IRISES AND GRASSHOPPER

Client in a house of courtesans, tableau
of masculine and feminine.
The irises lie back, languorous, dark pink
at the centers and lighter at limbs.
The grasshopper, in his armor, grips the green
blade. Proximity is ecstasy
enough. A homesick soldier will kneel
at any woman’s bed, to lose his mind beside
the nakedness of corolla and calyx.

After the woodblock print “Irises and Grasshopper”
by Katsushika Hokusai, 1760-1849, Japan

*

A CHILD’S NIGHTMARE OF GHOSTS

Because the young are so capable
of dying, unsure of what’s real in the world,
the territorial ghosts exploit them.
The torment is real. The mother lays
down her sewing needle
and watches the changing weather of her
child’s features. It is theater,
and weakness to look, before
waking him. The thrill of a fish wrestling
with a hook, from a balcony of boat.

After the woodblock print “A Child’s Nightmare of Ghosts”
by Kitagawa Utamaro, 1756-1806, Japan

Read More »

A GIRL AT CHRISTMAS

The choir that cannot die.
Fish and fennel. Snow. Christmas
tree, clover and pomegranate.

For all she’s gladdened: milk
which is love dreaming in one
hand; clefts of clementine stain

the other. They cannot die,
these tribal ornaments, coral
joy, battering ceramic, peach

bones. Scotch bonnet seeds.
She then belts her savage choir
and dances herself into a festival.

*

VERS DE SOCIÉTÉ

Some meager talk of Larkin
over quiche and pâté, olives
the proclaimed ragamuffin
picked at as though our lives;

circumspect, the neutral host
blanched at pills and diaphragm,
shook her clipped head of frost,
insist he please changed from

that cold brute, to where life
is modest, the islands, perhaps,
not this social phalanx;
but he answered, none too vexed:

that’s the drivel of some bitch;
a gulf caved into her face;
the champagne flattened to piss;
cardiac breath, no one flaked,

waiting for blood on the ice,
an extremity, voice rifted
on voice; burred, tender, polite
in one spur, like crisped pomfret

forked in the … Read More »

Translated by Victoria Lampard and Heather Cleary

From “Ultramarina,” a contemporary opera by Marcelo Lombardero, with music by Pablo Mainetti and a libretto by Edgardo Cozarinsky, based on his novel “El rufián moldavo” (Emecé 2004). “Ultramarina” premiered in “Hasta Trilce” in April 2014. The excerpt that follows is a play on tango kitsch sung by a prostitute named Perla.

A CLEAN SLATE

If I could spit out all the kisses
That tainted my young lips…

If I could wash away the scratch of
of all those god-forsaken sheets…

If I could wipe away the caresses
that consumed my skin, then I could love you.

Oh how I wish you were my first,
the one who lied to me a thousand times.

(Does it matter? It is a man’s way to lie
to a woman, and love her all the same),

How I wish you could see me as I once was,
and … Read More »

translated by Carys Evans-Corrales

“What’s wrong here is that we don’t know
how to sell ourselves,” your fellow tenants
would always complain.
But when that guy who really had a handle on it
moved into Apartment B, fifth floor,
the whole building soon began to stone him from their little
balconies.

A cowering disc. Appropriating hens.
If all of our imaginary fades away, where then
are the organs with which we forget?

To raise, it took multitudes;
to demolish: just a handful of folks.

*

PRETENDING THAT THE PAIN SHE FEELS IS PAIN

My looks suggest I like
things that I do not.

Everyone speaks through
closed lips.

As does this.
The walls of a grotto where, ten thousand years ago,
someone sullies the natural essence of the stone.
Coins, alternating current,
a girl born with beauty in her genes,
pock-marked by hang-ups.
Like an orgasm in Hedy Lamarr, like Nikola Tesla’s eyes.
A country where one needn’t be,
but can merely
appear … Read More »

translated by Leah Leone

Diary of Vienna

A young boy carries a bucket of water. Its weight seems somehow lightened by the belief that the desiccated tree will come back to life if watered every day. The end of the story is less important than the image of his persistence—and his faith. I cannot conceive of anything more idiotic than faith, especially with respect to faits accomplis.  The tree is dead. The feeling I have is that death appropriates everything, as if taking something back something that had been his all along.

It is impossible to halt the processes that take over the body, after death. The body stops being a body, after death. Death arrogates the deepest, most intimate spaces. The darkness is complete, the silence, the body that continues but does not go on, after death. I am too … Read More »

A circular path is carved through your front yard.

Pink sinkholes gather in your medicine

cabinet. You exalt busted blenders like sophisms

scrawled by retired scholars.

Your life has become a shy puzzle,

a canyon of foreclosures,

an abandoned fish market.

The world has accused you of not being a world,

of loving meaningless songs,

and you have responded by raising your children to unravel

spools of red tape across cities of wax.

The promise … Read More »

reniform

free-arm comfort of raptor shadows
splashing skin with
dusk among the dwarf pines
shaped by wind eyes
carved on the antlertipped
spear haft
remember the damselfly
sifting through mulberry fumes
the sacked
and burned
half-ring
of bones

*

crosshatch

a limping auroch rooting in bracken
a stream-infested summer
humming among lice

cold-toe scents of dead ash
talk back
to the mouth of
the dolmen the glow worm
attempts
another
approach

*

aviform

shadows walking hold the
troubled hum
of night boulders pouring in
without the gift of drain
shadows entwine leave with arrive

snow vanishing in surf once
had a name
cloudmurk gums the ears
as rain pulls worms into day nothing
heartens like the scar sulphured or
the family reek of piss

*

circle

hear again which lairmauling by
which eye-scrabbing badger
again the kestrel-ground sands
that ambush the old
again which scorpioncloud pregnancy
after fingering hoof prints
for slow breathing
warning again before smoke replaces
hands and … Read More »

ALONG THE DUERO

A stork at the bell tower’s peak
circled around its height and around the home below
as the little swallows squealed. Dry winds have crossed
a long, long winter of snow, escaping the inferno.

_________Tomorrow, it might be nice.
Today, the sun bakes the poor earth of Soriana.

The pines are so green they’re
nearly blue and spring
electrifies the poplar blooms
along the highway
and the river, the Duero running gently, terse and mute.

The landscape isn’t innocent; it is down-soft, ripe and cleft.
In the weeds a solitary, shy flower unfolds,
blue—or white… Beauty, beauty tremendous: the meadow unflowered yet,
the mystic spring—

albas flanking the white streets and riverbanks poplar-flush,
and the frothing apex of the mountain
is outlined in remotest blue,
the daysun rising, clearest day—
enchanted, this vision of Spain!

*

THE GOLDEN APRIL MORNING SMILED…

The golden April morning smiled
_____and the pearl moon
slid
_____into the cleave
_________of the curved horizon,
with … Read More »

TO AN OLD FRIEND IN PARIS

I haven’t seen the ghost of your mother.
But I have seen your poems about the ghost
Of your mother as she brushes by you
Near the Seine, or as Linda Gregerson,
Or in the unseen acts guiding those poems
About the ghost of your mother, that chill
As you write that withers into something
Lithe, words for the weather suddenly flush
With lavender and salt, barked line breaks hush,
The poem opening like an ear pressed
Against the cold, clicking door of a safe.
Day comes to dark caves but darkness remains.
And the only way then to know a truth
Is to squint in its direction and poke.

*

LUCAS AND MARK

I sit sandwiched between two Chuck Closes:
Luckless “Lucas,” made up of small fat dots
Bursting against black-backgrounded colors,
His unkempt hair, unkempt beard, unkempt stare
Shot past the small bench between him and “Mark.”
No one in … Read More »

translated by Jennifer Croft

HOW WILL TERROR TAKE ROOT IN THE FUTURE?

We jump right in, head first.
The beginning is incredible. Halfway through
is incredible. You quit
smoking. We do the things
people do
under the influence
of talismans. You start
smoking again. You say
you’re not against me,
or against the people who are against me.
I can’t love someone
without knowing what they’re afraid of.
But you don’t think
about the future, you act
like it doesn’t exist, you configure
an idea of a present continuous
like the past doesn’t exist. Or
are we our past? You’re scared
of it, you don’t want for anything
to be gone and buried
with whatever else has already happened.
But some things of yours and mine
are gone,
some of the delight of that pink I put on.
When we drift off,
I have dreams about people going wild,
a flight attendant jumping out of a plane mid-air
who winds up fighting in Cambodia.
At dawn I wake … Read More »