Friday, June 15, 2007

To Clymène

Mystical singing-birds,
romances without words,
dear, because your eyes
the shade of skies,

because your voice, strange
vision that will derange,
troubling the horizon
of my reason,

because the rare perfume
of your swanlike paleness,
because the innocence
of your fragrance,

ah, because all your being,
music so piercing,
clouds of lost angels,
tones and scents,

has by soft cadences
with its correspondences,
lured my subtle heart, oh
let it be so!

By Paul Verlaine

My Familiar Drea

I often have this dream, strange and penetrating
of a woman, unknown, whom I love, who loves me,
and who’s never, each time, the same exactly,
nor exactly different, she knows me, she’s loving.

Oh she knows me, and my heart, growing
clear for her alone, is no longer a problem,
for her alone, she alone understands, then,
how to cool the sweat of my brow with her weeping.

Is she dark, blond, or auburn? – I’ve no idea.
Her name? I remember it’s vibrant and dear,
as those of the loved that life has exiled.

Her eyes are the same as a statue’s eyes,
and in her voice, distant, serious, mild,
the tone of dear voices, of those who have died.

By Paul Verlaine

The Graveyard Club

I meet B. in the graveyard.
She is my age, more or less.

I have been coming here for nine years,
every Sabbath - she explains -.
My little son died in his sleep.
A sudden death.
I had gone to work at the cannery.
My elder son, the seven year old, realized
that he could not wake him up
to go to school.

By Miren Agur Meabe

The Cold

Frost spat in my eyes
at four in the morning.
The sheets were clean,
but her lips are a puddle on the pillow.

I put on her stockings.
Now she has warm feet.
I thought she smiled at me.

They tolled the bell. Funeral rites.
I shall never again touch this body.

By Miren Agur Meabe

L’Allumette

Fire makes a body of the match.
A living soul with its own expression,
its own glory, its own short history.
The gas rising from it blazes;
bestowing wings, a costume, even a body:
a truly moving thing,
stirring.

It all happens so quickly!

Only the head has the power to catch fire
when it comes into contact with harsh
reality
- sounds like the crack of a starting pistol.
But, as soon as it takes hold,
the flame
- upright, swift, a sail blown like a racing yacht -
travels the length of its own wooden boom,

And hardly has it come about
it leaves
black as the hat of a parish priest.

By Francis Ponge

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

As someone on his back for months of illness

As someone on his back for months of illness
would leave the bed one morning; tries and tries
with little help from bone or muscle, striving
upward, he doubles over, cannot rise;
just so with me: I struggle against loving;
wish to believe what thought assures me of,
only cannot, cannot - no strength remaining
after the long infirmity of love.

By Ausiàs March

My November Guest

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so ryly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

By Robert Frost

The Pasture

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.
I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

By Robert Frost

Sí tosto come aven che l’arco scocchi

As soon as ever he has launched his arrows,
the expert archer can see from afar
which shots have gone astray, and those
he’s sure will hit the target he assigned:

so you knew the arrows from your eyes,
lady, had pierced straight to my deepest part,
and I’d be forced to weep eternally
because of the wound my heart received.

And I am certain of what you said then:
‘Wretched lover, where will crying lead him?
Behold the arrow by which Love hoped he’d die.’

Now, seeing how grief has bound me,
all that my enemies do with me now,
is not to kill me but increase my pain.

By Petrarch

And when you are gone

And when you are gone there will be no memory
Of you and no regret. For you do not share
The Pierian roses, but unseen in the house of Hades
You will stray, breathed out, among the ghostly dead.

By Sappho

Hopkins Forest

I'd gone out
to get water from the well, near the trees,
and I was in the presence of another sky.
Gone were the constellations
there a moment before.
Three fourths of the firmament was empty,
the intensest black shone there alone,
though to the left, above the horizon,
in among the tops of the oaks,
there was a mass of reddening stars
like firecoals, from which smoke even rose.

I went back inside
and re-opened the book on the table.
Page after page,
there were only indecipherable signs,
clusters of forms without any sense,
although vaguely recurring,
and beneath them an abyssal white
as if what we call the spirit
were falling there, soundlessly,
like snow.
Still, I went on turning the pages.

Many years earlier,
in a train at the moment when the day rises,
between Princeton Junction and Newark,
— that is to say, two chance places for me,
two arrows fallen out of nowhere —
the passengers were reading, silent
in the snow that was sweeping the gray windows,
and suddenly,
in a newspaper open next to me —
a big photograph of Baudelaire,
a whole page,
as if the sky were emptying at the world's end
in recognition of the chaos of words.
I put together this dream and this memory
when I walked, all of one fall,
in woods where snow would soon triumph,
among the many signs we receive,
contradictorily,
from the world devastated by language.
The conflict between two principles,
it seemed to me, was nearing an end,
two lights were becoming one,
the lips of a wound closing.
The white mass of the cold was falling in gusts
on color, but a roof in the distance, a painted
board, standing against a gate,
was color still, and mysterious,
like someone coming out of a tomb, laughing,
and telling the world, "No, don't touch me."

Truly I owe a lot to Hopkins Forest.
I keep it on my horizon, in that place
where the visible gives way to the invisible
in the trembling of the blue in the distance.
I listen to it, amid other sounds,
and at times even, in summer,
kicking the dead leaves of other years
lying as if lit in the shade of oaks
grown densely among stones,
I stop: I believe that the ground is opening
to the infinite, that the leaves are falling into it
without hurry, or coming up again,
above and below no longer existing,
or sound, only the light
whispering of snowflakes that soon
multiply, draw closer, bind together —
and then I see again the whole other sky,
I enter for a moment the great snow.

By Yves Bonnefoy

The Oldest Child

The night still frightens you.
You know it is interminable
And of vast, unimaginable dimensions.
"That's because His insomnia is permanent,"
You've read some mystic say.
Is it the point of His schoolboy's compass
That pricks your heart?

Somewhere perhaps the lovers lie
Under the dark cypress trees,
Trembling with happiness,
But here there's only your beard of many days
And a night moth shivering
Under your hand pressed against your chest.

Oldest child, Prometheus
Of some cold, cold fire you can't even name
For which you're serving slow time
With that night moth's terror for company.

By Charles Simic

Hotel Insomnia

I liked my little hole,
Its window facing a brick wall.
Next door there was a piano.
A few evenings a month
a crippled old man came to play
"My Blue Heaven."

Mostly, though, it was quiet.
Each room with its spider in heavy overcoat
Catching his fly with a web
Of cigarette smoke and revelry.
So dark,
I could not see my face in the shaving mirror.

At 5 A.M. the sound of bare feet upstairs.
The "Gypsy" fortuneteller,
Whose storefront is on the corner,
Going to pee after a night of love.
Once, too, the sound of a child sobbing.
So near it was, I thought
For a moment, I was sobbing myself.

By Charles Simic

‘Yo eschuco los cantos’

I follow the songs
with age-old rhythms
the children are singing
while they are playing
and showing in song
what their souls are dreaming,
like stone fountains
that show their water:
in monotonous murmurs
of undying laughter
that has in it no joy,
of ancient weeping
that has in it no pain
and speaks of sadness
the sadness of loving
of ancient legends.

In the mouths of children
the singing brings
the tale’s confusion,
pain that’s clear
as that clear water,
brings the message
of ancient love,
that it conceals.

Playing in shadows
of an ancient plaza
the children, singing…

The fountain of stone
poured out its eternal
crystal of legend.
The children were singing
innocent songs
of things that go on
and are never ending:
the story confused
the suffering clear.

The fountain serenely
continued its tale:
erasing the story,
telling the pain.

By Antonio Machado

The wisdom handed down by the ancients

The wisdom handed down by the ancients
breaks up into miserable fragments the moment I breathe
at every beat stasis renders it vain
confirmed and unsurprising.
How can we forget that the shades, the disquietudes
merely dissimulate rigid rest
a silence already immense?
The wisdom handed down by the ancients
therefore, must only be thought of
as the headlong flight of a herd
of animals pursued by fire:
a not unnatural, non-formal event
which happens many times in a life
and millions of times in every memory
and imagination – an event
both vital and mortal
and fundamental
which makes of existence an extinction
and not only the appearance of movement.

By Andrea Raos

Saturday, June 2, 2007

Myself

It’s filled with light, is
my heart of silk, and
with bells that are lost,
with bees and with lilies,
and I will go far off,
behind those hills there,
close to the starlight,
to ask of the Christ there
Lord, to return me
my child’s soul, ancient,
ripened with legends,
with a cap of feathers,
and a sword of wood.

By Federico Garcia Lorca

The house where I was born (01)

I woke up, it was the house where I was born,
Sea foam splashed against the rock,
Not a single bird, only the wind to open and close the wave,
Everywhere on the horizon the smell of ashes,
As if the hills were hiding a fire
That somewhere else was burning up a universe.
I went onto the veranda, the table was set,
The water knocked against the legs of the table, the sideboard.
And yet she had to come in, the faceless one,
The one I knew was shaking the door
In the hall, near the darkened staircase, but in vain,
So high had the water already risen in the room.
I took the handle, it was hard to turn,
I could almost hear the noises of the other shore,
The laughter of the children playing in the tall grass,
The games of the others, always the others, in their joy.

By Yves Bonnefoy

Close To Midnight

Close to midnight.
Flies dying in a glass.
The fire has died out.
Fair Vida, there is
sorrow in your memory.
Stravinsky in a car.
The roaring of the sea.
Oh, to be alone for 5 minutes.
The heart-Trieste is ill.
That is why Trieste is beautiful.
Pain blossoms in beauty.

By Srečko Kosovel

A Suicide in front of a Mirror

A suicide in front of a mirror.
A frightened soul.
The wind moans in the black woods.
The night's tempest tears my heart from my chest.


My spirit, you are the Flying Dutchman,
always returning to the primal darkness,
getting drunk on the blowing of the wind!
A policeman blowing his whistle.


It is frightening to be a brother to the storm!
Frightening to be a brother to the silver sun.
Stay broken and slain, my spirit,
do not look to the dead slopes for salvation.


I walk through the woods. The tree trunks are black.
Two go leaning towards each other.
The black chasm of the universe above me.
I am leaning into it
and listening.

I walk through the woods. The tree trunks are black.
Two go leaning towards each other.
The black chasm of the universe above me.
I am leaning into it
and listening.

By Srečko Kosovel

Homeless Poet Writing to His Love

I will build us a house made of words.
Nouns will be bricks
and verbs will be shutters.

With adjectives we will adorn
the window sills
as with flowers.

In perfect silence we will lie
beneath the baldachin of our love.
In perfect silence.

Our house will be too beautiful
and too fragile for us to endanger it
with an inflation of words.

And if we speak,
we will name objects
visible only to our eyes.

Because every verb
could shake the foundations
and demolish them.

Therefore, hush, mon amour,
hush, pour le beau demain
à notre maison.

By Peter Semolič