Poetic Modes

Open Poetry: A Workshop on Writing in New Modes

Carolyn Forché

The Elegiac Mode

Constantine Cavafy (C.P. Cavafy)

The God Forsakes Antony

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.


Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Body, Remember

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,

not only the beds you lay on,

but also those desires that glowed openly

in eyes that looked at you,

trembled for you in the voices—

only some chance obstacle frustrated them.

Now that it’s all finally in the past,

it seems almost as if you gave yourself

to those desires too—how they glowed,

remember, in eyes that looked at you,

remember, body, how they trembled for you in those voices.

Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

 The City

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Rainer Maria Rilke

The Ninth Elegy

Why, when this span of life might be fleeted away

as laurel, a little darker than all

the surrounding green, with tiny waves on the border

of every leaf (like the smile of a wind) :—oh,why

have to be human, and, shunning Destiny,

long for Destiny . . .

Not because happiness-really‑

exists, that precipitate profit of imminent loss.

Not out of curiosity, not just to practice the heart,^-

 that could still be there in laurel . . .

But because being here is' much, and because all^- this

 that's here, so fleeting, seems-to require us and strangely

concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once,

everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we,

too,

once. And never again. But this

having been once, though only once,

having been once on earth—can it ever be cancelled ?

And so we keep pressing on and trying to perform it,

trying to contain it within our simple hands,

in the more and more crowded gaze, in the speechless

heart.

Trying to become it. To give it to whom? We'd rather

hold on to it all for ever . . . But into the other relation,

what, alas! do we carry across? Not the beholding we've

here

²slowly acquired, and no here occurrence. Not one.

Sufferings, then. Above all, the hardness of life,

the long experience of love; in fact,

purely untellable things. But later,

under the stars, what use ? the more deeply untellable

stars ?

Yet the wanderer too doesn't bring from mountain to valley

a handful of earth, of for all untellable earth, but only

a word he has won, pure, the yellow and blue

gentian. Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House.

Bridge, Fountain, Gate, jug, 'Fruit tree, Window,--

possibly: Pillar, Tower ? . . . but for saying, remember,

oh, for such saying as never the things themselves

hoped so intensely to be. Is not the secret purpose

of this sly Earth, in urging a pair of lovers,

just to make everything leap with ecstasy in them ?

Threshold : what does it mean

to a pair of lovers, that they should be wearing their own

worn threshold a little, they too, after the many before,

before the many to come, . . . as a matter of course!

Here is the time for the Tellable, here is its home.

Speak and proclaim. More than ever

things we can live with are falling away, for that

which is oustingly taking their place is an imageless act.

Act under crusts, that will readily split as soon

as the doing within outgrows them and takes a new outline.

Between the hammers lives on

our heart, as between the teeth

the tongue, which, in spite of ail,

still continues to praise.

Praise this world to the Angel, not the untellable: you

can't impress him with the splendour you've felt;  in the

cosmos

where he more feelingly feels you're only a novice. So show

him

some simple thing, refashioned by age after age,

till it lives in our hands and eyes as a part of ourselves.

Tell him things. He'll stand more astonished: as you did

beside the roper in Rome or the potter in Egypt.

Show him how happy a thing can be, how guileless and

ours;

how even the moaning of grief purely determines on

form,

serves as a thing, or dies into a thing,—to escape

to a bliss beyond the- fiddle.   These things that live on

departure

understand when you praise them: fleeting, they look

for rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all.

Want us to change them entirely, within our invisible

hearts,

into—oh, endlessly—into ourselves! Whosoever we are.

Earth, is it not just this that you want : to arise

invisibly in us ?  Is not your dream

to be one day invisible ? Earth! invisible!

What   is   your   urgent   command, if not   transforma-

tion ?

Earth, you darling, I will! Oh, believe me, you need

no more of your spring-times to win me over : a single one,

ah, one, is already more than my blood can endure.

Beyond all names I am yours, and have been for ages.

You were always right, and your holiest inspiration

is Death, that friendly Death.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor

            Future

are growing less. . . . . Supernumerous existence

wells up in my heart.

Translated from the German by Stephen Spender and J. B. Leishman

The Eighth Duino Elegy

Dedicated to Rudolf Kassner

With all their eyes, all creatures see

the open. Only our eyes are

turned around, and surround it

with pitfalls, all round the way to be free.

What is outside, we know-from animal

eyes alone; since even the youngest child

we turn round, force it backwards

to see conformity, not the.openness that's

so deep in an animal's face. Free.from death.

Which is what only we see; the free animal

has its perishing always behind it,

and God in front;atid when it moves, it moves

in eternity, the way springs run.

We never, not even one single day, have

pure space in front of us, into which the flowers

endlessly arise. Always it is world

and never nothing without no:

the pure, unsupervised, that one breathes

and endlessly knows and craves nothing. As a child

you sometimes get lost there in silence and then

somebody shakes you. Or someone dies and is it.

Since close to death one doesn’t see death any more,

just stares ahead, perhaps with big animal gaze

Lovers, if the other weren't there to

block the view, lovers are near it and wonder . . .

As if by oversight it's disclosed to them

behind the other ... But beyond that _-

no one gets any further, and the world happens to him again.

Always turned towards creation, we see

only a mirroring of the free

dimmed by our breath. Or an animal,

wordless, looks up quietly and sees right through us.

That's what destiny means; to be opposite

and nothing but that, and always opposite.

If consciousness of our sort existed

in the sure animal that draws close to us

on his own other path, he would change our course

with his kind of life. Since for him, being is

unending, ungrasped and without glimpse

of-his condition, pure, just like his gaze.

And where we see the future, he sees everything

and himself in everything and healed for ever.

And yet in the watchful warm animal

is the weight and care of a great sadness.

Since he too is always in touch with

what often- overpowers us-too—remembrance

as if once upon a time what we're striving for

had been closer, truer and its connection

infinitely tender. Here all is being apart,

there it was breath. After the first homeland

 the second seems to him doubtful and vague.

Oh bliss of the littlest creatures

that remain forever in the womb that bore them;

happiness of little gnats that still leap within

even when they marry—for womb is all.

Look at the half-certainty of the bird

who from his origin is almost aware of both,

as if he were the soul of an Etruscan

and came from the dead man welcomed inside a space

that bears his image in repose for a lid

And how dismayed anything is that has to fly

if it comes from a womb. As if from its very self

it shrinks back in fear, zigzags through the air as a crack

 runs through a cup. The way the track of a bat

tears through the porcelain of evening.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

devoted to everything and never free of it!

It fills us to the brim. We arrange it. It perishes.

We arrange it again and perish ourselves.

Who turned us around this way, so that we,

 whatever we may do, always are in the posture

of someone who's going away? As he on

the last hill, that will show him his whole

valley one last time, turns round, pauses, lingers—

 we live that way forever saying goodbye.

This translation is dedicated to the memory of Max Delbrück

Translated form the German by Robert Kelly

Seamus Heaney

Casualty

I   

He would drink by himself   

And raise a weathered thumb   

Towards the high shelf,   

Calling another rum   

And blackcurrant, without   

Having to raise his voice,   

Or order a quick stout   

By a lifting of the eyes   

And a discreet dumb-show   

Of pulling off the top;   

At closing time would go   

In waders and peaked cap   

Into the showery dark,   

A dole-kept breadwinner   

But a natural for work.   

I loved his whole manner,   

Sure-footed but too sly,   

His deadpan sidling tact,   

His fisherman’s quick eye   

And turned observant back.   

Incomprehensible   

To him, my other life.   

Sometimes, on the high stool,   

Too busy with his knife   

At a tobacco plug   

And not meeting my eye,   

In the pause after a slug   

He mentioned poetry.   

We would be on our own   

And, always politic   

And shy of condescension,   

I would manage by some trick   

To switch the talk to eels   

Or lore of the horse and cart   

Or the Provisionals.   

But my tentative art   

His turned back watches too:   

He was blown to bits   

Out drinking in a curfew   

Others obeyed, three nights   

After they shot dead   

The thirteen men in Derry.   

PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,   

BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday   

Everyone held   

His breath and trembled.   

                   II   

It was a day of cold   

Raw silence, wind-blown   

Surplice and soutane:   

Rained-on, flower-laden   

Coffin after coffin   

Seemed to float from the door   

Of the packed cathedral   

Like blossoms on slow water.   

The common funeral   

Unrolled its swaddling band,   

Lapping, tightening   

Till we were braced and bound   

Like brothers in a ring.   

But he would not be held   

At home by his own crowd   

Whatever threats were phoned,   

Whatever black flags waved.   

I see him as he turned   

In that bombed offending place,   

Remorse fused with terror   

In his still knowable face,   

His cornered outfaced stare   

Blinding in the flash.   

He had gone miles away   

For he drank like a fish   

Nightly, naturally   

Swimming towards the lure   

Of warm lit-up places,   

The blurred mesh and murmur   

Drifting among glasses   

In the gregarious smoke.   

How culpable was he   

That last night when he broke   

Our tribe’s complicity?   

‘Now, you’re supposed to be   

An educated man,’   

I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me   

The right answer to that one.’

                   III   

I missed his funeral,   

Those quiet walkers   

And sideways talkers   

Shoaling out of his lane   

To the respectable   

Purring of the hearse...   

They move in equal pace   

With the habitual   

Slow consolation   

Of a dawdling engine,   

The line lifted, hand   

Over fist, cold sunshine   

On the water, the land   

Banked under fog: that morning   

I was taken in his boat,   

The screw purling, turning   

Indolent fathoms white,   

I tasted freedom with him.   

To get out early, haul   

Steadily off the bottom,   

Dispraise the catch, and smile   

As you find a rhythm   

Working you, slow mile by mile,   

Into your proper haunt   

Somewhere, well out, beyond...   

Dawn-sniffing revenant,   

Plodder through midnight rain,   

Question me again.

The Didactic Mode

C.P. Cavafy

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.

May there be many a summer morning when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you come into harbors seen for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you have gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Nazim Hikmet

On Living

Living is no laughing matter:

you must live with great seriousness

like a squirrel, for example—

I mean, without looking for something beyond and above living,

I mean living must be your whole life.

Living is no laughing matter:

you must take it seriously,

so much so and to such a degree

that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,

your back to the wall,

or else in a laboratory

in your white coat and safety glasses, you can die for people—

even for people whose faces you've never seen, even though you know living

is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

I mean, you must take living so seriously

that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees—

and not for your children, either,

but because although you fear death you don't believe it, `

because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery—

which is to say we might not get up

from the white table.

Even though it's impossible not to feel sad

about going a little too soon,

we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,

we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,

or still wait anxiously

for the latest newscast...

Let's say we're at the front—

for something worth fighting for, say.

There, in the first offensive, on that very day,

we might fall on our face, dead.

We'll know this with a curious anger,

but we'll still worry ourselves to death

about the outcome of the war, which could last years.

Let's say we're in prison

and close to fifty,

and we have eighteen more years, say,

before the iron doors will open.

We'll still live with the outside,

with its people and animals, struggle and wind—

I mean with the outside beyond the walls. I mean, however and wherever we are,

   we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,

a star among stars

and one of the smallest,

a gilded mote on blue velvet—

I mean this, our great earth.

This earth will grow cold one day,

not like a block of ice

or a dead cloud even

but like an empty walnut it will roll along

in pitch-black space...

You must grieve for this right now.

You have to feel this sorrow now.

For the world must be loved this much

            if you’re going to say “I lived.”

Translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk

The Interrogative Mode, the Poem of Questioning

C.P. Cavafy

Waiting for Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

    The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?

Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

    Because the barbarians are coming today.

    What laws can the senators make now?

    Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,

and why is he sitting at the city's main gate

on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

    Because the barbarians are coming today

    and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.

    He has even prepared a scroll to give him,

    replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today

wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?

Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,

and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes

beautifully worked in silver and gold?

    Because the barbarians are coming today

    and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual

to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

    Because the barbarians are coming today

    and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?

(How serious people's faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home so lost in thought?

    Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.

    And some who have just returned from the border say

    there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?

They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley

Yannis Ritsos

The Search

Come in, Gentlemen—he said. No inconvenience. Look through

everything;

I have nothing to hide. Here's the bedroom, here the study,

here the dining-room. Here? — the attic for old things; —

everything wears out, Gentlemen; it's full; everything wears out;

wears out,

so quickly too, Gentlemen; this? — a thimble; — mother's;

this? mother's oil-lamp, mother's umbrella — she loved me

enormously; —

but this forged identity card? this jewellery, somebody else's? the

dirty towel?

this theatre ticket? the shirt with holes? blood stains?

and this photograph? his, yes, wearing a woman's hat covered

with flowers,

inscribed to a stranger — his handwriting —

who planted these in here? who planted these in here? Who

            planted these in here?

Translated from the Greek by Nikos Stangos

The Philosophic Mode

Rainer Maria Rilke:

Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.

Stretch out your shadow on the sundial’s face,

and on the meadows let the winds go loose.

Command the last fruits to be full in time;

grant them  even two more southerly days,

press them toward fulfillment soon and chase

the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will build none.

Who is alone now, will stay long alone,

will lie awake, read, get long letters written,

and through the streets that follow up and down

will wander restless, when the leaves are driven.

Translated from the German by John Felstiner

 

Human Beings at Night

The nights are not made for the masses.

Night divides you from your neighbor,

and by no means are you to seek him out

And if you light up your room at night

in order to look human beings in the face,

then you must ask yourself: whose.

Human beings are horribly warped by the light

that drips from their faces,

and if at night they have gathered together,

then you'll see a wavering world

all heaped up at random.

On their foreheads yellow glare has

driven out all thought,

in their eyes the wine flickers,

on their hands hangs

the heavy gestures with which they

understand one another in their talks;

and by which they say: I and I

and mean: Anybody.

Pablo Neruda:

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,

let's not speak in any language;

let's stop for one second,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines;

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea

would not harm whales

and the man gathering salt

would look at his hurt hands.

 

Those who prepare green wars,

wars with gas, wars with fire,

victories with no survivors,

would put on clean clothes

and walk about with their brothers

in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused

with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about;

I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

af never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead

and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve

and you keep quiet and I will go.

Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid

The Poem of Address, The Epistolary Mode

César Vallejo
To My Brother Miguel
Brother, today I sit on the brick bench of the house,
where you make a bottomless emptiness.
I remember we used to play at this hour, and mama
caressed us: "But, sons..."

Now I go hide
as before, from all evening
lectures, and I trust you not to give me away.
Through the parlor, the vestibule, the corridors.
Later, you hide, and I do not give you away.
I remember we made ourselves cry,
brother, from so much laughing.

Miguel, you went into hiding
one night in August, toward dawn,
but, instead of chuckling, you were sad.
And the twin heart of those dead evenings
grew annoyed at not finding you. And now
a shadow falls on my soul.

Listen, brother, don't be late
coming out. All right? Mama might worry.
Translated from the Spanish  by Robert Bly

Henri Michaux

I Am Writing to You from a Far-off Country

I

We have here, she said, only one sun in the mouth, and for only a little while. We rub our eyes days ahead. But to no purpose. Inexorable weather. Sunlight arrives only at its proper hour.

Then we have a world of things to do, so long as there is light, in fact we hardly have time to look at one another a bit.

The trouble is that nighttime is when we must work, and we really must: dwarves are born constantly.

II

When you walk in the country, she further confided to him, you may chance to meet with substantial masses on your road. These are mountains and sooner or later you must bend the knee to them. Resisting will do no good, you could go no farther, even by hurting yourself.I do not say this in order to wound. I could say other things if I really wanted to wound.

III.

The dawn is grey here, she went on to tell him. It was not always like this. We do not know whom to accuse.

At night the cattle make a great bellowing, long and flutelike at the end.

We feel compassionate, but what can we do?

 

The smell of eucalyptus surrounds us: a blessing—serenity, but it cannot protect us from everything, or else do you think that it really can protect us from everything?

IV.

  I add one further word to you, a question rather.

  Does water flow in your country too? (I don’t remember whether you’ve told me so) and it gives chills too, if it is the real thing.

   Do I love it? I don’t know. One feels so alone when it is cold. But quit otherwise when it is warm. Well then? How can I decide? How do you others decide, tell me, when you speak of it without disguise, with open heart?

V.

  I am writing to you from the end of the world. you must realize this. The trees often tremble. We collect the leaves. They have a ridiculous number of veins. but what for? There’s nothing between them and the tree any more, and we go off troubled.

  Could not life continue on earth without wind? Or must everything tremble, always, always?

   There are subterranean disturbances, too, in the house as well, like angers which might come to face you, like stern beings who would like to wrest confessions.

   We see nothing, except what is so unimportant to see. Nothing, and yet we tremble. Why?

Translated from the French by Richard Ellman

Wen Yiduo

Perhaps

Perhaps you have wept and wept, and can weep no more.

Perhaps. Perhaps you ought to sleep a bit;

then don't let the night hawk cough, the frogs

croak, or the bats fly.

Don't let the sunlight open the curtain onto your eyes.

Don't let a cool breeze brush your eyebrows.

Ah, no one will be able to startle you awake:

I will open an umbrella of dark pines to shelter your sleep.

Perhaps you hear earthworms digging in the mud,

or listen to the root hairs of small grasses sucking up water.

Perhaps this music you are listening to is lovelier

than the swearing and cursing noises of men.

Then close your eyelids, and shut them tight.

 I will let you sleep, I will let you sleep.

I will cover you lightly, lightly with yellow earth.

I will slowly, slowly let the ashes of paper money fly

Translated from the Chinese by Arthur Sze

The Narrative Mode

Daniil Kharms

The Beginning of a Beautiful Day (A Symphony)

The rooster had hardly crowed when Timofey jumped out of the window onto the roof and frightened all the passers-by who were on the street at that hour. The peasant Khariton stopped, picked up a stone, and threw it at Timofey. Timofey disappeared somewhere. “That is a clever one!” the herd of people shouted, and Zubov ran full speed and rammed his head into a wall. "Oh!" a woman with a swollen cheek shouted. But Komarov beat up the woman, and the woman ran howling through the doorway. Fetelyushin walked past and laughed at them. Komarov walked up to him and said, "Hey, you greaseball," and hit Fetelyushin in the stomach. Fetelyushin leaned against the wall and started to hiccup. Romashkin spat from the top-story window, trying to hit Fetelyushin. At that moment, not far from there, a big-nosed woman was beating up her kid with a trough. A fattish young mother rubbed a pretty little girl's face against the brick wall. A little dog broke its thin leg and rolled around on the pavement. A little boy ate some kind of loathsome thing out of a spittoon. At the grocery store there was a long line for sugar. The women swore loudly and pushed one another with bags. The peasant Klariton got drunk on denatured alcohol and stood in front of the women with unbuttoned trousers and said bad words.

Thus began a beautiful summer day.

Translated from the Russian by George  Gibian

Leonardo Sinisgalli

Fido has fat buttocks.

He's an old church dog

who loafs under the altar.

He's lost his sense of smell, his fangs

are loose and he's given up

scratching himself with his muzzle.

Even cats scare him

but he's here at the requiem mass

for my Mother's bones.

His head stretched out between his paws,

he's stuck out his tongue: suddenly

he swallows a big fly that was bothering him.

Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick

Leonardo Sinisgalli

Old Grief

Grief comes easily to old people.

At midday

sitting in a corner of an empty house

they burst into tears.

Infinite despair

catches them by surprise.

They lift a withered slice of pear

to their lips, or the pulp of a fig

baked on the roof tiles.

Even a sip of water

or a visit by a snail

helps to ease a crisis.

Translated from the Italian  by W. S. Di Piero

Autumn

The flies seem glad

to see me again.

They inch along the stems

of my glasses, pounce

on the tips of my ears.

The white paper fascinates them.

I talk, I pet them,

gather them in my fist,      

call them by name,           

Fantina, Filomena, Felicetta.

I fool myself thinking

it's always them.

One checks his reflection in my fingernail,

the others hide so that

he'll have to find them.

Translated from the Italian  by W. S. Di Piero

Via Velasca

Years of pounding have nearly

Caved it in, and it's hard to believe

The street's gotten narrower.

This is my hour, my favorite hour.

I remember one night all noise died

In the fading light, a voice

Cried my name as if in a dream

Then stopped.

The street bends, the day     -

Drips from the rooftops,

The sweet hour sings in me.

The light is only a stubborn

Ghost, a glow: a fish

Gleams in the glass bottle.

Translated  from the Italian by W. S. Di Piero

Yanis Ritsos

Midnight Stroll

In the end, afraid of the poems and the many cigarettes,

he went out at midnight to the suburb—

a simple, quiet walk along closed fruit stores, among

good things with their true, vague dimensions.

Having caught a cold from the moon, he wiped his nose

now and then with a paper napkin. He lingered

there before the pungent odor of fresh brick,

before the horse tied to a cypress tree,

before a barn's padlock. Ah, like this—he said—

arnong things that demand nothing of you

and  a small balcony shifting in the air

with a solitary chair. On the chair

the dead woman’s guitar has been left upside down;

on the guitar's back moisture sparkles secretly—

it is sparks such as these that prevent the world from dying.

Translated from the Greek by Kimon Friar

Elio Vittorini

From Coversations in Sicily

I

That winter I was in the grip of abstract furies. I won’t be more specific, that’s not what I’ve set out to re­late. But I have to say that they were abstract, not heroic, not living; in some way they were furies for all doomed humanity. This went on for a long time, and I went around with my head hung low. I saw posters for the newspapers blaring their advertisements and I hung my head; I saw friends for an hour or two without saying a word, and I hung my head; and I had a girlfriend or wife waiting for me, but I didn’t say a word even with her, even with her I hung my head. Meanwhile it rained, and days and months passed; I had holes in my shoes and water seeped in, and there was no longer anything but this: rain, massacres in the ad posters for the newspapers, water seeping through the holes in my shoes, mute friends, life in me like a deaf dream, and a hopeless calm.

That was the terrible thing: the calm in the midst of hopelessness. Believing humanity to be doomed and not burning with a fever to do anything about it; wanting to doom myself as an example of it instead. I was agitated by abstract furies, but they didn’t stir my blood, and I was calm, I desired nothing. It didn’t matter to me that my girlfriend was waiting for me; joining her or not joining her, or flipping through a dictionary, was all the same to me; and going out to see friends, or others, or staying home, was all the same to me. I was calm. It was as if I had never had a day of life, never known what it meant to be happy; as if I had nothing to say, to affirm or deny, nothing of myself to put into play, and nothing to listen to; noth­ing to give and no inclination to receive; as if I had never in all my years of existence eaten bread, drunk wine or coffee, never gone to bed with a woman, never had chil­dren, never hit someone, never believed any of this possi­ble; as if I had never had a childhood in Sicily among the prickly pears and sulphur, in the mountains; but inside, I was agitated by abstract furies, and I thought humanity was doomed, I hung my head, and it rained, I didn’t say a word to my friends, and water seeped through the holes in my shoes.

Translated from the Italian by Alane Salierno Mason

The Lyric Mode

In the Beginning Is the Relation

by Edward Hirsch

The message in the bottle is a lyric poem and thus a special kind of communiqu�. It speaks out of a solitude to a solitude; it begins and ends in silence. We are not in truth conversing by the side of the road. Rather, something has been written; something is being read. Language has become strange in this urgent and oddly self-conscious way of speaking across time. The poem has been (silently) en route—sometimes for centuries—and now it has signaled me precisely because I am willing to call upon and listen to it. Reading poetry is an act of reciprocity, and one of the great tasks of the lyric is to bring us into right relationship to each other. The relationship between writer and reader is by definition removed and mediated through a text, a body of words. It is a particular kind of exchange between two people not physically present to each other. The lyric poem is a highly concentrated and passionate form of communication between strangers—an immediate, intense, and unsettling form ofliterary discourse. Reading poetry is a way of connecting—through the medium of language—more deeply with yourself even as you connect more deeply with another. The poem delivers on our spiritual lives precisely because it simultaneously gives us the gift of intimacy and interiority, privacy and participation.

Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, and the lyric poem exists somewhere in the region—the register—between speech and song. The words are waiting to be vocalized. The greatest poets have always recognized the oral dimensions of their medium. For most of human history poetry has been an oral art. It retains vestiges of that orality always. Writing is not speech. It is graphic inscription, it is visual emblem, it is a chain of signs on the page. Nonetheless: “I made it out of a mouthful of air,” W. B. Yeats boasted in an early poem. As, indeed, he did. As every poet does. So, too, does the reader make, or remake, the poem out of a mouthful of air, out of breath. When I recite a poem I reinhabit it, I bring the words off the page into my own mouth, my own body. I become its speaker and let its verbal music move through me as if the poem is a score and I am its instrumentalist, its performer. I let its heartbeat pulse through me as embodied experience, as experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds. The poem implies mutual participation in language, and for me, that participation mystique is at the heart of the lyric exchange.

Many poets have embraced the New Testament idea that “In the beginning was the Word,” but I prefer Martin Buber’s notion in I and Thou that “In the beginning is the relation.” The relation precedes the Word because it is authored by the human. The lyric poem may seek the divine but it does so through the medium of a certain kind of human interaction. The secular can be made sacred through the body of the poem. I understand the relationship between the poet, the poem, and the reader not as a static entity but as a dynamic unfolding. An emerging sacramental event. A relation between an I and a You. A relational process.

Paul Celan

Corona

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.

From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:

then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday,

in dream there is room for sleeping,

our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:

we look at each other,

we exchange dark words,

we love each other like poppy and recollection,

we sleep like wine in the conches,

like the sea in the moon's blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing,.and.people look up from the street:

it is time they knew!

It is time the stone made an effort to flower,

time unrest had a beating heart.

It is time it were time.

It is time

Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger

The Lyric Descriptive Mode
Tatsuji Miyoshi

Great Aso

Horses are standing in rain.

A herd of horses with one or two foals is standing in rain.

In. hushed silence rain is falling.

The horses are eating grass,

With tails,  and backs too-, and manes too, completely

soaking wet

they are eating grass,

eating grass.

Some of them are standing with necks bowed over absent-

mindedly and not eating grass.

Rain is falling and falling in hushed silence.

The mountain is sending up smoke.

The peak of Nakadake is sending up dimly yellowish and

 heavily oppressive-volcanic smoke, densely, densely.

And rain clouds too all over the sky.

Still they continue without ending.

Horses are eating grass.

On one of the hills of the Thousand-Mile-Shore-of Grass

they are absorbedly eating blue-green grass.

Eating.

They are all standing there quietly.

They are quietly gathered in one place forever, dripping

and soaked with rain,
If a hundred years-go by in this single moment, there would

be no wonder,

Rain is falling. Rain is falling.

In hushed silence rain is falling.

Translated from the Japanese by  Edith Marcombe Shiffert and Yuki Sawa

Paul Celan

Death Fugue

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening

we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night

we drink and we drink

we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped

A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes

he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta

he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling, he

whistles his hounds to come close

he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground

he commands us to play up for the dance.

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening

we drink and we drink

A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes

he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta

Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped

He shouts jab the earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play

he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are so blue

jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening

we drink and we drink

a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margareta

your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays his vipers

He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland

he shouts scrape your strings darker you'll rise then as smoke to the sky

you'll have a grave then in the clouds there you won't lie too cramped

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland

we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink

this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue

he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true

a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete

he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air

he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete

dein aschenes Haar Shulamith

Translated from the German by John Felstiner

The Ekphrastic Mode

William Carlos Williams

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus  

According to Brueghel 

when Icarus fell 

it was spring 

 a farmer was ploughing 

his field

the whole pageantry  

of the year was 

awake tingling 

near  the edge of the sea 

concerned  

with itself  

sweating in the sun 

that melted 

the wings' wax  

unsignificantly 

off the coast 

there was  

a splash quite unnoticed

 this was

 Icarus drowning 

John Keats

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
    Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunt about thy shape
    Of deities or mortals, or of both,
        In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
    What men or gods are these?  What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit?  What struggle to escape?
        What pipes and timbrels?  What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
    Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
    Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
    Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
        Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;
        She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
    For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
    Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
    For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
    For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
        For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
    To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
    And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
    Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
        Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
    Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
        Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape!  Fair attitude! with brede
    Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
    When old age shall this generation waste,
        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
    Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The Dramatic Mode (Monologic and otherwise)
Delmore Schwarz

Baudelaire

When I fall asleep, and even during sleep,

I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking

Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial,   

Having no relation to my affairs.   

Dear Mother, is any time left to us

In which to be happy? My debts are immense.

My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment.

I know nothing. I cannot know anything.   

I have lost the ability to make an effort.

But now as before my love for you increases.   

You are always armed to stone me, always:   

It is true. It dates from childhood.

For the first time in my long life

I am almost happy. The book, almost finished,   

Almost seems good. It will endure, a monument

To my obsessions, my hatred, my disgust.   

Debts and inquietude persist and weaken me.   

Satan glides before me, saying sweetly:

“Rest for a day! You can rest and play today.   

Tonight you will work.” When night comes,   

My mind, terrified by the arrears,

Bored by sadness, paralyzed by impotence,   

Promises: “Tomorrow: I will tomorrow.”

Tomorrow the same comedy enacts itself   

With the same resolution, the same weakness.   

I am sick of this life of furnished rooms.   

I am sick of having colds and headaches:   

You know my strange life. Every day brings

Its quota of wrath. You little know

A poet’s life, dear Mother: I must write poems,   

The most fatiguing of occupations.

I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me.

I write from a café near the post office,

Amid the click of billiard balls, the clatter of dishes,   

The pounding of my heart. I have been asked to write   

“A History of Caricature.” I have been asked to write   

“A History of Sculpture.” Shall I write a history

Of the caricatures of the sculptures of you in my heart?

Although it costs you countless agony,

Although you cannot believe it necessary,

And doubt that the sum is accurate,

Please send me money enough for at least three weeks.

 

Gwendolyn Brooks

 

a song in the front yard

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.

I want a peek at the back

Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.   

A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now   

And maybe down the alley,

To where the charity children play.   

I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.

They have some wonderful fun.

My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine

How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.   

My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae   

Will grow up to be a bad woman.

That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late

(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.

And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,

And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace   

And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

The Rhetorical Mode

Tadeusz Rozewicz

Who is a poet

A poet is the one who writes poems
and the one who does not write poems

a poet is the one who bursts one's fetters
and the one who puts them on

a poet is the one who has faith
and the one who cannot have it

a poet is the one who has lied
and the one who has heard lies

a poet is the one who has lips
and the one who swallows the truth

the one who has fallen
and the one who is raising

a poet is the one who leaves
and the one who cannot leave

Translated from the Polish by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert Maguire

The Prophetic Mode
César Vallejo
Black Stone Lying on a White Stone

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,

on some day I can already remember.

I will die in Paris—and I don't step aside—

perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

   It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down

these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on

wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself

with all the road ahead of me, alone.

   César Vallejo is dead.  Everyone beat him

although he never does anything to them;

they beat him hard with a stick and hard also

   with a rope.  These are the witnesses:

the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,

the solitude, and the rain, and the roads. . .

Translated from the Spanish by Robert Bly

Miklós Radnóti

Postcard (Found on His Body after Being Killed by the Nazis)

I fell beside him; his body turned over,

already taut as a string about to snap.

Shot in the back of the neck. That’s how you too will end,

I whispered to myself: just lie quietly,

Patience now flowers into death.

Der springt noch auf, a voice said above me.

On my ear, blood dried, mixed with filth.

Translated from the Hungarian by Emery George

Czeslaw Milosz

A Song on the End of the World

On the day the world ends

A bee circles a clover,

A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea,

By the rainspout young sparrows are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends

Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,

A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,

Vegetable peddlers shout in the street

And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,

The voice of a violin lasts in the air

And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder

Are disappointed.

And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps

Do not believe it is happening now.

As long as the sun and the moon are above,

As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,

As long as rosy infants are born

No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:

There will be no other end of the world,

There will be no other end of the world.

Translated from the Polish by the author

The List, or Catalogue poem: litanies, incantations, inventories.

To everything there is a season.

And a time to every purpose under the heaven

A time to be born, and time to die;

A time to plant, and a time to pluck that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

A time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose;

A time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew;

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate;

A time of war, and a time of peace.

In the Bible, the narrator of the above verses speaks in a voice of authority to the community. The voice is declarative, aware that it speaks wisdom. Look what happened when Polish poet Tymoteusz Karpowicz borrowed this “list poem” format with its anaphorical repetition of the word “time,” and transformed it into a post-World War Two landscape:

                              Ecclesiastes

there is a time of opening the eyes and closing the bed

time for donning a shirt and shedding sleep

time for drowsy soap and half-awakened skin

time for the hair-brush and of the sparks in the hair

time for trouser-legs of shoe-laces time of buttons

for laddered stockings for the slipper’s blindness

time for the fork and for the knife time for sausages and spoiled eggs

time for tram time for the conductress time for the policeman

time for good morning and time for goodbye

time for carrots peas and parsley

for tomato soup and shepherd’s pie

time for trussing chicken and releasing forbidden speeds for thought

time for cinema ticket or a ticket to nowhere

to a river perhaps perhaps a cloud

there is finally a time for close eyelids and the open bed

time for past present and future

praesens historicum and plusquamperfectum

time perfect and imperfect

time from wall to wall

While Karpowicz announces from the start—the very title of the piece—his intent to correspond with the older text, the images, tone and use of detail do a great deal to transform the tone of the canonical litany. This onslaught of detail in Karpowicz’s version—a cinema ticket, tomato soup, a hairbrush—offers its own metaphysics—homelier in comparison to the Ecclesiastical narrator’s grand proclamations. Writing in post-war Europe, having witnessed the great acts of destruction and survival, Karpowicz’s tone is both ironic and tender. His response is multilingual, multivocal, it refuses to console, and yet consoles. It allows the canonical form to enter into our world.  (Kaminsky, International Poetry Anthology).

Repetition:

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Your Shoulders Hold Up the World

A time come when you can no longer say:
-- my God.
A time of total cleaning up.
A time when you no longer can say: my love.
Because love proved useless.
And the eyes don't cry. And the hand do only rough work.
And the heart is dry.
Women knock at your door in vain, you won't open.
You remain alone, the light turned off,
and your enormous eyes shine in the dark.
It is obvious you no longer know how to suffer.
And you want nothing from your friends.

Who cares if old age comes, what is old age?
Your shoulders are holding up the world
and it's lighter than a child's hand.
Wars, famine, family fights inside buildings
prove only that life goes on
and not everybody has freed himself yet.
Some (the delicate ones) judging the spectale cruel
will prefer to die.
A time comes when death doesn't help
A time comes when life is an order.
Just life, without any escapes.

Translated from the Portuguese by Mark Strand)

Paul Celan:

Corona

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends

From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:

then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it’s Sunday,

in dream there is room for sleeping,

our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:

we look at each other,

we exchange dark words,

we love each other like poppy and recollection,

we sleep like wine in the conches,

like the sea in the moon’s blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from

      the street:

it is time they knew!

It is time the stone made an effort to flower,

time unrest had a beating heart.

It is time it were time.

It is time.

         Celan’s poem above is a very private, personal address. “It is time they knew!” Celan exclaims, as his repetition of “time” in the last five lines of the poem echoes the old text, giving it a chance to enter a twentieth-century love lyric. If the speaker is addressing the public (as in Ecclesiastes), it is by standing with his lover by the window, embracing.

      Yet another twentieth-century poet who echoed this Biblical litany in a very personal way is Carlos Drummond De Andrade. In his poem “Your Shoulders Hold Up the World,” he offers intense self-examination:

A time comes when you no longer can say:

     my God.

A time of total cleaning up.

A time when you no longer can say: my love.

Because love proved useless.

And the eyes don’t cry.

And the hands do only rough work.

And the heart is dry.

Women knock at your door in vain, you won’t open.

You remain alone, the light turned off,

and your enormous eyes shine in the dark.

It is obvious you no longer know how to suffer.

And you want nothing from your friends.

Who cares if old age comes, what is old age?

Your shoulders are holding up the world

and it’s lighter than a child’s hand.

Wars, famine, family fights inside buildings

prove only that life goes on

and not everybody has freed himself yet.

Some (the delicate ones) judging the spectacle cruel

will prefer to die.

A time comes when death doesn’t help.

A time comes when life is an order.

Just life, with no escapes.

This intense lyrical poem opens and closes with a litany of “time.” The poem is both very intimate (Women knock at your door in vain, you won’t open. /  You remain alone, the light turned off, / and your enormous eyes shine in the dark) and very public (wars, famine, family fights inside buildings / prove only that life goes on). The wisdom of Ecclesiastes is updated here to the twentieth-century voice in a similar way as with the previous poems– the proclamatory public tone is replaced by the utterance of an individual, in this case, one persuading himself against suicide. This voice, although at times public, is not as interested in teaching others how to live—it is interested in voicing one human’s need to survive. The struggle here is not so much with the community as it is with one’s self. This, of course, reminds us of Yeats’ great twentieth-century statement that “argument with another is a rhetoric, argument with one’s self is poetry.”  In the end, life triumphs, “just life, with no escapes.”

Finally, Yehuda Amichai’s poem “A Man in His Life” enters into confrontation with Ecclesiastes:

A Man in His Life

A man in his life has no time to have

Time for everything.

He has no room to have room

For every desire. Ecclesiastes was wrong to claim that.

A man has to hate and love all at once,

With the same eyes to cry and to laugh

With the same hands to throw stones

And to gather them,

Make love in war and war in love.

And hate and forgive and remember and forget

And order and confuse and eat and digest

What long history does

in so many years.

A man in his life has no time.

When he loses he seeks

When he finds he forgets

When he forgets he loves

When he loves he begins forgetting.

And his soul is knowing

And very professional,

Only his body remains an amateur

Always. It tries and fumbles.

He doesn’t learn and gets confused,

Drunk and blind in his pleasures and pains.

In autumn, he will die like a fig,

Shriveled, sweet, full of himself.

The leaves dry out on the ground,

And the naked branches point

To the place where there is time for everything.

This ability to hate and love at once, in the same line, in the same moment, is perhaps one of the more characteristics attributes of many great poems from this era, whose “confusion” is not for the sake of mere linguistic fireworks, but to describe the joyfulness and terror of a human being in the twentieth century. Amichai, like the other poets before him, is able to go back to the origin of the Biblicat text—but he does not merely update it for our own moment in time—he confronts it. His confrontation is personal, intimate just as much as it is public, the argument with the tradition becomes more powerful in its intimacy of address.   (Kaminsky)

Jorge de Lima

Distribution of Poetry

I took wild honey from the plants,
I took salt from the waters, I took light from the sky.
Listen, my brothers: I took poetry from everything
To offer it to the Lord.
I did not dig gold from the earth
Or leech blood from my brothers.
Inn-keepers: let me alone.
Peddlers and bankers:
I can fabricate distances
To keep you away from me.
Life is a failure,
I believe in the magic of God.
The roosters are not crowing,
The day has not dawned.
I saw the ships go and return.
I saw misery go and return.
I saw the fat man in the fire. I saw zig-zags in the darkness.
Captain, where is the Congo?
Where is the Isle of Saint Brandon?
Captain, what a black night!
Mastiffs howl in the darkness.
O Untouchables, which is the country.
Which is the country that you desire?
I took wild honey from the plants.
I took salt from the waters. I took light from the sky.
I have only poetry to give you.
Sit down, my brothers.

Translated from the Portuguese by John Nist

André Breton

Free Union

My wife whose hair is a brush fire

Whose thoughts are summer lightning

Whose waist is an hourglass

Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger

Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first

     magnitude

Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow

Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass

Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer

The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut

Whose tongue is incredible stone

My wife whose eyelashes are strokes in the handwriting of a child

Whose eyebrows are nests of swallow

My wide whose temples are the slate of greenhouse roofs

With steam on the windows

My wife whose shoulders are champagne

Are fountains that curl from the heads of dolphins under the ice

My wife whose wrists are matches

Whose fingers are raffles holding the ace of hearts

Whose fingers are fresh cut hay

My wife with the armpits of martens and beech fruit

And Midsummer night

That are hedges of privet and nesting places for sea snails

Whose arms are of sea foam and a landlocked sea

And a fusion of wheat and a mill

Whose legs are spindles

In the delicate movements of watches and despair

My wife whose calves are sweet with the sap of elders

Whose feet are carved initials

Keyrings and the feet of steeplejacks who drink

My wife whose neck is fine milled barley

Whose throat contains the Valley of Gold

And encounters in the bed of the maelstrom

My wife whose breasts are of the night

And are undersea molehills

And crucibles of rubies
my wife whose breasts are haunted by the ghosts of dew-moistened roses

Whose belly is a fan unfolded in the sunlight

Is a giant talon

My wife with the back of a bird in vertical flight

With a back of quicksilver

And bright lights

My wife whose nape is of smooth worn stone and wet chalk

And of a glass slipped through the fingers of someone who has just drunk

My wife with the thighs of a skiff

That are lustrous and feathered like arrows

Stemmed with the light tailbones of a white peacock

And imperceptible balance

My wife whose rump is sandstone and flax

Whose rump is the back of a swan and the spring

My wife with the sex of an iris

A mine and a platypus

With the sex of an alga and old-fashioned candies

My wife with the sex of a mirror

My wife with the eyes full of tears

With eyes that are purple armor and a magnetized needle

With eyes of savannahs

With eyes full of water to drink in prisons

My wife with eyes that are forests forever under the ax

My wife with eyes that are the equal of water and air and earth and fire

Translated from the French by David Antin

Attila Jószef

To sit, to stand, to kill, to die

To shove this chair away from me,
to squat in front of a speeding train,
to climb a mountain carefully
or tip my bag out on the plain;
to feed a bee to my pet bug
or with some granny, snuggle close;
to have a tasty soup to sup,
to sneak through mud on tippytoes;
to place my hat on the railway line
or skirt the lake shore in a rush,
or sit on the bottom, looking fine—
or with the breakers, in a flush;
to bloom with the flowers of the sun
or merely to let out a lovely sigh
to drive away a fly—just one—
or dust my book of grit and grime;
to clean a mirror with my spit,
to make a truce with deadly foes—
or knife them all and from the slit,
study the blood as it overflows;
to watch a young girl as she turns
or sit around and twiddle my thumbs;
to light up Budapest so it burns,
to wait for a bird to take my crumbs;

o life, that's writing now this verse,
you tie me up, you let me loose,
you make me laugh, you make me curse—
o life, you make me choose!

Translated from the Hungarian by John Batki

Attila Jószef

The Seventh

If you set foot on this earth,

You must go through seven births.

Once, in a house that’s burning,

once, among ice floes churning,

once, amidst madmen raving,

once, in a field of wheat swaying,

once, in a cloister, bells ringing,

once, in a pigsty a-squealing.

Six babes crying, not enough, son.

Let yourself be the seventh one!

If foes confront you, that is when

Your enemies must see seven men.

One, who’s off on a holiday,

one, who goes to work on Monday,

one, who teaches unpaid on a whim,

one, who has learned to sink or swim,

one, who will seed a whole forest,

one, whom wild forefathers protect.

But all their tricks are not enough, son.

Let yourself be the seventh one!

If you want to find a lover,

Let seven men go look for her.

One, whose words contain his heart,

one, who can pay his part,

one, pretending to be a dreamer,

one, who will be a skirt-peeler,

one, who knows the snaps and hooks,

one who can put down his foot –

buzz like flies around her, son.

And you yourself be the seventh one.

Be a poet if you can afford it,

but seven men make up one poet.

One, a marble-village builder,

one, who was born a sleeper,

one, an adept sky-charter,

one, whom words befriend and favor,

one, who is his own soul-maker,

and one who dissects a rat’s liver.

Two are brave and four are wise, son –

let yourself be the seventh one.

And if all went as was written,

You will be buried as seven men.

One, nursed on a soft milky breast,

one, who likes tough titties best,

one, who flips empty plates in the bin,

one, who helps the poor to win,

one, who labors, falling apart,

one, who stares at the Moon all night.

The world will be your tombstone, son:

if you yourself are the seventh one.

Translated from the Hungarian by John Batki

Günter Eich

Inventory

This is my cap,

this is my coat,

here's my shaving gear

in a linen sack.

A can of rations:

my plate, my cup,

I've scratched my name

in the tin.

Scratched it with this

valuable nail

which I hide

from avid eyes.

In the foodsack is

a pair of wool socks

and something else that I

show to no one,

it all serves as a pillow

for my head at night.

The cardboard here lies

between me and the earth.

The lead in my pencil

I love most of all:

in the daytime it writes down

the verses I make at night.

This is my notebook,

this is my tarpaulin,

this is my towel,

this is my thread.

Translated from the German by David Young