[Sven2]

Facing the River


   I've been told it's not a dream, but I see a bridge and below it blue and limpid river, also a shadow that is not a shadow, but a different light. I see a woman who passes smiling and then a man who is also smiling. Both look at me and stretch their hands out to me.

   I've been told it's not a dream, but I see thousands of men and women on the bridge that suddenly becomes a magnificent crystal arch. And I look at the river and see stones on the bottom, fish the color of fire, and I understand that I must keep looking at it because it is blue and limpid river that at each instant ceases to be itself.

   I've been told it's not a dream.

--Abilio Estevez
translated by Cola Franzen

[Sven2]

The Most Ancient Names of Fire


Blessed are the lovers
for theirs is the grain of sand
that sustains the center of the seas.

Dazed by the play of fountains
they hear nothing
but the music sprinkled by their names.

Trembling, they cling to one another
like small frightened animals who tremble, knowing they will
                      die.

Nothing is alien to them.

Their only strength against the wind and tide
are the beautifying words of all existence: I love you.
We shall grow old together to the end.

Male and female ravens steal lovers' eyes,
their beautiful gestures, even the moon in their mirror
but not the fire

from which they are reborn.


--Roberto Sosa
translated by Jo Anne Engelbert

[Water Lily]

 ;D


In Praise of Idleness




By  Paul Violi  


For the second time this week

I've watched snow fall at sunrise,

dawn arrive on a breeze

(the way I think it always does).

I don't know which, time or the weather,

woke me, charmed me out of a dream

where a few of us floated around,

gravity's jokers,

face-up in the quiet water

and the jetsam of a slow life.

I had one line that I'd saved

and let it go as though it were mine,

calling for "Darker days and brighter gods!"

Then I only had my waking instant,

but it opened with that same shadowless light,

a sense of change, of something both near

and remote, first and last,

blowing with the wind and snow

through my reflection in the window.

And then I lost it.


So here I am, with cigarettes and cold coffee,

an unfinished ode to idleness,

cobwebs in high places,

a spider that rappels down the bookshelves,

and a commotion recollected in tranquility;

sunlight pouring through,

and another bright page

with a peculiar darkness flowing over it

—shadows of heatwaves from the radiator,

or my thoughts going up in smoke.


The glass, when misted over,

reminds me of store windows,

how they're swathed with soap,

shrouded in secrecy

before a grand opening

or after an ignominious closing.

Either way, not very interesting

except, perhaps, when the grafitti,

the anonymous messages appear

scrawled across them

by some child of the air,

words you can see through

or a clear smear.


And at twilight I'm still here,

the same place, the same light.

Nothing to do but move with the view:

snow, wind over soft ruins,

unfinished buildings that loom

like monuments to a spent curiosity.

I'm in the tallest, up here with the Nopes

roosting on soggy flunkgirders.

Want a cigarette? Nope.

Got a match? Nope.

See any alternative to solipsism? Nope.

Hedonism? Nope. Sloppy stoicism? Nope.

Did you know that Maryland

has no natural but only man-made lakes? Nope.


The creatures of idleness

are pure speculation.

They follow the weather,

shadow the wind, fill in the blanks.

Some are big and clumsy and sly

and like to lick my watch;

others, like gerunds,

have already drunk themselves

into a state of being.

Another, with time on his hands

and the sense of how windows

are both inside and outside a place,

stands there watching his silhouette

change to a reflection

as the light shifts

and he moves forward or back,

plays like a god

stepping in and out of himself,

and hears the wind as the breath of change

when the last flurry whirls away in the light.


The last flake grows larger

as it descends, and presents

when it lands in a burst of brilliance

the floorplan for a new building

where every wet, beaded window

is a picture of pleasure and expectation.

The drops ripen, moments in the light,

questions that, answered by a feeling,

slide away as clear as my being,

a drop at a time down the glass.

When the wind blows this hard

it's about to say something at last.

The earth down to its bare magic,

wind and glass, water and light.

:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)

[Sven2]

Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion

In early March of year 353,
we have gathered at the Orchid Pavilion in the North of Kuaiji Mountain
for the purification ritual.
All the literati have finally arrived.
Young and old ones have come together.
This area has high mountains and steep hills,
dense wood and slender bamboos,
as well as a limpid swift stream flowing by
with reflections all around.
We sit by a redirected streamlet that floats the wine goblets to us.
Although without the grandeur of musical accompaniment,
the wine and poems
are sufficient to allow for a free exchange of deep feelings.
As for this day,
the sky is clear, the air is fresh,
and the breeze is mild.
Hanging high is the immense universe.
Around us is the myriad variety.
Stretching our sights and freeing our minds
will allow us to fully enjoy the sound and vision.
This is really delighting.
The bond between people
will quickly span a lifetime.
Some people might share their ambitions in a closet
while others might freely enjoy themselves with their pleasures.
Although interests are widely unique
and the vigour is different,
whatever pleasure one meets,
we can get some temporary satisfaction.
But one can hardly realize how fast we will grow old.
When we become tired of our desires
and the circumstances changes,
grief will come.
What we have been interested in
will soon be a relic.
We can't help but lament.
Whether life is long or short is up to destiny,
but it will all end in nothingness.
The ancients said,
"Birth and death are big events."
How could it not be agonizing?
Any look at the cause of sentiment of the ancients
shows the same origin.
We can hardly not mourn before their scripts
although our feelings cannot be verbalized.
We know that equating life and death is ridiculous.
It is equally absurd to think that longevity is the same as short-lived.
The future generations will look upon us
just like we look upon our past.
How sad!
So we record the people here
and their works.
Even though time and circumstances will change,
the cause for lament
will remain the same.
Future readers
will have sentiment on this prose.

--Wang Xizhi
353 A.D.

[Sven2]

Preface to the "Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion"

In the late spring of 1985,
we met in the weedy lot of the Orchid Pavilion Nursery
for a little ritual purification.



Everyone came, all the half-brothers and half-sisters,
the children not yet born,
and men so old they were young again.



We sat beside the aqueduct, and gold cans of beer
floated down to us
like the lines of poems.



The end of the twentieth century hung over
us like a cartoon anvil, but the breeze
that day was a knife so sharp



you couldn't feel it cutting pieces off of you.
But then, when it's sunny, no one remembers
how quickly a century turns over.



Our mothers always said that living and dying
ran on the same business model,
that one hand washed the other.



But how to tell that to the rat whose whiskers
will be bound into the brush
that inks these very lines about him?



No, there's no use pretending the tears our mothers wept
over newborn babies and the dead
were even the same species of water.


--Nick Lantz

[Sven2]

Bleecker Street, Summer


Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
for the eternal idleness of the imagined return,
for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom
of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin!

When I press summer dusks together, it is
a month of street accordions and sprinklers
laying the dust, small shadows running from me.

It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,
ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children
tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper;
it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water
down littered streets that lead you to no water,
and gathering islands and lemons in the mind.

There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame.
I would undress you in the summer heat,
and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.

--Derek Walcott

[Sven2]

The Trees


The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.


--Philip Larkin

[Sven2]

Audubon

VII. Tell Me a Story

                                             [A]

Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse. I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart.

It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.

The sound was passing northward.


                                             

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of great delight.


--Robert Penn Warren
    1969

[Sven2]

A Way To Love God

Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.
And the line where the incoming swell from the sunset Pacific
First leans and staggers to break will tell all you need to know
About submarine geography, and your father's death rattle
Provides all biographical data required for the Who's Who of the dead.

I cannot recall what I started to tell you, but at least
I can say how night-long I have lain under the stars and
Heard mountains moan in their sleep.  By daylight,
They remember nothing, and go about their lawful occasions
Of not going anywhere except in slow disintegration.  At night
They remember, however, that there is something they cannot remember.
So moan.  Theirs is the perfected pain of conscience that
Of forgetting the crime, and I hope you have not suffered it.  I have.

I do not recall what had burdened my tongue, but urge you
To think on the slug's white belly, how sick-slick and soft,
On the hairiness of stars, silver, silver, while the silence
Blows like wind by, and on the sea's virgin bosom unveiled
To give suck to the wavering serpent of the moon; and,
In the distance, in plaza, piazza, place, platz, and square,
Boot heels, like history being born, on cobbles bang.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

And when, by the hair, the headsman held up the head
Of Mary of Scots, the lips kept on moving,
But without sound.  The lips,
They were trying to say something very important.

But I had forgotten to mention an upland
Of wind-tortured stone white in darkness, and tall, but when
No wind, mist gathers, and once on the Sarré at midnight,
I watched the sheep huddling.  Their eyes
Stared into nothingness.  In that mist-diffused light their eyes
Were stupid and round like the eyes of fat fish in muddy water,
Or of a scholar who has lost faith in his calling.

Their jaws did not move.  Shreds
Of dry grass, gray in the gray mist-light, hung
From the side of a jaw, unmoving.

You would think that nothing would ever again happen.

That may be a way to love God.

--Robert Penn Warren

[Sven2]

Fragments of an Apocryphal Gospel

3.   Wretched are the poor in spirit, for under the earth they shall be what they now are upon the earth.
4.   Wretched are they that mourn, for they already have the miserable habit of mourning.
5.   Fortunate are they that know that suffering is not a crown of glory.
6.   It sufficeth not to be the last in order to someday be the first.
7.   Happy are they that do not insist they are right, for no man is or all men are.
8.   Happy are they that forgive others and they that forgive themselves.
9.   Blessed are the meek, for they do not condescend to disagreement.
10.   Blessed are they that do not hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they know that our fortune, adverse or merciful, is a matter of chance, which is inscrutable.
11.   Blessed are the merciful, for their happiness lies in the exercise of mercy and not in the hope of a reward.
12.   Blessed are the pure in heart, for they see God.
13.   Blessed are they that suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness, for righteousness matters more to them than their human destiny.
14.   Nobody is the salt of the earth; no one, at some moment in life, is not the salt of the earth.
15.   Let thy light so shine, even if men cannot see it. God shall see it.
16.   There is no commandment which cannot be broken, neither those that I say nor those that the prophets have said.
17.   He that kills for a just cause, or for a cause which he believes just, is guiltless.
18.   The acts of men deserve neither hell fire nor heaven.
19.   Hate not thine enemy, for upon doing so, thou art in some way his slave. Thy hate shall never be better than thy peace.
20.   If thy right hand offend thee, forgive it; thou art thy body and thou art thy soul and it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the boundary that divides them...
24.   Exaggerate not the cult of truth; there is no man that at the end of the day has not lied with good reason many times.
25.   Swear not, for all swearing is an emphasis.
26.   Resist evil, but without awe or anger. To whomsoever smite thee on thy right cheek, thou mayest turn the other also, as long as thou art not moved by fear.
27.   I speak not of vengeance nor of forgiveness; to forget is the only vengeance and the only forgiveness.
28.   Doing good to thine enemies can be an act of righteousness and it is not difficult; loving them, a task for angels and not for men.
29.   Doing good to thine enemies is the best way to placate thy vanity.
30.   Lay not up gold upon earth, because gold is the father of idleness, and the latter, of sadness and of boredom.
31.   Judge that others are or shall be righteous, and if they are not, it is not thy error.
32.   God is more generous than men and shall mete to them with a different measure.
33.   Give that which is holy to dogs, cast thy pearls before swine; what is most important is to give.
34.   Seek for the pleasure of seeking, not for that of finding...
39.   The gate is the one that chooses, not the man.
40.   Judge not a tree by its fruits, neither a man by his works; they could be better or worse.
41.   Nothing is built upon the rock, everything upon the sand, but our duty is to build as though the sand were rock...
47.   Happy are the poor without bitterness or the rich without pride.
48.   Happy are the valiant, they that accept with equal spirit failure or applause.
49.   Happy are they that retain in their memory the words of Virgil or Christ, for these shall give light to their days.
50.   Happy are they that are loved and they that love and they that can do without love.
51.   Happy are the happy.

--Jorge Luis Borges
translated by Mark D. Larsen

[Sven2]

Time Passes

Time too is afraid of passing, is riddled with holes
through which time feels itself leaking.
Time sweats in the middle of the night
when all the other dimensions are sleeping.
Time has lost every picture of itself as a child.
Now time is old, leathery and slow.
Can't sneak up on anyone anymore,
Can't hide in the grass, can't run, can't catch.
Can't figure out how not to trample
what it means to bless.

--Joy Ladin

[Sven2]

Swallows

They dip their wings in the sunset,
They dash against the air
As if to break themselves upon its stillness:
In every movement, too swift to count,
Is a revelry of indecision,
A furtive delight in trees they do not desire
And in grasses that shall not know their weight.


They hover and lean toward the meadow
With little edged cries;
And then,
As if frightened at the earth's nearness,
They seek the high austerity of evening sky
And swirl into its depth.

--Leonora Speyer

[Sven2]

Champagne


A cold wind, later, but no rain.
A bus breathing heavily at the station.
Beggars at the gate, and the moon
like one bright horn of a white
cow up there in space. But

really, must I think about all this
a second time in this short life?
This crescent moon, like a bit
of ancient punctuation. This

pause in the transience of all things.

Up there, Ishtar in the ship
of life he's sailing.  Has

he ripped open again his sack of grain?
Spilled it all over the place?
Bubbles rising to the surface, breaking.

Beside our sharpened blades, they've
set down our glasses of champagne.
A joke is made.  But, really, must

I hear this joke again?

Must I watch the spluttering
light of this specific flame? Must I
consider forever the permanent
transience of all things:

The bus, breathing at the station.
The beggars at the gate.
The girl I was.
Both pregnant and chaste.
The cold wind, that crescent moon.
No rain. What difference

can it possibly make, that
pain, now that not a single
anguished cry of it remains?

Really, must I grieve it all again
a second time, and why tonight
of all the nights, and just
as I'm about to raise, with the
blissful others, my

glass to the silvery, liquid
chandelier above us?

--Laura Kasischke

[Sven2]

Ordinary Light

To rise early, reconsider, rise again later
to papers and the news. To smoke a few if time
permits and, second-guessing the weather,

dress. Another day of what we bring to it-
matters unfinished from days before,

regret over matters we've finished poorly.
Just once you'd like to start out early,
free from memory and lighter for it.
Like Adam, on that first day: alone

but cheerful, no fear of the maker,
anything his for the naming; nothing
to shrink from, nothing to shirk,

no lot to carry that wasn't by choice.
And at night, no voice to keep him awake,
no hurry to rise, no hurry not to.

--Tracy K. Smith

[Sven2]

Unpacking a Globe


I gaze at the Pacific and don't expect
to ever see the heads on Easter Island,

though I guess at sunlight rippling
the yellow grasses sloping to shore;

yesterday a doe ate grass in the orchard:
it lifted its ears and stopped eating

when it sensed us watching from
a glass hallway—in his sleep, a veteran

sweats, defusing a land mine.
On the globe, I mark the Battle of

the Coral Sea—no one frets at that now.
A poem can never be too dark,

I nod and, staring at the Kenai, hear
ice breaking up along an inlet;

yesterday a coyote trotted across
my headlights and turned his head

but didn't break stride; that's how
I want to live on this planet:

alive to a rabbit at a glass door—
and flower where there is no flower.


--Arthur Sze