Silence and Dancing1
“Schweigen and tanzen” are words spoken by Elektra near the end of the
opera by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
Silence and dancing
is what it comes down to
in the end for them,
as they struggle from wheelchair to bed,
knowing nothing changes,
that the poor, who are themselves,
will become even poorer
and the fatuous voices on the screen
will go on gabbling about another
war they cannot do without.
What defense against this
except silence and dancing,
the memory of dancing—
O, but they danced, did they ever;
she danced like a devil, she’ll tell you,
recalling a dress the color of sunrise,
hair fluffed to sea-foam,
some man’s some boy’s
damp hand on her back
under the music’s sweet, hot assault
and wildness erupting inside her
like a suppressed language,
insisting on speaking itself
through her eloquent body,
a far cry
from the well-groomed words on her lips.
The Story1
You are telling a story:
How Fire Took Water to Wife
It’s always like this, you say,
opposites attract
They want to enter each other,
be one,
so he burns her as hard as he can
and she tries to drown him
It’s called love at first
and doesn’t hurt
but after a while she weeps
and says he is killing her,
he shouts that he cannot breathe
underwater—
Make up your own
ending, you say to the children,
and they will, they will
Widow2
What the neighbors bring to her kitchen
is food for the living. She wants to eat
the food of the dead, their pure
narcotic of dry, black seeds.
Why, without him, should she desire
the endurance offered by meat and grain,
the sugars that glue the soul to the body?
She thanks them, but does not eat,
consumes strong coffee as if it were air
and she the vigilant candle
on a famous grave, until the familiar
sounds of the house become strange,
turn into messages in the new language
he has been forced to learn.
All night she works on the code,
almost happy, her body rising
like bread, while the food in its china caskets
dries out on the kitchen table.
Roberto Juarroz (1925 – 1995)
Any movement kills something1
Translated from the Spanish by Mary Crow
Any movement kills something.
It kills the place that is abandoned,
the gesture, the unrepeatable position,
some anonymous organism,
a sign, a glance,
a love that returned,
a presence or its contrary,
the life always of someone else,
one’s own life without others.
And being here is moving,
being here is killing something.
Even the dead move,
even the dead kill.
Here the air smells of crime.
But the odor comes from farther away.
And even the odor moves.
Donald Justice (1925 – 2004)
American Sketches1
The telephone poles
have been holding their
arms out
a long time now
to birds
that will not
settle there
but pass with
strange cawings
westward to
where dark trees
gather about a
waterhole this
is Kansas the
mountains start here
just behind
the closed eyes
of a farmer’s
sons asleep
in their workclothes
In Bertram’s Garden2
Jane looks down at her organdy skirt
as if it somehow were the thing disgraced,
for being there, on the floor, in the dirt,
and she catches it up about her waist,
smoothes it out along one hip,
and pulls it over the crumpled slip.
On the porch, green-shuttered, cool,
asleep is Bertram that bronze boy,
who, having wound her around a spool,
sends her spinning like a toy
out to the garden, all alone,
to sit and weep on a bench of stone.
Soon the purple dark must bruise
lily and bleeding-heart and rose,
and the little cupid lose
eyes and ears and chin and nose,
and Jane lie down with others soon,
naked to the naked moon.
Carolyn Kizer (b. 1925)
Bitch1
Now, when he and I meet, after all these years,
I say to the bitch inside me, don’t start growling.
He isn’t a trespasser anymore,
just an old acquaintance tipping his hat.
My voice says, “nice to see you,”
as the bitch starts to bark hysterically.
He isn’t an enemy now,
where are your manners, I say, as I say,
“How are the children? They must be growing up.”
At a kind word from him, a look like the old day,
the bitch changes her tone: she begins to whimper.
She wants to snuggle up to him, to cringe.
Down, girl! Keep your distance
or I’ll give you a taste of the choke-chain.
“Fine, I’m just fine,” I tell him.
She slobbers and grovels.
After all, I am her mistress. She is basically loyal.
It’s just that she remembers how she came running
each evening, when she heard his step;
how she lay at his feet and looked up adoringly
though he was absorbed in his paper;
or, bored with her devotion, ordered in to the kitchen
until he was ready to play.
But the small careless kindnesses
when he’d had a good day, or a couple of drinks,
come back to her now, seem more important
than the casual cruelties, the ultimate dismissal.
“It’s nice to know you are doing so well,” I say.
He couldn’t have taken you with him;
you were too demonstrative, too clumsy,
not like the well-groomed pets of his new friends.
“Give my regards to your wife,” I say. You gag
as I drag you off by the scruff,
saying, “Goodbye! Goodbye!
Nice to have seen you again.”
The Ashes1
This elderly poet, unpublished for five decades,
said that one day in her village a young girl
came screaming down the road,
“The Red Guards are coming! The Red Guards …
Are Coming!” At once the poet
ran into her house and stuffed the manuscript
of her poems into the stove. The only copy.
When the guards arrived they took her into the yard
for interrogation. As they spoke
the poet’s mother tried to hang herself in the kitchen.
That’s all I know about the Red Guard.
It is enough.
The elderly poet is bitter—
and why not?
She earned her Ph.D. at an Ivy League school
and returned to China in 1948. Bad timing.
She is bitter with me
because I’ve chosen to translate a younger poet,
young enough to be her child or mine.
The truth is, her poems are forced,
but not flowering. The good work died in the stove.
She knows this. She wants me to recompose them
from the ashes. She wants the noose
around her mother’s neck untied by me.
She wants—oh she wants!—to have her whole life over:
not to leave America in 1948;
to know me when we are both young promising poets.
Her rusty English now is flawless,
my Mandarin, so long unused, is fluent.
No dictionaries needed. A perfect confidence
flowing between us. And the Red Guard,
except as the red sword-lilies
that invigilate the garden,
unimagined by us both:
I, who believe the Reds are agrarian reformers,
she, who believes she will be an honored poet,
her name known to everyone, safe in her fame.
Robert Creeley (1926 – 2005)
Heaven1
Wherever they’ve
gone they’re
not here
anymore
and all
they stood
for is empty
also.
I Know a Man1
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness surrounds
us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
I’ll Win2
I’ll win the way
I always do
by being gone
when they come.
When they look, they’ll see
nothing of me
and where I am
They’ll not know.
This, I thought, is my way
and right or wrong,
it’s me. Being dead, then,
I’ll have won completely.
Old Days1
River’s old look
from summers ago
we’d come to swim
now yellow, yellow
rustling, flickering
leaves in sun
middle of October
water’s up, high sky’s blue,
bank’s mud’s moved,
edge is
closer,
nearer than then.
Place (“There’s a Way out”)2
There’s a way out
of here but it
hurts at the edges
where there’s no time left
to be one if
you were and friends
gone, days seemingly
over. No one.
Thanksgiving’s Done1
All leaves gone, yellow
light with low sun,
branches edged
in sharpened outline
against far-up pale sky.
Nights with their blackness
and myriad stars, colder
now as these days go by.
Galway Kinnell (b. 1927)
St. Francis and the Sow2
The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops
to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats
into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
James Wright (1927 – 1980)
A Blessing1
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
to welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely,
they can hardly contain their happiness
that we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in
the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
for she has walked over to me
and nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
her mane falls wild on her forehead,
and the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
that is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
that if I stepped out of my body I would break
into blossom.
Beginning1
The moon drops one or two feathers into the fields.
the dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon’s young, trying
their wings.
Between trees,
a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
of her face, and now she steps into the air,
now she is gone
wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
and I lean toward mine.
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota2
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
asleep on the black trunk,
blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
the cowbells follow one another
into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
in a field of sunlight between two pines,
the droppings of last year’s horses
blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
Irving Feldman (b. 1928)
The Dream2
Once, years after your death, I dreamt
you were alive and that I’d found you
living once more in the old apartment.
But I had taken a woman up there
to make love to in the empty rooms.
I was angry at you who’d borne and loved me
and because of whom I believe in heaven.
I regretted your return from the dead
and said to myself almos
t bitterly,
“For godsakes, what was the big rush,
couldn’t she wait one more day?”
And just so, daily somewhere Messiah
is shunned like a beggar at the door because
someone has something he wants to finish
or just something better to do, something
he prefers not to put off forever
—little pleasures so deeply wished
that Heaven’s coming has to seem bad luck
or worse, God’s intruding selfishness!
But you always turned Messiah away
with a penny and a cake for his trouble
—because wash had to be done, because
who could let dinner boil over and burn,
because everything had to be festive for
your husband, your daughters, your son.
Donald Hall (b. 1928)
My mother said1
My mother said, “Of course,
it may be nothing, but your father
has a spot on his lung.”
That was all that was said: My father
at fifty-one could never
speak of dreadful things without tears.
When I started home,
I kissed his cheek, which was not our habit.
In a letter, my mother
asked me not to kiss him again
because it made him sad.
In two weeks, the exploratory
revealed an inoperable
lesion.
The doctors never
told him; he never asked,
but read The Home Medical Guidebook.
Seven months later,
just after his fifty-second birthday
—his eyesight going,
his voice reduced to a whisper, three days
before he died—he said,
“If anything should happen to me … “
Names of Horses1
All winter your brute shoulders strained
against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
The Giant Book of Poetry Page 37
