spain
translated from the Catalan by Anna Crow
* * *
"The House"
The man alone listens to the calm voice
with half-closed eyes, as if a breath
were blowing on his face, a friendly breath
rising -- astonishing -- from a lost time.
The man alone hears the ancient voice
that his fathers, in their day, heard, clear
and collected, a voice that, like the green
of ponds and hills, deepens with evening.
The man alone knows a shadow voice,
caressing, that rises up in the calm tones
of secret springs: he drinks it intently,
eyes closed. Its presence isn't apparent.
This is the voice that once stopped the father
of his father, and on back through dead blood.
The secretive voice of a woman that comes
from a doorway a the falling of dusk.
-- Cesare Pavese, Italy
translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock
* * *
"The Leaf of the Poplar"
It trembled so, the wind carried it away,
it trembled so, how could the wind not carry it away
in the distance
a sea
in the distance
an island in the sun
and hands grasping the oars
dying the moment the port came into sight
and eyes closed
in sea anemones.
It trembled so much
I wanted it so much
in the cistern with the eucalyptus trees
spring and autumn
in all the woods naked
my God I wanted it.
-- George Seferis, Greece
translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
* * *
"Wood and Shavings"
Of hornets I will say nothing,
since they are so easy to spot.
Also, the current revolutions
are not that dangerous.
Death has always been chosen
amid a fanfare of noise.
Yet beware the May flies and women,
beware the Sunday hunters,
beauticians, the undecided, the well meaning,
the ones devoid of contempt.
Out of the forests we carried branches and logs,
and for a long time there was no sun.
Intoxicated by paper on the conveyer belt,
I no longer recognize the branches
nor the moss, carved into the bark,
impudent and true.
Wasted paper, banners,
black posters . . . . By day and by night
the machine of faith rumbles beneath
this or that star. But in wood,
as long as it is still green, and with bile,
as long as it is still bitter, I am
willing to write what happened at the start!
Make sure you stay awake.
The swarm of hornets chases the shavings
blown by the wind, while at the fountain,
resisting the curled allure
that once made us weak,
my hair bristles.
-- Ingeborg Bachmann, Germany
translated from the German by Peter Filkins
* * *
"Still Life"
Here in a summer full of dust
the dampness of winter
trails us into dark corners.
I bought the shoes days ago
but they remain untouched in the box
heel to heel.
Blessed is the sunbeam that falls upon us
like the eye of a stranger focused on a natura morte.
A platter of the season's finest fruit
so plump, and nestled among it, a shiny dagger.
It's not dangerous
but as alluring and peaceful
as the fruit that surrounds it.
What has become of us?
My hands, skillful and transparent,
slice the atmosphere into rabbit feed.
Another new pair of shoes
to help you enjoy a stroll around the grounds.\
Since you've left I dream of only one thing:
the sound they would make
in the evening
as you reach the front door.
-- Luljeta Lleshanaku, Albania
translated from the Albanian by the author and Henry Israeli
* * *
"The Old Gods"
Now they are condemned
to live in cracks,
in bubbles of plaster and rust,
and spiders' webs
behind the furniture:
speaking a derelict language
to empty space,
sealed with the vapour
in bottles, closed in the blown
robins' eggs
in some abandoned loft.
Each has its given power.
Each has its hearth, its secret,
its local name,
and each has its way of learning
the skill of return,
the science of bleeding through, when anger or fear
is fuzzing the surface,
making us dizzy and whole.
-- John Burnside, Scotland
* * *
"Voice"
I walk on the sea-shore
to catch that voice
between the breaking of one wave
and another
but there is no voice
only the senile garrulity of water
salty nothing
a white bird's wing
stuck dray to a stone
I walk to the forest
where persists the continuous
hum of an immense hour-glass
sifting leaves into humus
humus into leaves
powerful jaws of insects
consume the silence of the earth
I walk into the fields
green and yellow sheets
fastened with pins of insect beings
sing at every touch of he wind
where is that voice
it should speak up
when for a moment there is a pause
in the unrelenting monologue of the earth
nothing but whispers
clappings explosions
I come home
and my experience take on
the shape of an alternative
either the world is dumb
or I am deaf
but perhaps
we are both
doomed to our afflictions
therefore we must
arm in arm
go blindly on
toward new horizons
toward contracted throats
from which rises
an unintelligible gurgle
-- Zbigniew Herbert, Poland
translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles
* * *
"Apples"
The apples have fallen and rot in the yard.
And you aren't here.
Otherwise, everything goes on like before.
The cricket creaks in the dry grass.
The windowpane is shattered.
The stone has fallen by the bed.
Shards of glass cover the pillow.
-- Lyubomir Nikolov, Bulgaria
translated from the Bulgarian by Miroslav Nikolov
* * *
"Moths"
Tonight the air smells of cut grass.
Apples rust on the branches. already summer is
a place mislaid between expectation and memory.
This has been a summer of moths.
Their moment of truth comes well after dark.
Then they reveal themselves at our window-
ledges and sills as a pinpoint. A glimmer.
The books I look up about them are full of legends:
ghost-swift moths with their dancing assemblies at dusk.
Their courtship swarms. How some kinds may steer by the moon.
The moon is up. the back windows are wide open.
Mid-July light fills the neighbourhood. I stand by the hedge.
Once again they are near the windowsill --
fluttering past the fuchsia and the lavender,
which is knee-high, and too blue to warn them
they will fall down without knowing how
or why what they steered by became, suddenly,
what they crackled and burned around. They will perish --
I am perishing -- on the edge and at the threshold of
the moment all nature fears and tends towards:
the stealing of light. Ingenious facsimile.
And the kitchen bulb which beckons them makes
my child's shadow longer than my own.
-- Eavan Boland, Ireland
* * *
"Essay"
Life begins with the reptiles:
the amoeba, the snails, the spiders,
the water with a tusk on each wave,
the space-hungry paths,
the roots, when they're hungry.
Even the minerals
devour one another.
A diamond has all the others
inside its guts.
What we see as vertical
is the various forms
of courtship dances which,
in poplars for instance, come close to being sublime,
in mountain ranges, to being grotesque,
in snakes, to being rainbows.
At night from the moon rattles
the hour of multiplication,
even seeds are on heat;
wax grows most frenzied of all.
The fishes, the birds, the mammals with great hopes
(among them humans too)
lay their eggs straight into sand
which they forget as soon as the kiss is over.
As you can see,
everything round about is perfect
as a sphere
containing neither an angle
nor a broken line
with which one could hang oneself.
-- Marin Sorescu, Romania
translated from the Romanian by Michael Hamburger
* * *
"Star, Meteor, Some Shooting Thing"
That one coming out of a building with a full-face crash helmet,
jumping toward an afternoon of tar
and wind against his neck, impatient, and savoring
the scent of mixture and of the two-stroke engine
or perhaps of fresh-cut grass, the short kilometers
that will zip by free of care, pure images
of faces and fleeting bodies, windows
like screens or glimpsed nostalgias, forgettable
sorrows: a light accompanies him. To leave,
just to leave, to get lost, to become
\star, meteor, some shooting thing.
Suburbs of nothingness, and in every house
the same blue flame, and clear signs
of frustrated hopes and oppositions
that have been utterly crushed.
Dogs on leashes, old folks, playgrounds.
"Do you know that once upon a time some forth head
of cattle used to graze here?" says one,
tapping his foot on the polyurethane surface of the small field.
This is the afternoon: a diffused dazzle,
the unexpected greeting of those you pass by.
And some knowing looks, that say thank you.
That say we are here, in spite of it all.
The watermelon, for example, that a group of Turks
kindly offered us, was delicious.
-- Fabio Pusterla, Switzerland
translated from the Italian by Marella Feltrin-Morris
* * *
"Silence"
Silence
Like the one before the world was created
Fog slides over the river
Tangles in bushes on shore
Dew trembles on a branch
A bud bursts open
A fledgling moves in a nest
Silence
Like the one before the first word was spoken
Church bells lick their lips
-- Ronalds Briedis, Latvia
translated from the Latvian by Margita Gailitis and J. C. Todd
* * *
* * *
