[Sven2]

Flood

--by Dionisio D. Martinez

Years of Hope

What my 1731 Stradivarius cannot play, my ears will invent.
My catalogue of inventions is worthless in the absence of desire.
I came for the music, but I stayed for you.
My tenuous landscape is nothing but layer upon layer of paper.
I sleep on the faultline and dream of being swallowed. At 5:19 in the morning one bird and then another will wake me.
What good is the dark without music?
You are as punctual as winter light.


Years of Solitude

To the one who sets a second place at the table anyway.
To the one at the back of the empty bus.
To the ones who name each piece of stained glass projected on a white wall.
To anyone convinced that a monologue is a conversation with the past.
To the one who loses with the deck he marked.
To those who are destined to inherit the meek.
To us.


Years of Reconciliation

The mime troupe is in town again. They want to reconstruct us bit by bit.
This is where the house went up in flames.
This is how we walked away, trying to salvage nothing.
That's us, building our separate houses in the aftermath.
There were ashes to be swept away, years of debris, pages and pages of unresolved music.
Here we are, looking out of our respective windows at the space between us.
Of all the illusions, forgetting is the most dangerous.


Years of Fortune

Suppose we count backwards and nothing happens.
The palm reader says I live on intuition.
Something tells me you're home for good, your unpacked bags nothing to worry about.
This morning I paid off the mortgage. By the middle of the afternoon I noticed that the house had not changed.
Indiscriminate wishes determine the length of a season and the falling of the light around here.
Escape has such a final ring to it. Let's just say we're taking our time in returning.
For better or for worse, ours is a variant of a rather common story.


Years of Judgment

One lethargic word crawls out of your reach and confronts you.
Each breath unfolds with intentions of its own.
Even the slightest preoccupation with absolute stillness is a significant increment of time.
Everything is measurable.
Salvation is a deliberate leap into the eye of a cataclysm.
Believe like a man and you will drown in a drop of faith.
Believe in nothing and the first rains will level your house.


Years of Vision

In a matter of minutes I destroyed the journal I had kept for 15 years, maybe longer.
A man in love soon learns to be unfaithful to himself.
I changed my name and taught myself not to answer when you called me by the old familiar one.
It became obvious that accidents are worth repeating.
Each day I woke a little closer to the sea with little more than my cobalt blue history to keep me afloat.
I bought a shirt to match the earth of each new country I stumbled into—terra cotta, terra firma, terra incognita.
In countries with nothing but overabundance, language has the luxury of moving backward—red hibiscus, dark leaves.


Years of Discourse

are not always preceded by years of silence. More than likely, they follow unfulfilled demands.
An arsenal of threats is dismantled.
The hands of the adversary begin to look surprisingly life-like.
For the agnostics, a man with cancer in his throat heals himself and begins to sing like a broken angel.
Those most susceptible to nostalgia are reminded of the mythical Age of Miracles.
An arsenal of memories, long abandoned, is discovered and restored.

Familiar voices reappear. In proportion to the sky, they are whispers.

[Sven2]

The Return

John Forbes

I often dream about the ocean
                              and would like to write
a long ode to water, because I live
on a drought stricken flood plain
next to a sea where a baked delta
opens between glittering sandstone cliffs
& the dunes and beaches make holiday resorts
seem like colonies in outer space.
Where are the green islands? Where are
                                                the sticky hibiscus flowers,
the paddocks full of clover and grass,
the intricate mangrove swamps
& the mud that squelches between your toes?
                                              Instead I am covered in salt—
the same brother you forgot
whose wounds were like rumours
of the rains' failure
but who returns even so, just as the wet arrives
after weeks of dry storm lightning out to sea
                                                 & who stands in front of you
                                            dressed in his flash city clothes
but suddenly shy, like a stranger embarrassed
by wet footprints and tears
& the sudden atmosphere of drama.

[Sven2]

The Earth

Anne Sexton


God loafs around heaven,

without a shape
but He would like to smoke His cigar
or bite His fingernails
and so forth.

God owns heaven
but He craves the earth,
the earth with its little sleepy caves,
its bird resting at the kitchen window,
even its murders lined up like broken chairs,
even its writers digging into their souls
with jackhammers,
even its hucksters selling their animals
for gold,
even its babies sniffing for their music,
the farm house, white as a bone,
sitting in the lap of its corn,
even the statue holding up its widowed life,
but most of all He envies the bodies,
He who has no body.

The eyes, opening and shutting like keyholes
and never forgetting, recording by thousands,
the skull with its brains like eels--
the tablet of the world--
the bones and their joints
that build and break for any trick,
the genitals,
the ballast of the eternal,
and the heart, of course,
that swallows the tides
and spits them out cleansed.

He does not envy the soul so much.
He is all soul
but He would like to house it in a body
and come down
and give it a bath
now and then.

[Sven2]

Filthy Savior

  --Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Look at this storm, the idiot,
pouring its heart out here, of all places,
an industrial suburb on a Sunday,
soaking nothing but cinder-block
and parking lots,

wasting its breath on smokeless
smoke-stacks, not even a trash can
to send rumbling through the streets.
And that lightning bolt, forking itself
to death, to hit

nothing — what a waste.
What if I hadn't been here, lost too,
four in the morning, driving around
in a jean-shirt over my night-gown,
reciting Baudelaire aloud —

like an idiot ¬— unable to sleep,
scared to death by my longing for it,
death, so early in the morning, driving
until the longing runs on empty?
The windshield wipers can't

keep up with this deluge,
and I almost run over it, a flapping
white thing in the middle of the street.
I step out, it's a gull, one leg
caught in a red plastic net

snared around its neck.
I throw my shirt over the shrieking thing,
take it back to the car, search my bag
for something, anything, find a nail file,
start sawing at the net.

The gull is huge, filthy, it shits
on my shirt, pecks at me — idiot, I'm trying
to save you. I slip a sleeve over its head,
hold it down with one hand, saw, cut,
pull with the other,

free the leg, the neck,
wrap the gull again, hold it against me,
fighting for its life, its crazed heart
beats against mine. I put my package
on the hood, open the shirt, and

there it goes, letting the wind
push it, suck it into a cloud; then it's
gone — like some vague, inhuman
longing — as the rain lifts, and the suburbs
emerge in dirty white light.

[Sven2]

Stay Close to Any Sound

--Hafiz

Stay close to any sounds
that make you glad
you are alive.

Everything
in this world is
helplessly reeling.

An invisible wake
was created
when God said
to His beautiful dead lover,
"Be!".

Hafiz, who will understand you
if you do not explain that last line?

Well then,
I will sing it this way:

When God said to illusion,
"Be!"

[Sven2]

Gift

--Czeslaw Milosz

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.

[Sven2]

The Lamb

--Linda Gregg

It was a picture I had after the war.
A bombed English church. I was too young
to know the word English or war,
but I knew the picture.
The ruined city still seemed noble.
The cathedral with its roof blown off
was not less godly. The church was the same
plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out
of the holes God's fist made in the walls.
All our desire for love or children
is treated like rags by the enemy.
I knew so much and sang anyway.
Like a bird who will sing until
it is brought down. When they take
away the trees, the child picks up a stick
and says, this is a tree, this the house
and the family. As we might. Through a door
of what had been a house, into the field
of rubble, walks a single lamb, tilting
its head, curious, unafraid, hungry.

[Sven2]

Salinas Is On His Way

Luis Omar Salinas

Go, friends, quickly to your tasks and wives.
This night I have to discover the clouds--
talk to the galaxies.
My parents are old
and the road is a serpent full of ambitions.
And what remains of me after sleep
is sunlight entering
like a nun into church.
After dreams get through with me
I shall devour books, sing arias,
walk on snow,
have arguments with darkness,
and crawl into the corner of the sea
listening to the tingle of bells.
What remains of me after sleep
may be a corpse.
So send out word:

Salinas is on his way--
quoting verses from the Bible,
making a mad dash through the night,
making sure everything is secure.

[Sven2]

The Name of a Fish

--Faith Shearin

If winter is a house then summer is a window
in the bedroom of that house. Sorrow is a river
behind the house and happiness is the name

of a fish who swims downstream. The unborn child
who plays the fragrant garden is named Mavis:
her red hair is made of future and her sleek feet

are wet with dreams. The cat who naps
in the bedroom has his paws in the sun of summer
and his tail in the moonlight of change. You and I

spend years walking up and down the dusty stairs
of the house. Sometimes we stand in the bedroom
and the cat walks towards us like a message.

Sometimes we pick dandelions from the garden
and watch the white heads blow open
in our hands. We are learning to fish in the river

of sorrow; we are undressing for a swim.

[Sven2]

A Talk With Friedrich Nietzsche

--Adam Zagajewski

Most highly respected Professor Nietzsche,
sometimes I seem to see you
on a sanatorium terrace at dawn
with fog descending and song bursting
the throats of the birds.

Not tall, head like a bullet,
you compose a new book
and a strange energy hovers around you.
Your thoughts parade
like enormous armies.

You know now that Anne Frank died,
and her classmates and friends, boys, girls,
and friends of her friends, and cousins
and friends of her cousins.

What are words, I want to ask you, what
is clarity and why do words keep burning
a century later, though the earth
weighs so much?

Clearly nothing links enlightenment
and the dark pain of cruelty.
At least two kingdoms exist,
if not more.

But if there's no God and no force
welds elements in repulsion,
then what are words really, and from whence
does their inner light come?

And from where does joy come, and where
does nothingness go? Where is forgiveness?
Why do the incidental dreams vanish at dawn and the
great ones keep growing?

--Translated by Renata Gorczynski

[Sven2]

Raven and the Birth of Tango

--Janni Edwards

i.

Raven hates myth, unless he gets a piece of the action.
He's perfected the shrug, carries a knife,
kicks ass when he needs to. When Raven shaves night,
he leaves shadow. A trick he learned by dancing.

ii.

Bored, Raven headed south, Buenos Aires.
Wandered the markets, the mixed-blood arrabales
the brothels. Cocked his head, sniffed.
Smelled meat on the edge of spoiling,
the bandoneonists drinking red wine, making love to their instruments.
He watched the card games, the emigrants and compadritos
drifting in from the country, their drinking, feuds, knives.
Raven thought about wounds and longings.
He listened to the ocean weight of darkness
sifting centuries of largo and eros,
listened to dogs barking in the night.

iii.

Raven blew a smoke ring around the moon,
watched dancers riffing Africa
off the music of the arrabales,
and when he was ready
                         Raven caught the tip
of the dance in his beak, tugged
                           and slowl
Raven pulled out Tango

He twined the dark blue current of sex around
the man's arm winding like a snake
around his partner's waist—and just like that
Raven caught the dancers
about to break
in two

2. The Marriage Tango


The old couple is dancing. Solemn,
worn confederates of the tango. Their bodies are thick with age,
their feet callused yet quick.
This is an old story, like water, like flying.
Still, each time they dance it, something new.
The young lovers set out in a raft
at the edge of the ocean, reckless,
rehearsing their new names like children
writing in the night air with burning sticks

Husband            Wife

They don't yet know neither the ocean nor the sky
cares about love or secrets or fidelity.

How they are bold with each other.
How like a kite she agrees to be led.
How he learns not to be afraid of her.
How the magnet of desire pulls in and at them.
How dangerous they become for each other.
How close they sail to the edge of the flat world,
how they long for the flying plunge.
How they learn to read each other's weather.
How they bear children, work and weep and laugh.
How they count the casualties.
How they make love:
How they sleep each night for decades spooned around each other,
wake to tell their dreams.
How they carry on.
How they haunt each other.

How strange to find themselves old and still dancing
quick and slow under the crooked smile of the moon.
How they sail closer and closer to death.
How, somehow, their raft becomes an ark,

Raven their dark dove.

[Sven2]

One Reason I Like Opera

--by Marge Piercy

In movies, you can tell the heroine
because she is blonder and thinner
than her sidekick. The villainess
is darkest. If a woman is fat,
she is a joke and will probably die.

In movies, the blondest are the best
and in bleaching lies not only purity
but victory. If two people are both
extra pretty, they will end up
in the final clinch.

Only the flawless in face and body
win. That is why I treat
movies as less interesting
than comic books. The camera
is stupid. It sucks surfaces.

Let's go to the opera instead.
The heroine is fifty and weighs
as much as a '65 Chevy with fins.
She could crack your jaw in her fist.
She can hit high C lying down.

The tenor the women scream for
wolfs down an eight course meal daily.
He resembles a bull on hind legs.
His thighs are the size of beer kegs.
His chest is a redwood with hair.

Their voices twine, golden serpents.
Their voices rise like the best
fireworks and hang and hang
then drift slowly down descending
in brilliant and still fiery sparks.

The hippopotamus baritone (the villain)
has a voice that could give you
an orgasm right in your seat.
His voice smokes with passion.
He is hot as lava. He erupts nightly.

The contralto is, however, svelte.
She is supposed to be the soprano's
mother, but is ten years younger,
beautiful and Black. Nobody cares.
She sings you into her womb where you rock.

What you see is work like digging a ditch,
hard physical labor. What you hear
is magic as tricky as knife throwing.
What you see is strength like any
great athlete's. What you hear

is still rendered precisely as the best
Swiss watchmaker. The body is
resonance. The body is the cello case.
The body just is. The voice loud
as hunger remagnetizes your bones.

[Sven2]

Obama edits Emma Lazarus poem on Statue of Liberty

"In his immigration speech today, President Obama cited the most prominent symbol of America's immigrant tradition: The Statue of Liberty.

He also quoted famous lines from the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at the base of the statue -- at least some of them.

Read on, and see if you can spot the difference (and we credit our friends at Politico for noticing this).

Here's Obama, according to the White House website:

   

Give me your tired, and your poor,

   Your huddled masses yearning to be free ...

   Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

   I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

And here's the Lazarus poem:

   

Give me your tired, your poor.

   Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

   The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

   Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

   I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Yes, the president left out the section about "the wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

Politically correct? Or did he just overlook the line?"

from:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/07/obama-edits-emma-lazaus-poem-on-state-of-liberty-/1

[Sven2]

The New Colossus

-- Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

[Sven2]

A Blade of Grass

--Brian Patten

You ask for a poem.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You say it is not good enough.
You ask for a poem.

I say this blade of grass will do.
It has dressed itself in frost,
It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.

You say it is not a poem,
It is a blade of grass and grass
Is not quite good enough.
I offer you a blade of grass.

You are indignant.
You say it is too easy to offer grass.
It is absurd.
Anyone can offer a blade of grass.

You ask for a poem.
And so I write you a tragedy about
How a blade of grass
Becomes more and more difficult to offer,

And about how as you grow older
A blade of grass
Becomes more difficult to accept.