Eurydice Eurydice
It’s more like the sound a doe makes when the arrowhead replaces the day with an answer to the rib’s hollowed hum. We saw it coming but kept walking through the hole in the garden. Because the leaves were bright green & the fire only a pink brushstroke in the distance. It’s not about the light—but how dark it makes you depending on where you stand. Depending on where you stand his name can appear like moonlight shredded in a dead dog’s fur. His name changed when touched by gravity. Gravity breaking our kneecaps just to show us the sky. We kept saying Yes— even with all those birds. Who would believe us now? My voice cracking like bones inside the radio. Silly me. I thought love was real & the body imaginary. But here we are—standing in the cold field, him calling for the girl. The girl beside him. Frosted grass snapping beneath her hooves.
Jan 28, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Ocean Vuong
Notes for the Translation of an Ancient Fragment Notes for the Translation of an Ancient Fragment
[She?] pale curtain fire behind it scent of split rock [She] as wind slendered in grass [She] soft path down which [Unknown refrain] Roughened blue [of eyes, of waters?] Steel [of her voice, of weather?]… Apple [her skin? its white cliffs/sting?] the cricket [cricket] climbing All this! [O She!] [Unknown refrain] Sea so blue [a handful, blue] Those glass lips say I shouldn’t say this her blouse slips dawn [or down] Sound [verb] with wide-eyed hands [Unknown refrain] She throws [we throw?] live flowers on fire they [flowers or limbs?] blend smooth as flames Though high stars circling will [how long how long?] pick our bones clean [Unknown refrain]
Jan 21, 2014 / Books & the Arts / James Richardson
Paris! Paris! Paris! Paris!
All reds come in the shape of lips. Even—s’il vous plaît—our shy little Mazovian cherries. So we shall write with a promiscuous tongue and instead of a period—make a lip print. At the railway station buffet in Radom we drink beer, and the world seen through a full mug is yellowed with the fright of Van Gogh, and a mug—mon Dieu!—also has no ear. Paris! Paris! Ai, dana, da dana! We climb atop our dresser stands and dream of the avant-garde’s New Trick: The Straight Line, which is a stem, and at its end hangs a lip-colored cherry. Oh, sweet drop of Marseillaise, little planet of our malignancy, flow down, drop into our thin borschts! We geometricians of form, puddle-jumpers into others’ imaginations, are waiting for you. And let the folk sing along: Paris! Paris! Ai dana, da dana! (translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer)
Jan 14, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Jerzy Ficowski
Destination Wedding Destination Wedding
Drunk as a persimmon on the wine of Cana or myself, I couldn’t tell— the old pain and the old dream mingled and seasickness threw kisses in shapes upon the wall like shells upon the shore outside the conch- shaped hall in whose pearled hum I danced as if my feet were small and free of gravity as sea lice. When above the palms, horns, drums and silks I heard a creature high in moss- tangled eucalyptus cry for milk— a creature not my own, yet still my milk let down. I looked up and it locked me in a stare, half-child, half-marsupial, that transfixed me on the scallop of the terraced white hotel it squatted on until sure that I had seen it dove back into the lagoon like a weasel chasing an eel ever further into the nature of oblivion.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Danielle Chapman
The Taiga The Taiga
Cold crown of the world. Boreas exhales the breath that’s preserved him all these years, kept the wolverine alive, and the spruce-blue stars keen as crystals of virgin ice clipping the pines on their northern slopes. Most coverage here is evergreen. It grows in the short day painfully slow, putting down rings, and whatever waxed needles do pitter to the ground lie there still as pickup sticks in the reckoning between two goes, as if the soft lynx left these miles on long exposure. Bison graze, moss-obsessed. Fresh snow settling confuses them with abandoned dens and boulders. A she-bear, snug in the bed of her own fur, lies under stone, four pink cubs assuming their forms faster in her womb than the carcasses that nourished them can decompose. She dreams at double speed of balsam wood, hot piss and foreign males, the planet turning imperceptibly underneath her shoulder. Honey congeals in hives suspended from conifer boughs. The yellow eyes of a Tengmalm’s owl click in the dark like camera shutters.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Frances Leviston
Helios Helios
Strong horses, Percherons, bred for imperturbability and speed: Aethon, Eous, Pyrois, Phlegon, what names to call a conflagration by. Two decades with the force, and you’d little use for people, but horses, that was a different matter: strong horses, swift as shadows lengthening across the tile bed, a father could not hold them, how could a god.
Dec 4, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Amanda Jernigan
Sea Urchins Sea Urchins
The sea urchins star the sea floor like sunken mines from a rust-smirched war filmed in black and white. Or if they are stars they are negatives of light, their blind beams brittle purple needles with no eyes: not even spittle and a squint will thread the sea’s indigo ribbons. We float overhead like angels, or whales, with our soft underbellies just beyond their pales, their dirks and rankles. Nothing is bare as bare feet, naked as ankles. They whisker their risks in the fine print of footnotes’ irksome asterisks. Their extraneous complaints are lodged with dark dots, subcutaneous ellipses… seizers seldom extract even with olive oil, tweezers. Sun-bleached, they unclench their sharps, doom scalps their hackles, unbuttons their stench. Their shells are embossed and beautiful calculus, studded turbans, tossed among drummed pebbles and plastic flotsam—so smooth, so fragile, baubles like mermaid doubloons, these rose-, mauve-, pistachio- tinted macaroons.
Nov 19, 2013 / Books & the Arts / A.E. Stallings
To the Next Centuries To the Next Centuries
Is there autumn there, is there leaf smoke, is the air blued and mapled, oaked and appled and wined, is that tang, that ache for who knows? gone from your sweaters and hair? Are there trees even, do they break out in uncontrollable cold fires, do they shatter in long, unreal downstreamings, is October the same without them, is our sadness so river-and-wind swift, and so free, is it still our sharpest seeing, if we have not learned from them how to be taken apart, how to be blown away? Are clouds the same, are they still our clouds if leaves have never seethed against them on a tempestuous night, are they wild, is the moon the same if it has never wildly sailed through wild clouds, is there a Hunter’s Moon, a Blood Moon tinged with the rust and incandescence of the leaves, is there a moon at all, a hanging stone, a white astonishment, the exile’s breath on a pane? There is sun, I am sure—has it grown more dangerous, has its shine through thin ozone whited out your eyes, does it drive dunes through your forests, has it warmed the seas to exactly body temperature? What is it like to have won and won and won, no mile without its grid of roads, no block unwired, no handswidth without wireless, when every breeze has been rebreathed each current steered, each cliff a mirror? Is there no wild desire, no wild with all regret because no animals are wild, because the hills are leveled and the valleys raised because there is no clear and endless sky? And what has endangered my imagination that imagines you pale and bodiless and scanned, not a shadow left in your floodlit brain, your sleep hard in coming, dreams shallow and bright? Why do I see you in a white room floating among machines and drips and feeds as if you were my dead, who went before me on white boats launched into the future, as if you were me, when I am tired, as I am tired now, tired of the expertise that says there is nothing new, no thoughts or feelings not already words, no words I have not said again and again, thinking how long this trip has been, so near its end that I will never again put down new roots, change jobs, raise children, fall in love. I can lighten my suitcase now, discarding my ticket, since there is no return, the map of the city I’ll never get back to, the little blue phrase book for the language I’ll never speak again, the sweater, the half-read novel, the comb, the end of this thought.... I know you will never hear the squeak of a mail box, church bells (already quaint here), a van graveling around a turn, a CD (surely gone). I won’t ask (couldn’t endure to know) are there birds there still building the dawn. I know you can’t hear the wind I’m hearing though there will be winds, the song that’s blowing me away, though there will be song after song. And you can’t hear this, though you, like me, will lose what seems like everything and go on, cry against your weariness with leaves and moon and wind, or whatever passes then for moon and leaves and wind, cry out against death and the dead world, the dead world, and the death in you, until, like me, you can stand again unborn, unused, unknown.
Nov 19, 2013 / Books & the Arts / James Richardson
Atavistic Sonnet Atavistic Sonnet
Shadow of the gull on the airport wall, lunging as the fuselage vaults above the meadow. Hollow in the cornrow where the hobo slept, then a backhoe filling up the furrow. Misery of clocks in neon glare, whereabouts of warblers and island foxes, an old flame googled from the dead letter office, simple as the still-warm bench at dusk. Typing or sewing, or bringing down a fever through a length of knotted string and a rusted staple gun. Here comes the tattooed witch with her drum while the royals wait by the limousine grinning. Shadow of the gull on the airport wall, shallows in the stairs where we fell and stepped, hollow in the cornrow where the hobo slept, a backhoe filling the furrow.
Oct 8, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Susan Stewart