Because you discovered that

the world was not yours, your world

 

crashed. Your world

 

that just because was not yours

crashed but not because of you

 

Until you stand up now

to a world that stands on nothing

 

 

 

You want to continue

after everything had come to pass, after everything

 

was made known. Now

 

the voices are calm, no longer

one utters a word that once

 

had its use. The self had use

 

for the self, you wished to say

in the end to commemorate what passes for life

 

 

 

You will write

yourself. You will write

 

on every word you will choose

 

in order to submit yourself

to every word you will renounce

 

in order to once again fail

in every renunciation

 

 

 

On the day you need

to say goodbye, you cannot walk away from

 

your room. At the last moment

 

you will decide to slip it inside your pocket

There’s your bed, small table, lamp

 

for reading. You will travel

 

from thereon without leaving

your room. In your frequent reentry

 

into it, you need to always ask for permission

 

Each day, you cannot walk away from

your room. Inside your pocket

 

every last moment, you slip it in

 

 

 

At this moment, you curse once again having lived

for art

translated from Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim

— to l.z.

 

this is your tree, river, lawn,

your big house, your america.

this is your life on another planet,

you slow down the car to lead me through foothills,

like a documentary of private life on the wide screen.

 

reprints by impressionists hang on the living room wall,

your daughter’s toys piled high on the floor,

daytime when your husband goes to manhattan,

and your child to kindergarten, the streets fall silent

except for conversation between vacuum and lawn mower,

on the treadmill, like a toy train

on its oval track you go around and around…

 

here i am surprised by a sense of strangeness,

not that you have already changed your nationality

or become someone’s wife, i am

surprised that your wanderings have so soon come to the end—

the dreamed-of happy land of our youth

already abbreviated into a comfort cage,

and on the thick velvet couch,

once we speak of china, your mouth curls in a smirk.

 

i am saddened that you have missed an epic change in time,

a myth of time upended amid reality;

every one of your years here,

is a day that we have spent back home.

twilight, i return to the hotel in queens,

put my coat on the back of the chair, before my eyes

that wild girl floats by, loving

freedom more than carmen depicted by mérimée, walking

among marchers in a parade, like a goddness painted by delacroix.

 

…memory retains nothing but the kite’s spool,

i know i can no longer take you home,

even blessings seem unnecessary.

no one to entrust a mission, deep in the night

i dream of myself one step over the pacific,

back to fire-bright smoke-thick battlefields,

loading crossbows and shooting down those toxic suns. 

translated from Chinese by Dong Li

not a drop last night, yet i woke

feeling hung over—at a hotel

before a steamed mirror, in shock, i

listened to the city’s river of traffic. here

i know a friend, who brushed his gifts aside

and scurried to capture cheap praises; a

classic literature professor, who loved his words more

than he did others; a girl, a music school grad

lost a love yet fell in love with this place,

had three jobs and precious little sleep,

—sadder than this was the passion drained away

from several generations in a flash, all of them

rushing ahead, cursing, complaining,

like countless rusty swords impelled to stick together—

a usual spring day, who amongst them

could discern my exacting wishes?

let them keep the best face on the past.

let me pass by without a visit and continue my journey—

throat dry, tongue scorched by soldering iron,

words swirl in dazed mind, so slow to come,

thus the need to pray year after year,

embrace rain showers repeatedly, landscapes and forked roads.

frail like tree shadow, in the puddles of the road

i feel the pain of being rolled over by wheels;

i am cold, because there is no light on the other side,

when people meet, lanterns are turned down low. 

translated from Chinese by Dong Li

Walking through the cemetery, the most fitting place

to think over a résumé, I try to recall the tarot card

that could calm me down. I know you all will return again

for the love that moves men beneath the stars’ clockwork.

And yet I’m here, seeing you all beyond the tranvía glass,

the chain of these events. Like when I was a boy,

I read your poems nestled in the night’s soul and I hear you

like a pilot dodging wood and granite crosses.

Since then we’ve been alone, no one’s shown up to join us,

and this squall, hollow day is the only consolation.

They’ve gone, the words I still can’t speak

and the squirrels that, given the chance, scamper among the oaks.

Take pity, I tell the lights glimmering beyond the pond

and the doves sleeping in the elderberry, bidding farewell

the carpenter’s hair, my friend, like someone lost in the dark.

From the craggy earth a wildflower grows in its own way.

The reign of lovers descends over abandoned houses

and June’s strawberries. The flash hardly lasted a minute,

but I shine because of you, my heart of hearts, in the cage

of the Empress and crickets.

translated from Spanish by Patrick Marion Bradley

As for us, afire with the mission of the Flood,

make the night a canto for bluest affections.

Dark as they are in the nightwatch marblework,

leave them the evening to speak the forgiveness

they’ve sought from those they could not find.

Choose there thy daily bread, they will give you

one thing: beauty, if you find them truly human,

and divorce like ebbing tides the anger from the terms.

They’re with God, they tie his laces; imagine it,

the shame, to boot them over the edge now.

Alone, for even less than asked, the dove leaves the Ark

and flies back with a hook in its mouth.

The widows’ truce returns to the tailor’s home

from the far edge of the floodwaters.

Nothing changes with the weight of precaution,

this is what we’ve come to believe.

It’s tough to consider where what wasn’t was,

how he will sort them out to persuade

each night’s gatekeeper of the Presence.

Boil water for both, for both the frost settles

over the olive trees and those that sew, sew until sunrise.

translated from Spanish by Patrick Marion Bradley

        the objects

their erect

        presence    

     their flickering form

or their shadow

to measure the body

or to neglect it

Morandi walks along the boundaries

navigates a field

of wild violets

and rises toward things

        the vase

            the bottle

               the empty cup

               again and again

        and again

plunge from shadow

     into light

glow in the open

and tremble

        for the hand

        trembles

and the eye

        trembles

before the vast

        silence

of the world

translated from Spanish by Hugo García Manríquez

        Cannot

                 the bird

                 sing?

        Or can it –– the bird?

 Singing is

        but

        a sun

 Does

        the bird

        know its sun?

 Is knowing versed

        in what the bird

                 cannot

                 sing?

 Nonetheless

        the bird

        sings

        without knowing

 What

        then is knowing?

 If the bird

        without knowing

                 sings

 the river

        without knowing laughs

 the wind without knowing

                 filters

        its sweet sound

        among the

                 branches

 In what is knowing versed in?

 Does the bird

        perchance

        know

where sounds

        come from?

 Voice

        sound

        whistle

 Does the learner know?

translated from Spanish by Hugo García Manríquez

The village windows are aglow at night

At each window sits a youth, pensive, dreamy

 

The village is asleep, but time crawls on

On the poor little workbench – meager little tools

 

The ceiling is low and the doorstep is low

Oh, the heft of all the world on each youth.

 

In the quiet of night, in the quiet of the valley,

There! See that boy, hard as steel.

 

In the quiet of the steppe, undisturbed by anyone

See another, deep as the earth. 

 

In the charcoal fumes, the smoke of night’s light

See a third, bright as the heavens. 

 

And the heart quivers and the heart awakens

On poor little windows the world stirs, shifts.

 

And this time, with a mouth parched, bound by fever

I will rise up to you and say this:

 

From tiny meager rooms in this mammoth land

The bold demand rises in the distance.

 

In the poor night’s light fuzzy with smoke

Stars reveal themselves, flicker in the skies. 

 

Youths carry them – barefoot and naked—

Rolled up and wrapped in village women’s kerchiefs

 

An aleph in the mouth, but with sorrow they carry

From doorsteps, barefoot – the stars, the world. 

translated from Yiddish by Rose Waldman

The sea fevers for night’s arrival

The distance is pensive, lost in thought

 

A blue stillness, such a stillness

Somewhere a sailboat has tarried

 

A sail – a cradle with childish sleep

And stillness swings up onto the new moon, dangles

 

And swings like that and rocks like that

On the silver rim, on the silver edge.

 

In a tiny silver nap, it dozes off

And a tiny star drops into the cradle.

 

The sea is set out like a silver bed

And stars lie there, spellbound

 

If the new moon lays a path over the sea,

A mirrored path over the stillness of the sea,

 

And charms and enchants and wakes and calls—

Well then, who doesn’t become intoxicated? Who doesn’t get stirred up?

 

So in the middle of the night who will skate

With the stars on the silver wake? 

 

Skate like that on the mirrored rim

Together with the stars, side by side,

 

Come as a silver one to the new moon

And put to sleep the parched mouth in the cradle? 

 

If such sparkle of passion and desire keeps trickling,

Who there will prevent me from being a child?  

translated from Yiddish by Rose Waldman

And no calm is coming, no plenitude—

On growth and on regrowth a wager!

 

A wager, a wager, and an eclipse

If only distance and height will suffice.

 

The heart isn’t filled, the brain isn’t sated,

The farmer in the field, the craftsman in the workshop

 

Feeds the field concealed in dreams.

The farmer doesn’t sleep, he wakes and he wants

 

The rye to be ample, abundant

Seven persons shall carry a grain.

 

A hindrance is no hindrance, labor doesn’t thwart

Neither heart nor head snuffs itself out.

 

Eyes phosphor from heights and ideals

At the wheel of a machine a youth is a-dream:

 

And where there’s one – let there be seventy now,

Joy should multiply for sweat, for pain.

 

But the mouth is parched, bound by fever.

So I’ll rise up to you and tell you this:

 

Each seed of time is expensive, so dear

But not for sale – no, for planting!

 

In the spring the land is plowed and green,

So reduce the time and improve the ilk

 

Increase the wager and reduce the toil—

The land is so tired from rising and moving.

translated from Yiddish by Rose Waldman

In a dream       the man with the indistinct face

I praised him three times, beat on him three times

On waking       near me had assembled many beautiful people;

I am coarse, I am tender

when you rush at the horizon’s flowing clouds, giggling like an idiot

twisting your sprinting knee till it snaps       like twisting

a sparrow’s neck till it snaps…where we stop

we remember some things that once bloomed

fresh flowers          buried shallow in the split-open soul

translated from Chinese by Nick Admussen

Have I ever been content? Have I ever renounced hostility?

Have I ever trembled in love without reason or cause?

An old star lights the provincial government     heaped bodies in the weeds

under a red regime I find a self as yet unnamed

he is precisely as incomplete              as he is exquisite

At night he can’t get to sleep            when he sleeps

he opens the eyes of the owl so wide —  

the moon’s shadow goes west           the thief has fallen asleep in his dream!

translated from Chinese by Nick Admussen

While you search for something

everything makes me search for you

but you slip my pursuit like a phantom.

You mummify my longing with this absence

and leave my bags on the platform.

I abandon this train.

I had hoped you might come to me

but now I unfurl my sails

hoping you will be a wind to take me, perhaps to our port.

Caravans of travelers caught on layover

realize their dreams are shut up in an iron coffin.

I remain on land forgetting departure

knowing the desert is stupefied every year by the burgeoning palms.

Wishing you would come

I postpone age. I postpone my struggle

and let time butcher me in my prime.

No one knows why women die waiting for twilight.

Why men die murderous in their desire.

Yet we live to love, as two strangers long to cross paths on a city bus.

You know that you will come to the platform’s darkness

where my heart appears behind the train’s windows,

and you’ll wave to me in the last seconds.

I cannot step off. I cannot step in.

Eventually we will know what happened between us.

The heart will have no right to beat anymore.

I repine on my seat

and a strangeness passes over me, certifying my solitude,

certifying the many cigarettes I shared, stranded, waiting long with others.

Clouds of smoke filled our room, flying easterly against the westbound trains

and snatching my baggage as required. We agreed, the smoke and I,

to leave love’s memory in the ink-black Tigris.

It is the heart that comes and goes suddenly

no matter its beating now.

No, I will not hunt for your childish face in this billowing smoke.

I will just lay down my head on the shoulder of impossibility

and, after waiting for you, refuse to relinquish departure’s roughness.

translated from Arabic by Francesca Bell & Noor Nader Al Abed

1. Mirror Trick

 

Of course I know her.

She is one and many,

A multitude flashing on, then

Blinking off—on, off—

Watching out from the tidy blank

of her face. She is silent, speaking

With just her mind. She is flesh, a form,

but also flat, a mute screen.

What she offers you, by no means

Should you accept.  She belongs to no-one,

sitting like a ghost beyond her own reach.

 

And yet, she’s there—I mean me—

Behind glass, as if the world has been cleaved,

Though something whole remains,

Roving, free, a voice with poise and pitch.

 

She’s there—me—snug in the glass,

The little mirror on the bedside

Doing its one trick

A hundred times a day.

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

 

2. Turkish Bath

 

The room is choked with nudes.

Once, a man barged in by mistake

Crying, “Turkish bath!” He had no idea

My door is always locked in this heat,

No idea that I am the sole guest and client,

The chief consort, that I cast my gaze

Of pity and absolute pride across

The length of my limbs—lithe, pristine—

The bells of my breasts singing,

The high bright note of my ass,

My shoulders a warm chord

The chorus of muscle that rings

Ecstatic.  I am my own model.

I create, am created, my bed

Is heaped with photo albums,

Socks and slips scatted on a table.

A spray of winter jasmine wilts

In its glass vase, dim yellow, like

Despondent gold. Blossoms carpet

The floor, which is a patchwork

Of pillows. Pick a corner sleep in peace.

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

 

3. Curtain Habit

 

The curtain seals out the day.

Better that way to let my mind

See what it sees (every evil under the sun),

Or to kneel before the heart, quiet king,

Feeling brave and consummately free.

Better that way to let all that I want

And all I believe swarm me like bees,

Or ghosts, or a cloud of smoke someone

Blows, beckoning. I come. I cry out

In release. I give birth

To a battery of clever babies—triplets,

Quintuplets, so many all at once.

The curtain seals in my joy.

The curtain holds the razor out of reach,

Puts the pills on a shelf out of sight.

The curtain snuffs shut and I bask in the bounty

Of being alive. The music begins.

Love pools in every corner.

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

 

4.  Self-Portrait

 

The camera snaps. Spits me out starkly ugly.

 

So I set out to paint the self within myself.

 

It took twelve tubes, blended to a living tint,

 

Before I believed me. I named the mixture Color P.

 

The hair—curious, unlikely—is my favorite,

 

The same fluff of bangs tickling my niece’s face.

 

And my eyebrows are wide as hills. They swallow everything.

 

They were a feat.  They do not impress me as likely to age.

 

They are brimming with wisdom. Neither slavish nor stern.

 

Not magnificent, but not the kind made to crumple in shame.

 

Not prudish.  Unwilling to arch and beckon like a whore’s. 

 

They skitter away from certainties like alive or dead. 

 

My self-portrait hangs on the narrow wall,

 

And I kneel down to it every day. 

 

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

 

5.  Impromptu Party

 

The little table is draped with a festive cloth, and

Light blurs out from a single lamp, making us fuzzy.

 

A sip of red wine, and I rise to my feet. We are

Dancing, my guests and I, like kids in a ballroom.

 

We don’t smile or even speak.  We’ve had a lot to drink.

 

To a single woman, time is like a scrap of meat:

Nothing you can afford to give away. I want

 

To hold it in my lap, Time, that sneak, that thief already

Scheming to break free.  Please—I beg

 

Upon the magnificent extravagance of my beloved stilettos,

I want the world back.  I’ve been alive—could it be?—

 

Near a century. My face has closed up shop. 

My feet are a desolate country. 

 

For a single woman, youth is a feast that lasts

Only until it is gone.

 

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

 

6.  Invitation

 

When it arrived, I was interrupted by relief,

Sitting in my rattan chair, feeling the wind ease in

Through the hole in my life.

 

I only said yes because of his dissertation. Friends,

Nothing more. We talked—he talked—about modernism,

Black humor. But always at a distance from reality.

 

Why didn’t he ask anything of me?

Tender and petulant, he struck me as cute.

But at heart, only a very well-behaved boy.

 

He offers his arm. Elegant, decent, gallant.

But how can I prove myself a woman

If he is a child? What can come of that union?

 

Can any of us save ourselves? Save another?

 

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

 

7. Sunday Alone

 

I don’t picnic on Sundays.

Parks are a sad song; I steer clear.

But I dug out all my sheet music,

I lolled about in the Turkish Bath

Singing from breakfast to tea.

With my hair, I sang Do

And my eyes, Re

And my ear sounded Mi

And my nose went after Fa

My face tilted back and out rose Sol

My mouth breathed La

My whole body birthed Si

Like my cousin said, famously—

Music is the soul sighing.

Music pushes back against pain.

Solitude is great (but I don’t want

Greatness). My eyes slump

Against the walls. My hair

Hurls itself at the ceiling like a colony

Of bats.

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

 

8.  Dialectic

 

I read materialist philosophy—

Material ispeerless.

But I’m creationless.

I don’t even procreate.

What use does the world have for me

Here beside my reams of cock-eyed drafts

That nick away at the mountain of

Art and philosophy?

Firstly, Existentialism.

Secondly, Dadaism.

Thirdly, Positivism.

Lastly, Surrealism.

Mostly, I think people live

For the sake of living.

Is living a feat?

What will last?

My chief function is obsolescence.

Still, I send out my stubborn breath

In every direction. I am determined

To commit myself to a marriage

Of connivance.

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

 

9.  Downpour

 

Rain hacks at the earth like an insatiable man.

Disquiet, like passion, subsides instantly.

Six distinct desires mate, are later married.

At the moment, I want everything and nothing.

The rainstorm barricaded all the roads. Sandbags.

Isn’t there something gladdening about a dead-end?

I canceled my plans, my trysts, my escapes.

For a moment—I almost blinked and missed it—the storm

Stopped the clock that chases me. The clock of the heart, maybe.

It was an ecstasy so profound…

“Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!”

I’d rather admit despair. And die.

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

 

10. Dream of Symbolism

 

I occupy the walls that surround me.

When did I become so rectilinear?

I had a rectilinear dream:

The rectilinear sky in Leo:

The head, for a while, shone brightest.

Next the tail.  After a while

It became a wild horse

Galloping into the distances of the universe,

Lasso dragging behind, tethered to nothing.

There are no roads in the black night that contains us.

Every step is a step into absence.

I don’t remember the last time I saw

A free soul. If she still exists, fire-eyed gypsy,

She’ll die young.

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

 

11. Birthday Candles

 

They are like heaps of stars.

My flat roof is like a private galaxy

That stretches on stubbornly forever.

 

The universe created us by chance,

Our birth a tidy accident.

Should life be cherished or lavished?

Showered with confetti or pelted with rocks?

 

God announces: Happy Birthday.

Everyone raises a glass and giggles audibly.

Death gets clearer in the distance. Closer by a year.

 

Because all are afraid, none is afraid.

It’s pity how fast youth sputters and burns,

Its flame like the season’s last peony.

A bright misery.

 

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

 

12.  Cigarette

 

I lift it to my lips, supremely slim,

Igniting my desire to be a woman.

I appreciate the grace of the gesture,

Cosmopolitan, a shorthand for beauty,

The winding haze off the tip like the chaos of sex.

Loneliness can be sweet. I re-read the paper.

The ban on smoking underway

Has gotten a bonfire of support. A heated topic,

Though I find it inflammatory. A sputtering drag.

A contest between low-lives and sophisticates,

Though only time knows which is which.

Tonight I want to commit a victimless crime.

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

 

13.  Thinking

 

I spend all my spare time doing it.

I give it a name: walking indoors.

I imagine my life is a melodrama

In which I possess all that I lack.

I flesh-out storylines. What never

Happens becomes a waking dream,

The kind that gets revealed at season’s end.

It’s impossible to think of everything.

Thinking of what I am afraid to say

Keeps my better judgment at bay.

I lose track. I look up, allowing thoughts

To collect.  It is like having a garage

Full of props from a period movie.

It is like a republic with exacting rules

Regarding departure and re-entry. My visa’s

In-process. I want to settle, though like anyone,

I worry it’s overpopulated already.

You didn’t come to live with me.

 

14.  Hope

 

This city of riches has fallen empty.

Small rooms like mine are easy to breech. People

Have taken to bodyguards, guardians. Still,

I come and go, always alone, fat with fear.

My flesh has forsaken itself.

Strangers’ eyes drill into me till I bleed.

I beg God: make me a ghost.

Something invisible blockades every road.

I wait for you night after night with a hope beyond hope.

If you come, will nation rise up against nation?

If you come, with the Yellow River drown its banks?

If you come, will the sky blacken and bleed?

Will your coming decimate the harvest?

There is nothing I can do in the face of all I hate.

What I hate most is the woman I’ve become.

You didn’t come to live with me.

translated from Chinese by Changtai Bi & Tracy K. Smith

V

The lid, already loosened by the fall to the ground,

flopped to the left and then broke off completely.

The face of the dead Theresie Kleinpeter gazed

up into the blue-gray winter sky.

 

IV 

Into its rippling waves it fell, with a frothy rumble,

and then floated off with the current.

Picking up speed, it hit a rock

bulging from the river’s mirror.

 

III

In the narrowest part of the ravine, the coffin began to move.

It rushed down the rocky slide, 

racing over the clean and icy snow

right into the heart of the Kamnitz, the wild, unfrozen river.

 

II

Maybe it was Anton Dinnebier who slipped

as he carried the coffin’s front left corner, maybe a frozen branch tripped up

Franz Hieke, and Franz Kessler and Karel Hegenberger

could not rescue the situation.

 

I

Winter, the funeral procession, frost and tears, the women draped

in black woolen scarves and jackets, the men

in raven coats, huddled, bearded, hunched,

a drop of mourning dropping, now and then, from their gray eyes.

 

 

from Molchloch (Newttown, 2004)

translated from Czech by Jonathan Bolton

They took my father off to the war, and my older brothers too. The winter was bitter cold, ribbons of smoke rose vertically over the roofs of the houses, each of us carried a log for the school stove to keep ourselves warm. The teacher was kind and didn’t beat us much, but he always had his cane to hand. Once it had been snowing all morning and I was coming back for lunch. I recognized the path to our house only by the rough-hewn fence posts, half covered in snow. I reached the door, pulled on the handle and … it was bolted shut. I pounded and screamed: Mama! Open up! Mama!

    To this day I remember every groove and knot in the wooden door, as well as the neighbors carrying out my mother, she was covered in blood, and placing her on the wagon. They carried me off, dazed, hungry, frozen, to spend the night at my aunt’s. I stayed with her until my father came back from the front.

 

 

from Nebožky / Selige (Departed Women, 2011)

translated from Czech by Jonathan Bolton

I have an eagle’s nose and a narrow face

and they call me – Vogelbird.

 

My husband demanded nothing from life,

he was kind and mute,

but I had two children with him.

 

I wandered with them among the sandstone cliffs.

The children crawled through holes in the rocks,

gathering up sticks and snail shells.

I was looking for a Root of Bewilderment,

but he appeared instead.

His watery, bewitching eyes

broke my abandoned heart.

 

We would meet at night

while my husband slept,

and we made love, our bodies covered in cuts from the sharp sedge.

I cried out so madly

the frightened birds hopped about

in the surrounding trees.

 

He whispered to me:

Beautiful Beaklet! Black fairy! Little one!

 

A shiny glaze always

covered my brown eyes

when I parted with him in the morning.

 

As tends to happen with fiery signs,

passion soon gave way

to wrath.

With what force did he

bind me to him?

With what enchantments did he bewitch me?

By what right did he

take possession of me?

And I stopped walking among the rocks.

 

Often I would hear his drawn-out,

howling call.

I plugged up my ears

with a loving horror

and locked up in my body

the bubbling spring

he awakened in me.

 

Forever will I hear

those whispered words of stone:

Beautiful Beaklet! Black fairy! Little one!

 

 

from Nebožky / Selige (Departed Women, 2011)

 

translated from Czech by Jonathan Bolton