Антология - Поети T-Z - A - B-D - E-I - J-L - M
Nils-Øivind Haagensen
A TRIFLE
I didn’t manage to make a hole in it
I didn’t try hard
I had a go
the patterning of the gift wrapping was perfect
the suit was my best one
the tie likewise, the parting took ten minutes
to set, the sideburns felt good underneath
the fingertips, the earlobes
were soft as I want them
the mouth and the voice said all I wanted to say
nevertheless—
I said, all that flows, flows
but that which clots
that which rains
that which is of clay
that which fills my rooms after I
am finished packing and cleaning out
that which follows the lines of the house
that which stops after a long time
I tried to make a hole in it
I didn’t try hard
I had two cigarettes
she smoked one
I bought a dress for her
she already had five
she said, all that floats, floats
but that which trembles
that which blows
that which is made of wood
that I listen for when you’ve disappeared
into the rain
that which first begins after a long time
I tried to make a hole in it
I didn’t try hard
tr. Charles Armstrong
Nick Laird
THE HALL OF MEDIUM HARMONY
In lieu of a Gideon Bible
the bedside table drawer
has a Lonely Planet Guide to China
and a year-old Autotrader.
You skim through the soft-tops, the imports,
the salvage & breakers,
then pick up the book. Over there
they are eight hours ahead
so it must be approximately dawn
in the Forbidden City,
where something might evade the guides
already at the entrance,
might glide right past the lion-dogs
on guard, asleep in bronze,
might fire the dew on the golden tiles,
ignite each phoenix on its ridge.
Light. Nine-thousand nine-hundred
and ninety-nine rooms
begin to warm under its palm.
Here, in the book, is a diagram.
There is the Hall of Union and Peace.
The Hall of Medium Harmony.
The Meridian Gate. The Imperial Library.
The inner golden bridges.
You fidget. You are, you admit, one of
the earth’s more nervous passengers.
But it’s different, this, a reasonable space.
In the palace of an afternoon
a child-king hiding in the curtain
listening. For a second apart
from the turn of the thing, for a second
forgetting the narrative’s forfeit—
how nothing can outlast its loss,
that solace is found, if at all,
in the silence that follows each footstep
let fall on the black lacquer floor
of the now, of the here, where you are,
in the sunlight, blinking, abroad.
THE ANT GLOVE
Dear Father, after Mother’s death, after I’d read
all your letters to her and her letters to you
and finally understood that I was the fruit of her rape,
I walked into the forest.
The tribe I met there helped me write this letter
preparing me as they would prepare a boy
who wanted to become a man.
The elders raided nests of giant hunting ants
for three hundred shining black workers
which they wove into the palm fibres of a glove,
their stinging abdomens pointing inwards.
They blew on them to enrage them.
They painted my writing hand with black dye
from the genipap fruit and thrust it into the glove.
I had to remain silent while the ants attacked.
Can you smell the lemony scent of formic acid?
These words are dancing the Tocandeiro.
I hope you’re dancing as you hold my letter,
as I had to dance wearing the ant glove
stomping my soles hard on the ground.
Afterwards I cut the stones from my feet.
Afterwards I celebrated with a feast
biting off ant-heads to suck blood from their bodies
until my lips and tongue were numb.
I hope you’ve sucked the blood from the words
that stung you. My hand is still swollen.
Are your fingers swelling as they stroke my signature?
Are your lips and tongue numb from kissing my kisses?
My hand is always in the glove, writing goodbye,
red and blue feathers flutter from my wrist.
John Keats
ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth,
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim—
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards.
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild—
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music—Do I wake or sleep?
Peter Curman
DEATH
This thundering Greek summer
when the sun-rays poured down
you walked beneath your dreams’ parasol
When
your face suddenly darkened
it was not
you who thought of death
It was death who thought of you
tr. the author
C. P. Cavafy
FINALITIES
In the midst of terror and suspicions,
With mind agitated and frightened eyes,
We make solutions, plan what to do
In order to escape the certain
Danger that so terribly threatens us.
And yet we are mistaken; that is not in our path.
The messages were false—
(Or we didn’t hear them, or didn’t understand
properly).
Another disaster, one we never dreamed of,
Suddenly, tempestuously comes down on us,
And unprepared—no time now—takes us off.
Roberto Cogo
*
the ash-grey heron allows an elegant
dance of his wings grasped at the invincible sky
he settles down on the highest branch
his black outline against the grey—we’re in the middle of wintertime
his slim retracted neck gives shape to an s in flight
then he heads downwards for another tree
where the water of the stream is a frozen ghostly green
and there he stays still and lost in thought
his eyes towards the mountains’ profile
within the gradual vanishing of light along his colourless beak
portrait inside a resinous dusk
thoughtfully but impassively fulfilling his task—a role that life
has assigned to him downright
all the frost of winter wraps and accompanies him
he and his branch are one on the elected tree
then he whirls round again over the silver-green slabs
following the pointed shadow of his wing
he stops and hovers in mid-air for a little while
not knowing what weight is
not worrying about gravity—he just lives and flies
tr. the author
Ezra Pound
*
M’amour, m’amour
what do I love and
where are you?
That I lost my center
fighting the world.
The dreams clash
and are shattered—
and that I tried to make a paradiso
terrestre.
Roger Santiváñez
THOSE ABOUT TO BE
We stayed dark. The sun ignited its failure upon
our brains. The boiling vision of the city
fell from the last flashing window. The houses in
El Cerro looked like rubble from a wretched time.
We walked on, breathing the fragrance of the fruits, lushness
of the sunrise slowly penetrated by the nausea of
muddy streets.
Shouts and knives. Hidden, encrusted in trans-
parent bottles, being strangers in the eyes of the peo-
ple was hell and release from a crushing fatigue.
Silence was the path, the detour we arrived at through
fear. No use singing. Too melancholy, watch-
ing an adolescent girl torn between blood and
rough laughter.
Sweat was the corner. Under trees in their whispering time
it surged toward anger, the rigid trembling of the constella-
tions. And shining heads in the night.
tr. Naomi Lindstrom
Ezra Pound
GRACE BEFORE
SONG
Lord God of heaven that with mercy dight
Th’alternate prayer wheel of the night and light
Eternal hath to thee, and in whose sight
Our days as rain drops in the sea surge fall,
As bright white drops upon a leaden sea
Grant so my songs to this grey folk may be:
As drops that dream and gleam and falling catch the sun,
Evan’scent mirrors every opal one
Of such his splendor as their compass is,
So, bold My Songs, seek ye such death as this.
Sigurdur A. Magnusson
A CHILD LOST
White white angel-white
snowbanks on the slope
down to a frozen lake
and a lacuna
indiscernible to the child’s eyes
blinded
by gusts and snowdrifts
as the sled rushes
automatically
inexorably
toward the deep-blue eye of the ice
which closes over
five years’ existence
Sled-tracks on the slope
covered by snowdrift
The ice-plated lake
keeps its prey
tr. the author
Hannes Pétursson
MARIE ANTOINETTE
This immense swarm is like a surging ocean
and the wagon protrudes like a skerry.
She stands there silent, looks across the crowd;
the morning breeze
is still cool. And ahead
the bitter blade of the self-important guillotine
waits, suspended over the crowd.
She is tired and hears
the shouting as though it came from afar,
subdued by her baneful stay in prison.
How can she understand that this whole savage
filthy crowd, this cruel bitter weapon
which gleams there, bloody, insatiable
as a damned monster, sowing death, affliction,
is the pure, unsullied dream of the thinkers, the future
more wholesome, an improvement, and the only option;
but what is being torn up by the roots:
the rotten government and heavy evil
is she, who gazes over the crowd in silence
pure and ashen.
tr. Sigurdur A. Magnusson
Silvia Goldman
CECILIA
Why does life persist like an endless day and NOT I?
Why life for a day and NOT I?
If only they knew
those who hear in my eloquent language sensible and direct emotions
those who see me eloquent and direct
that I don’t have a language
nor sensible nor direct emotions
if only they knew
that I would throw myself
that I would be cecilia
and closing my eyes also cecilia
and cecilia falling and silvia falling
and cecilia in the air and silvia in the air
and cecilia barefoot and silvia clasping her bare foot
and cecilia wanting to touch the ground and silvia holding her back
the day cecilia fell silvia fell
and if only they knew
those who hear in my language a sensible rhythm without falls
that I am fallen
that I am broken
that I cecilia.
tr. Luiz Prazeres & Julia Garner
Anne Carson
EPITAPH: EVIL
To get the sound take everything that is not the sound drop it
Down a well, listen.