[Sven2]

Not Yet

My father said he'd have to cut the tree down,
It was so high and broad at the top, and it leaned
In towards the house so that in wind it brushed
The roof slates, gables and the chimney stone
Leaving its marks there as if it intended to.

We said, don't cut it yet, because the tree was so full
Of big and little nests, of stippled fruit.
In spring and summer it spoke in a thousand voices,
The chicks upturned for love, the birds like fishes
Swimming among the boughs, and always talking.

And then a day came when the chicks woke up.
Love was all over, they tumbled from their nests
Into the air, ricocheted from a leaf, a branch,
Almost hit the ground, then found their wings
And soared up crying, brothers, sisters, crying.

Then the nests were vacant. Now we must cut the tree,
My father said. Again we begged, not yet,
Because with autumn the freckled fruit began
To turn to red, to gold, like glowing lamps
Fuelled with sweetness filtered from the soil

And scent that was musk and orange, peach and rose.
And when they dropped (they grew on the topmost branches,
Could not be picked, we took when it was offered)
We wiped them clean and sliced out the darkening bruise
Where they'd bounced on the yellow lawn, by then quite hard

With winter coming. The fruit were so much more than sweet,
Eve fell for such fruit and took Adam with her:
No serpent whispered, no god patrolled the garden.
Only my father. Again, not yet, we said, remembering
What winter had to do with our huge bent tree,

Once it had got the leaves off. We knew the hoar-frost
Tracery and the three-foot icicles
And how it simply was, the December moon
Lighted upon it and hung in its arms like a child.
Not yet, we said, not yet. And my father died,

And the tree swept the slates clean with its wings.
The birds were back and nesting, it was spring,
And nothing had altered much, not yet, not yet.

--Michael Schmidt

[Sven2]

The Gospel of the Gospel

And the prophet said: "Let not your heart
dwell in sadness, but be glad in the day."
The word used for heart has two translations:
One is as a door through which a blue sky
over white-washed stone steps can be glimpsed
and the other has to do with a kind of clearing
in a forest of hemlock and white pine.
Sadness references the turning-inward look
of a shy child in a roomful of strangers.
Glad has a connotation of the same weight
and earthiness of certain flower bulbs
that can lie dormant or be transported
great distances in their dry drowse
and then brought to blossom when replanted.
The phrase "in the day" is a guess, but a good guess,
given that time passed then as now.

--Michael Chitwood

[Sven2]

Second Draft

As an older man,
Graying, not stooped,
I saw the future:
Extremities

Cold, tongue
Sluggish,
Foam at the lips.
Excessive hope

Seemed more
Indulgent
Than despair.
I ran great distances.
I stood in sunlight

Just to see my shadow,
Show it off.
For the first time I remember

My soul looked back.
What other people learn
From birth,
Betrayal,
I learned late.

My soul perched
On an olive branch
Combing itself,
Waving its plumes. I said

Being mortal,
I aspire to
Mortal things.

I need you,
Said my soul,
If you're telling the truth.

--James Longenbach

[Sven2]

An Amateur Photographer

He has a photo of himself
next to a girlfriend, friend and neighbor;
at leisure and in tireless labor;
holding a flute, a ball, a saber;
himself - raising glass of wine;
himself - receiving a diploma;
himself - in front of roofs and walls,
at gates of Sodom and Gomorrah;
himself - next to a dappled steed,
a monument, a tomb, a castle;
next to a grotto or a fountain;
dwarfed by a highrise or a mountain;
after a night out and before;
himself, himself, himself...
Whatever for?
He writes, poor man, not quite a sage,
his unsophisticated story.
Without awareness, still less glory
he keeps a record of the age.
And all this time he's in the midst
of stars and storms, of rains and snows,
of smiles and joys, of gasps and woes -
a single gasp, and he is dust.
Preserved on film (himself now laid
to rest) is he who labored, quietly,
to conquer life immortal via
lenses and negatives and slides.
But he had cosmos for his crib,
and was himself a tiny cosmos
of God's design, complete and flawless..
but much too simple, that's the rub.
And now he's one in a downpour
of raindrops... Who taught him to long for
the immortality of splendor
while knocking at its humble door?


--David Samoilov

Translated by Tanya Wolfson

[Sven2]

Dominion

Sometimes I take the leather hood off—I
refuse to wear it. As if I were king. Or a man
who's free. Ravens, red-tailed hawks, the usual
flocks of drifting-most-of-the-time strangers
settle the way even things that drift
                                                     have to, and
I don't care. All over again, I know things that
nobody knows, or wants to—things that, though
prettier, maybe, against the snow
                                                     of memory, can
still hurt, all the same. Any blame falling where
it falls—that random. That moment each day
when the light traveling across what's always been
mine to at any point take back, or give elsewhere,
becomes just the light again, turning back to dark,
when the branches
                                  stir as they've stirred forever,
more tenderly over some of us than others. Sing,
or don't sing. Help me take this leather hood off—
I refuse to wear it. I'm the king. I'm free.


--Carl Phillips

[Sven2]

Past Parallax

Last night, I made love to a star. Pristine,
the sky. Blustery. I climbed
a staircase of wind from my window
to soft-step across
the ozone's crumbling balcony.
She was draped in eon's
old light, picking the bones
of cosmonauts from her braids.
I knelt, hugged her
midsection, pressed my cheek
over her belly's cool plane.
Though barren, she was motherly
in that moment before she unwrapped
the luminance from her shoulders,
and we fumbled for each other
in the cherry darkness.
Through sleep, I reached for the pen, paused:
another poem, another phantom longing.
What will critics think of these
once I'm gone. That I was hijacked
by the carnal, blood thin with youth?
No, it's that I fall in love with people
so far from the ground beneath me
I feel the span as measurable
only in light and years.

--Kyle Dargan

[Sven2]

Message to Blanca

                                                        for Blanca Subercaseaux

I don't know  if I can come,
let's see if I can reach you, sister.

I'll arrive, if I do, on a mild wind,
so as not to freeze your plains,
or at the edge of your dream,
with love, and without a word.

Stand up tall, in case I find it
hard to meet halfway,
and bring me little earth
to remember my inn by.

Don't worry if I don't have a shape
or if I look different.
And don't cry if I don't answer,
for my sin was words.
But give me yours, your word,
that was like a dove alighting.

--Gabriela Mistral

[Sven2]

Upon Discovering My Entire Solution to the Attainment of Immortality Erased from the Blackboard Exce

If you have seen the snow
somewhere slowly fall
on a bicycle,
then you understand
all beauty will be lost
and that even the loss
can be beautiful.
And if you have looked
at a winter garden
and seen not a winter garden
but a meditation on shape,
then you know why
this season is not
known for its words,
the cold too much
about the slowing of matter,
not enough about the making of it.
So you are blessed
to forget this way:
a jump rope in the ice melt,
a mitten that has lost its hand,
a sun that shines
as if it doesn't mean it.
And if in another season
you see a beautiful woman
use her bare hands
to smooth wrinkles
from her expensive dress
for the sake of dignity,
but in so doing trace
the outlines of her thighs,
then you will remember
surprise assumes a space
that has first been forgotten,
especially here, where we
rarely speak of it,
where we walk out onto the roofs
of frozen lakes
simply because we're stunned
we really can.

--Dobby Gibson

A note to readers: the title is as the author intended.

[Sven2]

What the Living Do


Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

--Marie Howe

[Sven2]

These two poems are in reply to the conversation we had with Eccles few weeks ago, about one form of immortality, the joy of feeling alive. As Faust said, "Verweile doch!du bist so schön!" - If to the moment I shall ever say: "Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!"

There are many interpretations of the idea of course.

[Sven2]

A Short Testament

Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,

And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it
And cannot make amends
I ask you
To comfort them to overflowing,

And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I've destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,

Remember them. I beg you to remember them

When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death's bare branches.

--Anne Porter

[Sven2]

Ecstasy


For years it was in sex and I thought
this was the most of it
            so brief
                    a moment
or two of transport out of oneself
                    or
in music which lasted longer and filled me
with the exquisite wrenching agony
of the blues
        and now it is equally
transitory and obscure as I sit in my broken
chair that the cats have shredded
by the stove on a winter night with wind and snow
howling outside and I imagine
the whole world at peace
                at peace
and everyone comfortable and warm
the great pain assuaged
                    a moment
of the most shining and singular sensual gratification.



--Hayden Garruth

[Sven2]

The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill


You may think it strange, Sam, that I'm writing
a letter in these circumstances. I thought
it strange too—the first time. But there's
a misconception I was laboring under, and you
are too, viz. that the imagination in your
vicinity is free and powerful. After all,
you say, you've been creating yourself all
along imaginatively. You imagine yourself
playing golf or hiking in the Olympics or
writing a poem and then it becomes true.
But you still have to do it, you have to exert
yourself, will, courage, whatever you've got, you're
mired in the unimaginative. Here I imagine a letter
and it's written. Takes about two-fifths of a
second, your time. Hell, this is heaven, man.
I can deluge Congress with letters telling
every one of those mendacious sons of bitches
exactly what he or she is, in maybe about
half an hour. In spite of your Buddhist
proclivities, when you imagine bliss
you still must struggle to get there. By the way
the Buddha has his place across town on
Elysian Drive. We call him Bud. He's lost weight
and got new dentures, and he looks a hell of a
lot better than he used to. He always carries
a jumping jack with him everywhere just
for contemplation, but he doesn't make it
jump. He only looks at it. Meanwhile Sidney
and Dizzy, Uncle Ben and Papa Yancey, are
over by Sylvester's Grot making the sweetest,
cheerfulest blues you ever heard. The air,
so called, is full of it. Poems are fluttering
everywhere like seed from a cottonwood tree.
Sam, the remarkable truth is I can do any
fucking thing I want. Speaking of which
there's this dazzling young Naomi who
wiped out on I-80 just west of Truckee
last winter, and I think this is the moment
for me to go and pay her my respects.
Don't go way. I'll be right back.

--Hayden Carruth

[Sven2]

Toast


There was a woman in Ithaca
who cried softly all night
in the next room and helpless
I fell in love with her under the blanket
of snow that settled on all the roofs
of the town, filling up
every dark depression.

Next morning
in the motel coffee shop
I studied all the made-up faces
of women. Was it the middle-aged blonde
who kidded the waitress
or the young brunette lifting
her cup like a toast?

Love, whoever you are,
your courage was my companion
for many cold towns
after the betrayal of Ithaca,
and when I order coffee
in a strange place, still
I say, lifting, this is for you.

--Leonard Nathan

[Eccles]

I've just heard from my godparents who live in Cairo. I'm thankful they're alright.

Most Westerners, like me, first heard of the poet, Simin Behbahani, after she wrote 'A Poem For Neda,' following the killing of the youthful protestor in Iran. Although Behbahani wrote the following poem about her native Iran, where she has been regarded as a national treasure, I think it apposite to print it here as we await the outcome of events in Egypt.

MY COUNTRY, I WILL BUILD YOU AGAIN.

My country, I will build you again,
if need be with bricks made of my life.
I will build columns to support your roof,
if need be, with my bones.
Once more I'll breath the perfume
of flowers loved by your youth.
Once more I will wash the blood stains
on your body with my flowing tears.
Once more, the darkness will leave this house,
and I will paint my poems blue
with the color of our sky.
And in his generosity the "resurrector of old bones"
will grant me the splendor of your mountains.
Old I may be, but I can still learn,
given another chance.
I will begin a second youth alongside my progeny.
I will recount the hadith of "Love of Homeland"
with such passion as to bring life to every word.
The fire still burns in my breast
of the love for my people.
My poems may be drenched in blood
But you shall make me strong.
I will build you again with my life,
however meager my means.

~ Simin Behbahani

God willing, or as my godmother would say, "Insha'Allah."