to attain divine wisdom in this life and the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring this good news to all people
on earth;
Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?
Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human existence
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered
but it was one place
And you weren’t here.
Adam Zagajewski (b. 1945)
Electric Elegy1
Translated from the Polish by Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry,
and C. K. Williams
Farewell, German radio with your green eye
and your bulky box,
together almost composing
a body and soul. (Your lamps glowed
with a pink, salmony light, like Bergson’s
deep self. )
Through the thick fabric
of the speaker (my ear glued to you as
to the lattice of a confessional) Mussolini once whispered,
Hitler shouted, Stalin calmly explained,
Bierut hissed, Gomulka held endlessly forth.
But no one, radio, will accuse you of treason;
no, your only sin was obedience: absolute,
tender faithfulness to the megahertz;
whoever came was welcomed, whoever was sent
was received.
Of course I know only
the songs of Schubert brought you the jade
of true joy. To Chopin’s waltzes
your electric heart throbbed delicately
and firmly and the cloth over the speaker
pulsated like the breasts of amorous girls
in old novels.
Not with the news, though,
especially not Radio Free Europe or the BBC.
Then your eye would grow nervous,
the green pupil widen and shrink
as though its atropine dose had been altered.
Mad seagulls lived inside you, and Macbeth.
At night, forlorn signals found shelter
in your rooms, sailors cried out for help,
the young comet cried, losing her head.
Your old age was announced by a cracked voice,
then rattles, coughing, and finally blindness
(your eye faded), and total silence.
Sleep peacefully, German radio,
dream Schumann and don’t waken
when the next dictator-rooster crows.
Moment1
translated from the Polish by Renata Gorczynski
Clear moments are so short.
There is much more darkness. More
ocean than firm land. More
shadow than form.
Andrei Codrescu (b. 1946)
Defense of the meek1
the meek have taken
jesus to mean
their turn will come
jesus was merely
stating a fact the meek
will inherit the earth
there are more of them
or he may have been mean
and a Buddhist and meant
the meek will return
to the earth over
and over until they get
it right sometimes
translation is on the side
of the meek but never
the commentary
Two fragments from Three Types of Loss, Part 32…
literal translations lose music while
poetic translations lose the original
…
the day is a literal translation
the night is a poetic translation
…
Larry Levis (1946 – 1996)
The Poem You Asked For1
My poem would eat nothing.
I tried giving it water
but it said no,
worrying me.
Day after day,
I held it up to the light,
turning it over,
but it only pressed its lips
more tightly together.
It grew sullen, like a toad
through with being teased.
I offered it money,
my clothes, my car with a full tank.
But the poem stared at the floor.
Finally I cupped it in
my hands, and carried it gently
out into the soft air, into the
evening traffic, wondering how
to end things between us.
For now it had begun breathing,
putting on more and
more hard rings of flesh.
And the poem demanded the food,
it drank up all the water,
beat me and took my money,
tore the faded clothes
off my back,
said Shit,
and walked slowly away,
slicking its hair down.
Said it was going
over to your place.
Brian Patten (b. 1946)
Party Piece1
He said:
’Let’s stay here
now this place has emptied
and make gentle pornography with one another,
while the party goers go out
and the dawn creeps in,
like a stranger.
Let us not hesitate
over what we know
or over how cold this place has become,
but let’s unclip our minds
and let tumble free
the mad, mangled crocodile of love!
So they did,
there among the woodbines and Guinness stains,
and later he caught a bus and she a train
and all there was between them then was rain.
Maura Stanton (b. 1946)
Living Apart1
I leave our house, our town, familiar fields
below me at take off when I fly to you
deep in these shadowed mountains. Now at dawn
I wake to the horse-clop of passing carriages
as if I’d passed through time as well as space.
Yesterday we saw an Amish farmer
bearded and calm, stroking his horse’s mane
under a flaming maple as he watched
hang-gliders drifting down from Hyner View.
We stopped to watch them, too. I was amazed
to see men falling toward the scarlet treetops
on out-spread wings. That’s when I grabbed your hand
to tell myself we were alive and human
not lost in hell which must resemble this—
a place where souls from many centuries
stand side by side, united but unhappy,
to watch the angels fall from fiery mountains.
Lorna Goodison (b. 1947)
Birth Stone2
The older women wise and tell Anna
first time baby mother,
“Hold a stone upon your head and follow
a straight line go home.”
For like how Anna was working in the
field, grassweeder
right up till the appointed hour
that the baby was to come.
Right up till the appointed hour
when her clear heraldic water
broke free and washed her down.
Dry birth for you young mother;
the distance between the field and home
come in like the Gobi desert now.
But your first baby must born abed.
Put the woman stone on your head
and walk through no man’s land
go home. When you walk, the stone
and not you yet, will bear down.
Kaylin Haught (b. 1947)
God
Says Yes to Me1
I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes
Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947)
Blackberries1
They left my hands like a printer’s
or thief’s before a police blotter
& pulled me into early morning’s
terrestrial sweetness, so thick
the damp ground was consecrated
where they fell among a garland of thorns.
Although I could smell old lime-covered
history, at ten I’d still hold out my hands
& berries fell into them. Eating from one
& filling a half gallon with the other,
I ate the mythology & dreamt
of pies & cobbler, almost
needful as forgiveness. My bird dog Spot
eyed blue jays & thrashers. The mud frogs
in rich blackness, hid from daylight.
An hour later, beside City Limits Road
I balanced a gleaming can in each hand,
limboed between worlds, repeating one dollar.
The big blue car made me sweat.
Wintertime crawled out of the windows.
When I leaned closer I saw the boy
& girl my age, in the wide back seat
smirking, & it was then I remembered my fingers
burning with thorns among berries too ripe to touch.
Camouflaging the Chimera1
We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,
blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird’s target.
We hugged bamboo & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slow-dragging with ghosts
from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
reaching in from America.
We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.
In our way station of shadows
rock apes tried to blow our cover
throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons
crawled our spines, changing from day
to night: green to gold,
gold to black. But we waited
till the moon touched metal,
till something almost broke
inside us. VC struggled
with the hillside, like black silk
wrestling iron through grass.
We weren’t there. The river ran
through our bones. Small animals took refuge
against our bodies; we held our breath,
ready to spring the L-shaped
ambush, as a world revolved
under each man’s eyelid.
Facing It1
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
no, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.
Ode to the Maggot1
Brother of the blowfly
and godhead, you work magic
over battlefields,
in slabs of bad pork
and flophouses. Yes, you
go to the root of all things.
You are sound & mathematical.
Jesus, Christ, you’re merciless
with the truth. Ontological & lustrous,
you cast spells on beggars & kings
behind the stone door of Caesar’s tomb
or split trench in a field of ragweed.
No decree or creed can outlaw you
as you take every living thing apart. Little
master of earth, no one gets to heaven
without going through you first.
Heather McHugh (b. 1948)
What He thought2
We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. The Italian literati seemed
bewildered by the language of America: they asked us
what does “flat drink” mean? and the mysterious
“cheap date” (no explanation lessened
this one’s mystery). Among Italian writers we
could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past.
Of all he was most politic—
and least poetic—so
it seemed. Our last
few days in Rome
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them? ) to whom
he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn’t
read Italian either, so I put the book
back in the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans
were due to leave
tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant,
and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,
sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked
“What’s poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables
and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori
or the statue there?” Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn’t have to think—“The truth
is both, it’s both!” I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest
to say. What followed taught me something
&nb
sp; about difficulty,
for our underestimated host spoke out
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:
The statue represents
Giordano Bruno, brought
to be burned in the public square
because of his offence against authority,
which was to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government
but rather is poured in waves, through
all things: all things
move. “If God is not the soul itself,
he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world.” Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die
they feared he might incite the crowd (the man
was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask
in which he could not speak.
That is how they burned him.
That is how he died,
without a word,
in front of everyone. And poetry—
(we’d all put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on softly)—poetry
is what he thought, but did not say.
Agha Shahid Ali (1949 – 2001)
The Dacca Gauzes1
… for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca
gauzes.
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Those transparent Dacca gauzes
known as woven air, running
water, evening dew:
a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. “No one
now knows,” my grandmother says,
“what it was to wear
or touch that cloth.” She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from
her mother’s dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.
Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys
were distributed among
the nieces and. daughters-in-law.
The Giant Book of Poetry Page 47
