SmallStations.com - Anthology of Poets B-D

Anthology - Poets E-I - J-L - M - N-S - T-Z - A

Beth Bachmann

COLORIZATION

Black and white distances the viewer.

Take, for instance, a split crow dropped from the jaw of some animal into the snow.
If we were to encounter it, with our chins tucked to our chests to block the blizzard,
we might think of it as shadow, but, in truth, the body is red.

There are two ways to name this: restoration and desecration.
It comes down to a question of actuality and intent.

When you enter my room, it is dark. What you can see
are broad shapes, the lines the blinds throw onto the bed.

If this were in color, would you know whether or not to be afraid?

Wallace Stevens, THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATE

Bogomil Gjuzel

HOMAGE TO STONE

Stone, you that for ages fell in love with the dust
stone, you that cure yourself falling
and still ail for the sky
you who reject to serve anyone
gnawed by poverty
covered with pleadings, scratched with nails
worn out by bare feet
caressed in despair to bring you to life
thrown so that you may circle like a bird
around the thought until it turns to stone
tinkered with heartbeats as with a hammer
and still dumb mute
proud hard obstinate stone.

You who sacrificed both death and life
for a fiercer existence
you who rejected the temporal presence
you who were once a plant, an animal and a man
but returned to your primeval being
near the beloved dust,
you who brought strife into space
you who made the elements quarrel
you who imprisoned the light
you who lure us into your permanence
terrifyingly indifferent to the uninitiated—
go burst with the seed of dynamite
burst with my bad wish
proud hard obstinate stone.

You were always the unavoidable nothing
you mocked fire the stench of water
you lied to the earth
made the highest peak equal
to the depths of the abyss
you who toy with gravity
fall and get up again
in order to suffer more
where is one to find for you a peaceful depth?
Levitating incurably in the river of life
you’ll be without rest
proud hard obstinate stone.

You who like a ball break the lightnings
raise the barricade of comprehension
you who pass like flooding lava
through the rotten door of the senses
and thrown by my muscular catapult
drop in the empty space of unwritten poetry
you who like Moloch melt down the darkness
throwing the sparks of rust into the light
you who crumbled Saints’ haloes
together with softened skulls
you who steadily dismantle the skeleton of air
you who will not admit a tear
until the whole eye flows out
sizzling like a hot drop of metal
incomprehensible ugly and divine
proud hard obstinate stone.

You who straighten beauty’s bones
like to a sweet woman that has no choice
but to offer herself to you
to be sucked out like a beehive,
you who dealt with the ages
we now only mention
as with a pack of snotty brats
you who assaulted the stars
until you taught them to keep their distance
you who ground down the gods
rolling them through a dry stream bed
and then slyly permitted them
to borrow for themselves your flesh
what evil what malice to you
mean vile foul exiled stone.

tr. Charles Simic

William Blake

THE SICK ROSE

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Bohdan Zadura

INSTEAD

Instead of suffering at the thought

that there is nothing except hunger thirst and lust

Consider how important is

what you eat drink

and with whom you talk

tr. Bogdan Czaykowski

Andrzej Sosnowski

TROPE FOR TROPE

Halfway there and the flames engulfed us

the prompter will be on cue in a minute.

We flowed, no we didn’t, we fled and now

upright now head down you go like water through a mill-gate

out of breath and out of your depth that should give them

something to dream of. As plain as the words in a song

‘just like a woman.’ But this

high-gloss, semi-technicolour

shoestring of days, pages torn from a diary

glowing like eclectic postmarks

in the album—was it for this, dear basilisk, we lit our powder train?

The explosives are in our possession

I fear this is it, quite frankly.

A match flares up. There’s a cackle of hyenas and the light

blowing up in our faces. Wham! The audience

curls up into a ball, while the hero

drives away into the weird glare

glancing back over his shoulder at the clinker of empire.

The aureole sheens in the eyes of his bride-to-be.

Meanwhile, we are quite patently elsewhere, fluorescent fish

in a derelict aquarium. When did you start hearing things

like the refrain underlying that famous lullaby

or did you work out in advance that background noises

won’t get a look in? Even when sleeping you leave a trail

and only a part of it can be read

when it doesn’t look a bit like what it isn’t, which is blood.

tr. Rod Mengham

Carole Satyamurti

SATHYAJI

Dusk, and the boathouse keeper

calls the late, scattered boats

from beyond the curve

in the lake; calls them by name,

Hirondelle! Angelique! George Sand!

Are they real or imagined,

those smudges of black

in the shade of the far bank?

Again his call, carrying, returning.

What’s in a name? You are—

in the name I called you by;

its weight and shape hard to convey

except—it lent itself to tenderness,

teasing and respect; closeness

and a certain distance.

Now it’s a vessel

for the far-flung

only sure reality of you.

Love draws you back.

In saying your name, I see it

boat-shaped and luminous

stitching the dark,

returned from formless drift

about the world. Let me

recall you. I’ve words enough—

a sheaf of versions. My pen

engraves you differently each time.

Nothing can be held, or hurried.

Wind casts a shiver on the water;

shallows uncertain in withdrawing light.

A phalarope races its image

and is gone; reflected, relinquished,

discarnate as the distant boats

the boathouse keeper calls and calls,

only a name to summon each of them.

Yet, here they come.

Mark Doty

BEACH ROSES

What are they, the white roses,

when they are almost nothing,

only a little denser than the fog,

shadow-centered petals blurring,

toward the edges, into everything?

This morning one broken cloud

built an archipelago,

fourteen gleaming islands

hurrying across a blank plain of sheen:

nothing, or next to nothing

—pure scattering, light on light,

fleeting.

And now, a heap of roses

beside the sea, white rugosa

beside the foaming hem of shore:

brave,

waxen candles…

And we talk

as if death were a line to be crossed.

Look at them, the white roses.

Tell me where they end.

Caroline Price

CLIMBING YAR TOR

The pleasure of walking with someone

you don’t know well

but come to know better, one stride

matching itself to the other, finding a way of progressing

despite this weather. Snippets of talk

snatched away by the wind

or stalled for an instant and hanging

outspread like the buzzard whose two-foot wingspan

governs the entire valley, drops

in a rush of silence

on something small, but important.

The paths you push

where paths never were,

transient as sheeptrails, ponytracks

running parallel, drawing together, apart,

the rough heather springing up behind

but never completely; so that anyone coming after

might gather the snags of conversation

as you climb higher, into the clear

domain of ravens, a dolmen, the sudden

lush emerald ring of grass

where something human must have been.

And the wind blows so strongly

when you stand on the Tor

that you can hardly stay upright.

It rips through your cagoule

and the sound is the sound of a kite

that someone is trying to fly

or the sail of a dinghy

years ago, in a Sussex harbour

shuddering, testing the air

before it filled and the perfect silence happened.

Michael Longley

SWANS MATING

Even now I wish that you had been there

Sitting beside me on the riverbank:

The cob and his pen sailing in rhythm

Until their small heads met and the final

Heraldic moment dissolved in ripples.

This was a marriage and a baptism,

A holding of breath, nearly a drowning,

Wings spread wide for balance where he trod,

Her feathers full of water and her neck

Under the water like a bar of light.

Daniel Calabrese

PRODIGY

The work of today is to carry

that stone from here to there.

It’s a very heavy rock, heavier than an ox

or a sack laden with rain,

like a prehistoric hole or a black

mirror that could swallow a world.

The work of today is to raise

that stone with the eyes

and gently lower it onto the middle of the road

to stop the cyclists,

to stop the background music,

to stop Route Two at the time

indicated by the red arteries.

And when everything has been stopped,

slowed down by the stone,

including the pious and enlightened generations,

including the love between things natural

and things manifest,

the work will be to take it away,

to lift that stone once more with tired eyes

and bury it somewhere, nowhere,

in the lake of self-contained indifference

where the bed creaks, the TV set glows,

engines shine, wine spills into light,

memory and sad conversations rot

and sink with the stone into utter extinction.

tr. Jonathan Dunne

Archibald MacLeish

THE END OF THE WORLD

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot

The armless ambidextrian was lighting

A match between his great and second toe,

And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting

The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum

Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough

In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb

Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over

Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,

There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,

There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,

There in the sudden blackness the black pall

Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.

Daniel Salgado

KISS WITH SCARF

And here’s the love poem. With its frigid days

and its staring eyes. With its cafés,

wet streets, its furtive crossings.

Here’s the love poem dressed in islands,

brimming with old songs and images in black and white.

Here’s a poem that can beckon scarfs and wharfs

and letters, embraces of course, and voyages and visions and meetings.

A poem that gives shelter to two and because of this is here,

to give shelter to two,

so that we miss what’s left of times

less than what’s indispensable, so you’ll stay, so that

you’ll somehow put an end to that way of writing the poem

of love. And here too is love in the poem, pulled taut,

with strange sky, with terraces, with leg, with vertigo,

with the fury of being alive and the speed

of a few fingers. Here is love falling over in the poem,

here is love, the steel, the learnings, the rooftops

in the love poem, in person, in transition.

The poem without means, but with willingness, directions,

grabbed into your ears and thrown to the ground,

resuscitated amid ruins, sabotages, pillages,

occupations and even borders. Here’s the poem

to be avoided, the love poem, the poem

of love in the last echo of our era, the corrupt

poem that burns in the bedsheets where we sleep

together, where we tear down house and idea, where

we recount uncertainties and blemishes and whatever will be will be

and. Here’s a poem speaking love and causes,

each and every banquet, nights pending nothing, our voices,

here’s this love poem that doesn’t shut down because

it goes on and on and finally goes. This poem that arrives and starts

in the blade of your eyes. The poem of love

completing itself without plant names or curtains,

engaged in flattery to escape from years

folded into books, celebrating governments and downfalls,

enumerating, counting on us and giving to us unreservedly,

love poem that’s nervous, that tries, that wants,

that ascends. Here’s the love poem like someone who sees a well,

a father, a non-native tree, here’s a love poem

like someone seeing a love poem, a prison wall, the shiver

of too strong arms, an imperial politics

of the unkempt garden variety. A poem

with silences absent, volume full blast, at all hours,

shameless, making itself known. And here where a

love poem could flow, in every confession, in Xiana,

in external affairs, in the repetition of light and

shadows, in the mechanical phrase of the insomniac,

in what we couldn’t stomach and later threw up

in messages, in grains, in toolsheds, in glass panes, in urn.

Here’s the love poem but it doesn’t taste of honey, here’s

love’s ways in a poem and the bitterness of dreams

and dreams just like the love poem and here’s

where a love poem ends and doesn’t shut down

and a love poem ravels and unravels and a love poem

has no idea of its object and still and the love poem’s entire.

Here’s how we keep track of ourselves, what we do

to spook the months, in the love poem that

little by little by little by little comes to an end

only on the page for there is no remedy

for the love poem.

tr. Erín Moure

Roque Dalton

ARS POETICA 1974

Poetry

Forgive me for helping you understand

you are not made of words alone

tr. Jonathan Dunne

Dimitris Allos

VOICES THAT NEVER ESCAPED

(Archilochus in my dream)

A certain Saian must now be enjoying the shield I accidentally threw away next to a bush even if it was an exquisite weapon; but I managed to escape. What do I care about the shield? Let it get lost! I will acquire another one no less good.

Archilochus

He learned how to walk on silences

maybe this is why his words recall silences

—ah! but do birds think of things like that?

When surprise

cuts through my sides like a knife

a dream of mine becomes

as real as flesh and bones

The clock has stopped

I count time with breaths

Everything inside me broken glares and nails

I don’t dare to move even my little finger

poems hack to pieces

I am bleeding he whispered and a most tender awe

swept his little body away

Time is

poetry’s nourishment

and her lovers—occasionally

time’s new attire

Allegories of white devoured him

Snow makes

all my colours fade

even the white colour

Ah time!

ah time!

bird of tiny deaths

10a

I grope the shape of my skull

out of curiosity

10b

A small mistake at the excavations

gave the right impression: that of a smile

When I stumble on my luck

all my wounds fall on me

(hit by wishing of course)

My hands are red

it becomes

the victors

They wake up alarmed

—novice roosters—

and they peck on the capsules

of ‘I wish’

When my luck stumbles—up there of course—

a star falls

in my sleep

(… high up in the sky a moon shone as

precious as the Phaistos Disc… just

what I needed—I said—just what I

needed… to serve this self-reliant poem)

She banged in the room

her infected

coin the tepid fly

but where should I start

what can I denounce first

I woke up in the bed of Procrustes

and I was

so close so close

tr. Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

Nikos Karouzos

WOMAN, OBSTINACY OF ASIA

You are a continent of the chest from the depths of races,
you wander like the moon,
pain is a tendril and your love mercury
woman, obstinacy of Asia.
When you cast a glance at the ripening valleys,
as the winds take it to the heights,
you exploit the branches and pour poison into the moon.
Solitary as a murder, you dwell in consciousness
conspiring against the divinities of birds,
you with your rivery black hair,
you again and again with your dark eyes.
I tell the sun to pause without kindness
ripping apart the great colour of dream,
tell it to fight you with bubbling sulphur
and to demolish all of the memory that torments me.
Look times have brought me to your steps
the vegetable dinosaurs, the heavenly latitudes,
a loose sheaf of blood, ready for scattering,
when I cried out without reply: would that I were blue.
You came to stay until death,
purple reflections from your limbs,
I asked but never learned where you found the dark,
you lock up your sound in secret streams
you alone, with the explosive voice of silence.
You came to stay till the far-off dawn,
you passed by bodies and are still travelling.
I did not live and the beauty of Attica is my whole journey.
Singing amid so much yearning
I know nothing of the weapon of oblivion.

tr. Philip Ramp

Dmitry Golynko

JUST LIKE THAT

just like that, yeah, catch on

a man in a black raincoat

sees, in the stairwell

they cross paths, a child-

paralytic in wheelchair

and a Chechen terrorist,

what are they, victims of the system

or a part of it, there’s a shock for you

just like that, yeah, get a grip

a man in a black raincoat

looks around, where to jerk off,

you’re a soldier, he tells himself,

but a soldier bringing up

the rear and a soldier breaking

rank are in essence

the same: beef soup

just like that, yeah, drool all you want

a man in a black raincoat

beholds the manna of heaven

spread all over the earth

an eyesore to all the land,

to the boarded-up convenience store,

the emaciated cur, the bearded geezers

on their perch, a brutal hangover

just like that, yeah, dig it

a man in a black raincoat

looks at the hands of a woman,

Asiatic, thin, without a single

blemish, if you blow off the dust

of impunity, everything

is ground to dust, flakes to the floor,

the style: doggy

just like that, yeah, pack it in

a man in a black raincoat

looks at the undeveloped

ribcage belonging to

an unknown, if caught up in lies

it will take bigger lies

to touch another heart, the abscess

festers, eyes burn

just like that, yeah, get off it

a man in a black raincoat

looks at the prison building,

the numbers blurred, within

are those who have committed

crimes against, different rules apply,

break-ups, trysts, the origin of the species

of violence is vague, even for the saints

just like that, yeah, take a dump

a man in a black raincoat

looks at a hair

fifteen centimeters long, who

let it fall, lonely-heart mother

or Chechen terrorist,

what unpleasant character

of this epoch, coochicoo after that

yeah, just like that, catch the drift

a man in a black raincoat

looks at the ones who

pulled themselves from the wreckage

then at those who didn’t

get out, whom they carry on stretchers

there and further on, he opens his eyes

wide, deserve astonishment

just like that, yeah, bite in

a man in a black raincoat

watches the swimmer

thrashing in ice, the jacked-up gangster

organizing the market, white bread

crumbled for pigeons, lips pressed

to the swollen nipple, digests

the recognized, can’t say it’s tasty

just like that, yeah, fake it

a man in a black raincoat

looks at the gymnastics

gear, a girlish body

leaps over the vault, the

voyeur’s organ tenses

tourists have jammed

the square, kept up the push-ups

just like that, yeah, nail it down

a man in a black raincoat

looks at himself, what a

stud, they’ll give it to him

right here, and where he’s going

further on also, and he knows

how to take it, sour cranberries

in a soaking bowl, the choice is huge

tr. Rebecca Bella

Eugene Ostashevsky

ENTER MORRIS IMPOSTERNAK, PURSUED BY IRONIES

When Morris Imposternak fell in love

The woman he loved didn’t love him in return

And so he picked up a violin and said:

You, violin, respond to my imprecations

Because as an inanimate object you have no choice

Play to me, violin, of the amaritude we both know

You, because you are not alive

I, because I am not loved

We are alike, you and I

We can’t change the world we can only make noise

The violin played

That is, its strings pushed the air to and fro

As Morris Imposternak remembered how he made love

To the woman who did not love him

Even as matters stood, the look of her eyes had made him forget himself

That is, forget he was Morris Imposternak

The violin played

Outside, buildings crowded together

And passersby passed whose figures resembled figures such as the Russian Λ

All life is real life, the violin played

And the amaritude of Morris Imposternak

Became set to music

Blessed are those who love

There are so few of them, almost everybody

Blessed are those who are loved

There are so few of them, almost everybody

How sad there is no one-to-one correspondence

Between these two sets

Dragan Danilov

HOLY PLACE

In this haunted little town

I had my holy place as well—

The comfy refuge of a warm pigeon-house,

where pigeons for me nameless

resided in scared confusion.

At the holy time of dusk, when mysteriously

fluids of night and day mixed,

under the trembling cherry branches

that hid half of the town,

they cooed in the righteousness of their sensuality,

as if they were celebrating some holiday known only to them.

Some lived miserably and wordlessly, almost

Like old men, for instance a couple of pigeons, faithful,

Haunted pair, one was a complete blackguard—

he stole grains, terrorized others, even

rushed at cats and rats, the dark princes

of this world—some passed themselves off as my

friends, and there were pigeons about whom I would not

be wrong if I were to say they were my brothers.

A quiet sorrow, like after making love,

would crush me when it fell to me to take the old

and feeble ones up the ladder

to the nest, and sometimes I found, in the pigeon-house

or right next to it, a dead pigeon.

I say I used to have my altar too in that haunted,

Small town in which I was not loved.

In days of solitude, in front of this pigeon-house

I prayed and prayed, I myself do not know who to.

tr. Alison & Vladimir Kapor

Jovan Zivlak

ISLAND

the war never ceased. I remember the dawn when

I was leaving my home. it was everywhere. behind the doorpost

it kept an axe. on the bed it curled up its body covered

with wolf skin.

it looked like a peacock observing me suspiciously

and readying itself to peck my hands. on windows it

pulled curtains. it hid so I would not see it.

I knew it was breathing behind my neck

it knotted my breath and made transparent the things

by which I used to sanctify my sight.

it addressed me scornfully:

thou that chewest the flint shalt wait before vomiting it

shalt learn to recall what thou hast forgotten

I am thy knowledge prophesied awake

that which thou shalt look back upon will remain obscure

a father who does not return

the sea from whence the flames shall come

deafening thee.

who is stronger than war

I whose word is of no import

an island whose name only will remain

a usurer that will make me indebted to him

weapons that kill before being forged

or a snake crawling where it is out of place.

tr. Alison & Vladimir Kapor

Photo: Smile by Jonathan Dunne