The house spider
was on the inside
& didn’t budge
when the phoebe flew up
& clung to the window screen,
jabbing fruitlessly
at a meal turned to metal —
or rather, subdivided
into orderly
impenetrable holes,
as in a physics
textbook account
of the structure of matter.
Chalk lines on a blackboard,
rows of blank faces
at their desks.
But it was right there —
the spider,
the phoebe,
the rattle of wings.
Lazy dog’s lament
The busy ones
the fast breeder reactors
always amaze me:
the ermine’s
slick white rope-
trick of a body
vanishing into the snow
a hummingbird threading
the hundred eyes of a woodlot
without slowing down
the manic shrew
like a heat-
seeking missile
& yes
the quick brown fox
ah I am nothing but
a speed bump
on a log
a lazy dog
but I figure
someone has to sit
at the center
of the maze
they make.
Foggy morning: four quick takes
Foggy morning porch.
Two blowflies are fucking
on my knee.
*
Foggy July morning:
I can’t focus on anything
but that one red branch.
*
Foggy morning, late July.
I count the bird songs to see
which ones are missing.
*
Sun through fog:
the trees’ shadows stretch
half-way to the ground.
Usage du temps
Follain’s concern is finally with the mystery of the present.
–W. S. Merwin
The aging transport ship
floats motionless
as the Newtonian surface of what
they still sometimes call outer space
dissolves around it.
The smallest of shudders
passes through the hull
& into the sleeping bodies
of the convicts,
the constellations change
in the monitor at the far end
of the almost-deserted lounge
where the chief engineer,
himself a convict, is reading
in an almost inaudible whisper
from Jean Follain’s
Transparence of the World.
__________
Amazon link. See review here. “Usage du temps” is the title of the 1943 collection which included the original “Transparence du monde.”
Viking Burial
The skiff rides inside a wave
of sand. The grave-robbers
peel back the sod on the old dune
& take everything but
the bronze hammer of Thor,
an odd coin or two
& several crosses — hammers
on their way to being men.
They re-bury the skeletons
from seven graves in
this one small craft:
three males & four females,
all dead before the age of 30
from disease or famine
& now jumbled together
like beads from a broken cord.
The pastures are poor,
trees have grown scarce,
the land is hungry for wood.
With its sod roof back in place,
the boat can melt into the soil
until only the iron nails remain,
orderly rows preserving the shape
that faith once took.
__________
Revised 7/24/07.
Translating Cernuda
Translating Cernuda on a cool summer morning, my body slowly warms as the sun clears the trees & begins beating on the porch. The cold drains out through my fingers & gets caught between the pages of the dictionary. A family of wrens — one adult & four juveniles — drops by to give me a thorough scolding. It’s true, I have no business doing this. To my ear, the words are single notes with few overtones, & I can rarely hear the whole music. The temperature climbs toward 70 degrees Fahrenheit — 22 degrees Celsius, according to the thermometer on the wall behind me — & I pull off my shoes & socks, prop my bare feet up on the railing & stare between my toes at a yard full of thistles. Two bees have already found the first purple bloom.
It Didn’t Speak in Words
by Luis Cernuda
It didn’t speak in words,
It could only draw near: an inquisitive body,
Unaware that desire is a question
Without an answer,
A leaf without a branch,
A world without a sky.
Anguish opens a path among the bones,
Travels upstream through the veins
Until it comes out on the skin,
Upwellings of dream made flesh
To question the clouds.
A brush in passing,
A stolen glance among the shadows
Are enough to make the body divide in two,
Eager to take another dreaming body
Into itself,
Half with half,
Dream with dream,
Flesh with flesh:
Equivalent in shape, in love, in craving.
But it never gets farther than a hope,
Because desire is a question whose answer nobody knows.
*
No Decía Palabras
No decía palabras,
Acercaba tan sólo un cuerpo interrogante,
Porque ignoraba que el deseo es una pregunta
Cuya repuesta no existe,
Un hoja cuya rama no existe,
Un mundo cuya cielo no existe.
La angustia se abre paso entre los huesos,
Remonta por las venas
Hasta abrirse en la piel,
Surtidores de sueño
Hechos carne en interrogación vuelta a las nubes.
Un roce al paso,
Una mirada fugaz entre las sombras,
Bastan para que el cuerpo se abra en dos,
Avido de recibir en sí mismo
Otro cuerpo que sueñe;
Mitad y mitad, sueño y sueño, carne y carne,
Iguales en figura, iguales en amor, iguales en deseo.
Aunque sólo sea una esperanza,
Porque el deseo es una pregunta cuya repuesta nadie sabe.
__________
Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) was a Spanish poet and literary critic who spent most of his life in exile. He incorporated all his poems into one, regularly updated volume, La realidad y el deseo (Reality and Desire).
Garden
The garden is a map that redraws itself daily.
Two paths meet in a head of grass.
Route of wind & route of the ichneumon,
her witching sticks tap-tap-tapping
for the green blood of her quarry.
A bumblebee circumnavigates
the purple abdomen of a coneflower
like the hour hand on a lover’s clock
which always moves too quickly,
albeit sometimes in reverse.
The sun priests of the Aztecs
thought of the heart as a flower
& the dagger as a hummingbird’s beak.
A bad metaphor can be fatal.
The poppies’ sea-green pods
swell like thought-balloons in the comics,
each one empty except for an asterisk.
Where lilies are concerned, I like
the word better than the flower,
the idea better than the word,
the lilies of the forest better than the lilies of the field.
The children were tired of lawns & streets
and being watched.
They found a blank spot in the garden’s map
& never came home.
__________
Updated to add text at 5:35 p.m.
Ghazal
The little boy with hemophilia
speaks in a whisper, they said.
The female traffic cop was too attractive.
People kept stopping to ask directions, I said.
While you were picking berries behind the house,
a bear walked down the driveway, they said.
A tanager, an oriole & a goldfinch, all males,
in a single tree at dusk: three flames, I said.
In Newfoundland’s only remaining ancient forest,
the trees are six inches tall, they said.
We stopped on the way home from D.C.
to read a historical marker for the Shadow of Death, I said.
Three tanka
A tiny spider
has spun its web across
the lens of my camera.
I check the memory stick
for pictures of flies.
*
Slender bodies,
legs impossibly long,
translucent wings:
stranger than any daydream,
the crane flies float through the trees.
*
On the damp woods trail
my boots scarcely make a sound.
Squirrels keep throwing fits —
as startled as me, this July morning,
by the apparition of my breath.