[Sven2]

Almanac

Better to be awake at night in sympathy with clocks
than to wander vaguely
    through days.
Better to feel a hush in the yard.
To cultivate a faith in strangers,
in air and evening, in spots of sun
    rising up the high oaks.
They are the harbor lights returned to you,
    the people you loved returned to you,
    the long sleep of pilgrims.
To pass safely through days free of sickness.
If you are deprived of hope
to still sometimes feel its power.
And the tides at night rippling back from
    cold sand—to sense them
even if you have never seen them.
We are fine rain and shining streets.
We throw away things of great value and feel confused.
Seize upon the smallest arguments and call them huge.
(Some days I am small beyond measure.
Some days I am the fence the field the trees.)

--Joanna Klink

[Sven2]

Dream

Knowing lifetimes are like dream, I search for nothing now.
Searching for nothing, a mind is perfectly empty, perfectly

quiet, and so deep in dream it traces borderlands of dream
clear through river and shoreline sands to the end of dream.


-- Wang An-Shih
(1021-1086 C.E.)
translated by David Hinton

[Sven2]

A Kind of Courage

The girl shepherd on the farm beyond has been
taken from school now she is twelve, and her life is over.
I got my genius brother a summer job in the mills
and he stayed all his life. I lived with a woman four
years who went crazy later, escaped from the hospital,
hitchhiked across America terrified and in the snow
without a coat. Was raped by most men who gave her
a ride. I crank my heart even so and it turns over.
Ranges high in the sun over the continents and eruptions
of mortality, through winds and immensities of rain
falling for miles. Until all the world is overcome
by what goes up and up in us, singing and dancing
and throwing down flowers nevertheless.

--Jack Gilbert

[Sven2]

Parting in River-Serene


Ravaged chrysanthemums blacken. Autumn wind returns,
and rain like the rain when early plums ripen to yellow.

Hand in hand, why talk? We gaze together into grief every-
where in sight. Isn't this where mind knows itself utterly?

--Wang An-Shih
translated by David Hinton

[Sven2]

The Negligible

I lie in bed listening to it sing
in the dark about the sweetness
of brief love and the perfection of loves
that might have been. The spirit cherishes
the disregarded. It is because the body continues
to fail at remembering the smell of Michiko
that her body is so clear in me after all this time.
There is a special pleasure in remembering the shine
on her spoon merging with the faint sounds
in the distance of her raising from the bath water.

--Jack Gilbert

[Sven2]

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions



back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you



over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you



with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

--W. S. Merwin

[Sven2]

If I Were Another

If I were another on the road, I would not have looked
back, I would have said what one traveler said
to another: Stranger! awaken
the guitar more! Delay our tomorrow so our road
may extend and space may widen for us, and we may get rescued
from our story together: you are so much yourself ... and I am
so much other than myself right here before you!


If I were another I would have belonged to the road,
neither you nor I would return. Awaken the guitar
and we might sense the unknown and the route that tempts
the traveler to test gravity. I am only
my steps, and you are both my compass and my chasm.
If I were another on the road, I would have
hidden my emotions in the suitcase, so my poem
would be of water, diaphanous, white,
abstract, and lightweight ... stronger than memory,
and weaker than dewdrops, and I would have said:
My identity is this expanse!


If I were another on the road, I would have said
to the guitar: Teach me an extra string!
Because the house is farther, and the road to it prettier—
that's what my new song would say. Whenever
the road lengthens the meaning renews, and I become two
on this road: I ... and another!


--Mahmoud Darwish
translated by Fady Joudah

[Sven2]

Beyond Beginnings

How could he later on believe it was the best
time when his wife died unexpectedly
and he wandered every day among the trees, crying
for more than a year? He is still alone and poor
on the island with wild flowers waist-deep
around his stone hut. In June the wind will
praise the barley stretching all the way
to the mountain. Then it will be good
in the harvested fields, with the sun nailed
to the stony earth. Mornings will come and go
in the silence, the moon a heaven mediated
by owls in the dark. Is there a happiness
later on that is neither fierce nor reasonable?
A time when the heart is fresh again, and the time
after that when the heart is ripe? The Aegean
was blue just then at the end of the valley,
and is blue now differently.

--Jack Gilbert

[Sven2]

Waves Sifting Sand

1.

One anchorage of sand appears as another dissolves away,
and another fold of wave ends as another rises. Wave and sand

mingling together day after day, sifting through each other
without cease: they level up mountains and seas in no time.

2.

White waves swell though wide open seas, boundless and beyond,
and level sand stretch into the four directions all endless depths:

evening they dissolve and morning reappear, sifting ever away,
their seasons transforming eastern seas into a field of mulberries.

3.

Ten thousand miles across a lake where the grass never fades,
a lone traveler, you find yourself in rain among yellow plums,

gazing grief-stricken toward an anchorage of sand. Dark waves
wind keeps churned up: the sound of them slapping at the boat.

4.

A day will no doubt come when the dust flies at the bottom of the seas,
and how the mountaintops can avoid the transformation to gravel?

Young lovers may part, a man leaving, setting out on some boat,
but who could say they'll never come together again one day?


--Po Chu-i
(772-846)
translated by David Hinton

[Sven2]

Wild Swans

I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock the door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying!

--Edna St.Vincent Millay
.

[Sven2]

I. Terra Nova

The place without associations--
Where, in another country, there were mountains
so the mind was made to discover
words for containment, and so on,
here there was water, an extension of a brilliant city.
As for detail: where there had been, before,
nurturing slopes of grass on which, at evening or before rain
the Charolais would lie, their many eyes
affixed to the traveler, here
there was clay. And yet it blossomed astoundingly,
beside the house, camellia, periwinkle, rosemary in crushing profusion--
in his heart, he was a lover again,
calling now, now, not restricted
to once or in the old days. He lay on his back in the wild fennel.
But in fact he was an old man.
Sixty years ago, he took his mother's hand. It was May, his birthday.
They were walking in the orchard, in the continuous present,
gathering apple blossoms. Then she wanted him to watch the sun;
they had to stay together as it sunk in the possessive earth.
How short it seemed, that lifetime of waiting--
the red star blazing over the bay
was all the light of his childhood
that had followed him here.

--Louise Gluck

[Sven2]

The Mockingbird

Look one way and the sun is going down,
Look the other and the moon is rising.
The sparrow's shadow's longer than the lawn.
The bats squeak: 'Night is here", the birds cheep:
                    "Day is gone."
On the willow's highest branch, monopolizing
Day and night, cheeping, squeaking, soaring,
The mockingbird is imitating life.

All day the mockingbird has owned the yard.
As light first woke the world, the sparrows trooped
Onto the seedy lawn: the mockingbird
Chased them off shrieking. Hour by hour, fighting hard
To make the world his own, he swooped
On thrushes, thrashers, jays and chickadees --
At noon he drove away a big black cat.

Now, in the moonlight, he sits here and sings.
A thrush is singing, then a thrasher, then a jay --
Then, all at once, a cat beging meowing.
A mockingbird can sound like anything.
He imitates the world he drove away
So well that for a minute, in the moonlight,
Which one's the mockingbird? which one's the world?

--Randall Jarrell

[Sven2]

I Am Writing You Tonight


The fishing boat is coming home after traveling the wide ocean
It glides through the shallow channel beneath a silver slice of
                        summer moon
The light is on the wheelhouse and a friendly radio reports
that princely codfish have been seen sleeping in the inlet
                        beyond the midnight shoals
And where am I? Watching from a bench outside a famous
                        restaurant that sprawls across the pier
Inside, film stars and cineastes are dining by windy candlelight
They pay with raw diamonds and are served with raw gold
                         while the codfish dream of all of us
their dreams are rumored to be luminous, like stars
                          beneath the sea

and F., F., I am writing you tonight to say that I have no one
                           to eat with, no one to sleep with
I hope you have found a safe harbor. I am still here,
                            waiting for what comes next


--Eleanor Lerman

[Sven2]

Taking Down the Tree


"Give me some light!" cries Hamlet's
uncle midway through the murder
of Gonzago. "Light! Light!" cry scattering
courtesans. Here, as in Denmark,
it's dark at four, and even the moon
shines with only half a heart.

The ornaments go down into the box:
the silver spaniel, My Darling
on its collar, from Mother's childhood
in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack
my brother and I fought over,
pulling limb from limb. Mother
drew it together again with thread
while I watched, feeling depraved
at the age of ten.

With something more than caution
I handle them, and the lights, with their
tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along
from house to house, their pasteboard
toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.
Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.

By suppertime all that remains is the scent
of balsam fir. If it's darkness
we're having, let it be extravagant.

--Jane Kenyon

[Sven2]

Kangra Folk Song


Flowers blossom in the flower garden,
the pretty woman blossoms
in her own home.

     On the day that you set off for employment,
     locks were put on the palace house, my love.

Locks were put on the palace house,
marigolds weathered in the garden, my love.

     Twelve years pass by,
     you never think of me, my love.

I sew men's clothes
And mount a gray horse, my love.

I go forward where three men sit in a shop
pondering over me, my love.

     'Shopkeepers sitting around in a shop,
     what discussion are you having?' My love.

     'One says you are a man,
     another says you are a woman.' My love.

Jumping off the horse, the pretty woman
grabs his arm,
then sits him on the horse.

She spurs the horse, turns it around,
bring him home, my love.

Locks open on the palace house,
marigolds blossom in the garden, my love.

Marigolds blossom in the marigold garden,
the pretty woman blossoms in her own home.


--Anon
Translated by Kirin Narayan