Антология - Поети M - N-S - T-Z - A - B-D - E-I
Jacques Demarcq
PUFFIN
How cunning the puffins
with their little round beaks
in rainbow makeup
Papageitaucher man hört schon
Die Zauberflöte im Yellow Submarine
a Kurd from Norway
with his blonde girlfriend
hands me a scalding coffee
both ready for the birdwatching party
on the cliff at the black sand’s end
30 sheep are grazing up there
and even more skuas nesting
gulls glide in the wind
hundreds of puffins
stay stoically on the chasm’s edge
knowing that if my Kurdish friend
moves up too far with his camera
the soft earth riddled with tunnels
dug with their pretty beaks
to nest each one’s one chick
pulcinella di mare o commedia
and whoops the dive down to the waves
they come back up on scooters
their short wings throbbing
red palms for taillights
oh aren’t they cute
their tails are just stumps
further down are petrels
black-legged kittiwakes
white-bellied black-caped guillemots
much like the puffins
but without the clown-noses
moreover either one filleted
left all night in a milk marinade
to remove the fishy perfume
flour and add mushrooms and thyme
pan-fry for five minutes and cognac-flame
puffins yes it’s wellknown
children’s books aren’t they
we’ll show them our pictures later
tr. Marilyn Hacker
E. E. Cummings, O the sun comes up-up-up in the opening
Jan Wagner
GUERICKE’S SPARROW
More exquisite than gold, devoid of all becoming or passing away…
Otto von Guericke
what is invisible, yet so powerful
that no force can withstand it? a circle
of burghers gathered around master guericke
and his construction: the vacuum pump
towering on three legs in the room, a perfect
piece, standing there with the obscene grace
of the mantis religiosa. polished brass,
its recipient a glass sphere: and here too
is the sparrow, now beginning to flutter
like the flame on a spirit of wine—its air
growing ever thinner. before the window
the yellow plums ripen in the buzzing heat,
the grass spreads on the ruins. and on the wall
hangs this engraving: old magdeburg.
the unswerving progress of the pendulum clock,
diopter, pedometer, astrolabe;
the globe on the table where new zealand’s
dorsal has shortly cut through
the great pacific, and as if from afar
the dogged trot of a passing horse and cart.
‘that dead sparrow,’ whispers one,
‘will yet fly through an empty sky.’
tr. Iain Galbraith
Ted Hughes, THISTLES
Jesús Sepúlveda
PLACE OF ORIGIN
I. My place of origin
is unknown and perverse
because it’s only mine.
Its location is not on the map
but rather in poems and tears.
II. My place of origin
isn’t Chile
South Africa
Ethiopia.
Maybe Central America
because of its turbulent
audacity of rhythms and bullets.
III. My place of origin
is Bolivia—the poverty-stricken—
not because of Barrientos
or the asthma of El Che.
Nor because of Lechín
or the betrayed Revolution
of ’52.
It’s because of the COB and Roberto Suárez
the great drug dealer
for America.
IV. My place of origin
is heaven
not because of good
but because of the beauty of its Sanatorium.
V. My place of origin
is the street
where life is.
It’s the Bronx
the barrio Franklin
—where the courageous die—
the forgotten Matta Avenue
where the repentant Buddha belches
and Nirvana is buried.
It’s the devil’s neighborhood
the streets of vice.
VI. My place of origin
doesn’t have any walls
scribbled against the tyrant
but rather with Pink Floyd
and John Lennon Is Alive
With drug addicts smelling of gangs
in the style of stabbings
alcoholic nights
proselytism ethyl
and Rock bands.
VII. My place of origin
has sidewalks
where drunkards live
stinking garbage
kicked out of the bar.
The corners
are private property of the crazy
petulant pompous
who remember Woodstock
ideological archetypes
a long-haired race
breaking bottles
and rolling joints.
VIII. My place of origin
is a dream
through the cocaine
that some cousin deals.
The Kawasaki
model z-650
that takes off with pestilent smoke
noisy and offensive motor
waking up the idiots at nightfall
IX. My place of origin is neither the belly
nor my dwelling-place
There are high barricades
puncturing the concrete
and expropriated banks
by Di Giorgio—the delinquent—
X. In my place of origin
the legendary SCORPIONS blaspheme
with leather jackets
night-owl carousers
and mattresses in profile
stained with semen.
XI. My place of origin
is a free zone
—not because there may be POP POWER
or industrial belts—
but only because it is free
and you speak in code.
XII. In my place of origin
the dogs also drink
and bite the way
a sober dog does.
XIII. In the nights of my place of origin
the wind whistles
with drag-racing
whining and gunshots.
At dawn
the homicide squad
interrogates me in a topless
while I chew on tits.
XIV. In my place of origin
‘El Mao’ was taken in
for trafficking in hashish
—and everybody believed the bullshit of the Seminary—
XV. In my place of origin
‘El Moro Marx’
walks around with his shaved head
while the two academies of Kung Fu
hold street fights.
XVI. In my place of origin
the rats dance
when the radio plays
the spot of
—Fanta and I we’re friends—
XVII. In my place of origin
drunken ‘Pollo’
started to shit in the middle of the boulevards
and the world fell on top of him yawning.
XVIII. In my place of origin
they have shot at rats
dressing in lilac
and Lenin formals.
Propagandizing in ‘Citronetas’
recruiting in taverns
preparing REDS
—which in guerrilla terms are bomb hits—
and making love
in clandestine meetings in these locales.
XIX. The militants of the streets
of my place of origin
are age 17
at 13 they have already smoked pot
at 24 the asylum will rot them.
XX. My place of origin
is only perceived with stars
It has guitars
and jugs of wine.
Bonfires in Ñuble
pyromaniacs forest-burners
and Trotskyist discussions.
XXI. My place of origin
will always be beginnings
never endings.
XXII. My place of origin
is a poetic strategy
vital to writing.
because in spite of everything
it still isn’t extinguished.
Since always
after the cataleptic paralysis
I end up drinking a beer
in the cantina of the Bogota square
whose mayor changed its name
to Drugota City
then remodeled it.
And there I spend the evenings
proposing
that Quisco Beach is only a memory of a sexual adventure.
that an earthquake is impossible
that the metaphysical female
will go on inspiring new poems in me
and that God does not exist
and that God does not
and that God
and that
and.
tr. Dave Oliphant
Allen Ginsberg, HOWL III
John Burnside
THE GOOD
NEIGHBOUR
Somewhere along this street, unknown to me,
behind a maze of apple trees and stars,
he rises in the small hours, finds a book
and settles at a window or a desk
to see the morning in, alone for once,
unnamed, unburdened, happy in himself.
I don’t know who he is; I’ve never met him
walking to the fish-house, or the bank,
and yet I think of him, on nights like these,
waking alone in my own house, my other neighbours
quiet in their beds, like drowsing flies.
He watches what I watch, tastes what I taste:
on winter nights, the snow; in summer, sky.
He listens for the bird lines in the clouds
and, like that ghost companion in the old
explorers’ tales, that phantom in the sleet,
fifth in a party of four, he’s not quite there,
but not quite inexistent, nonetheless;
and when he lays his book down, checks the hour
and fills a kettle, something hooded stops,
as cell by cell, a heartbeat at a time,
my one good neighbour sets himself aside,
and alters into someone I have known:
a passing stranger on the road to grief,
husband and father; rich man; poor man; thief.
Wallace Stevens, FINAL SOLILOQUY OF THE INTERIOR PARAMOUR
THE POEM OF THE GOLDFINCH
Write, came the persistent whisperings, a poem
on the mendacities of war. So I found shade
under the humming eucalyptus, and sat,
patienting. Thistle-seeds blew about on a soft breeze,
a brown-gold butterfly was shivering on a fallen
ripe-flesh plum. Write your dream, said Love, of the total
abolition of war. Vivaldi, I wrote, the four
seasons. Silence, a while, save for the goldfinch
swittering in the higher branches, sweet, they sounded,
sweet-wit, wit-wit, wit-sweet. I breathed
scarcely, listening. Love bade me write but my hand
held over the paper; tell them you, I said,
they will not hear me. A goldfinch swooped,
sifting for seeds; I revelled in its colouring, such
scarlets and yellows, such tawny, a patterning
the creator himself must have envisioned, doodling
that gold-flash and Hopkins-feathered loveliness. Please
write, Love said, though less insistently. Spirit, I answered,
that moved out once on chaos… No, said Love,
and I said Michelangelo, Van Gogh. No, write
for them the poem of the goldfinch and the whole
earth singing, so I set myself down to the task.
George Herbert
LOVE
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack’d anything.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here.
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
John High
from A BOOK OF UNKNOWING
Again, a brilliance of green across meadow in this
day when we find so much arrangement
in myriad trees. Coming to terms with fine
bladed yellow grass, the whitened hill
and moon & mother was always more than two
people, she says, taking the boy’s hand in her mouth.
Here where our world is a reflection from
the lake. Animals on the hill speak, therefore
be at peace with me, she breathes in a kiss
to his own open eye. The road blooded
in a tradition of continuance. So you abandoned
the monastery, this, too, is our life. The first
step into water outside the frame
of our seen. No longer any need to
punish ourselves, she says, skipping
by a shore of black birds. As if our whole life
came from this telling, she reminds the boy, pointing
toward the unspeakable distance in hearing—his
Letters to God revealed this much
on a cypress tree, waiting
for us to join in a miraculous calm
of body, this dew in a cup of rain.
Andrea Libin
BLAKE’S DAUGHTER
We are parented by air. Siblinged by glue. I will school you. Breathe in the vapors and the fumes will crawl into your heart. Haunt you like a shadow. Ragged eyeballs. This much I can tell you. Put one ear to my chest, the other to my lips. Ivan was the one to find me huddled in a piss-stall in the station, weeping fits of woe. Mama, mamushka, why have you gone to church to pray and left me to weep weep weep? Ivan rescued me to the tunnels. Sheared my head so I’d look like a boy, so bugs wouldn’t creepy-crawl my pretty braids. Ivan nabbed stray dolls and stuffed bears dropped unawares by tiny fingers. He’d find them on the terminal floor wide-eyed like corpses. Ivan lined the dolls up on an empty apple crate where I slept. Placed a golden-haired girlie on my cardboard mat. Ivan bigbrothered me till he was vampired by glue. His heart was hollowed out and he evaporated in the night. Now the dolls mock me with their plastic stares.
THE MASSEUSE
A Bulgarian gymnast in her sixties
well-endowed and with eyes like walnuts
direct descendant of the partisan Vela Peeva
dressed in a leotard
took me by the arm and
slammed me on the bench
worked her way up and down