Translations

based on An Experience by Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, translated by Mary Kinzie

Half-sleep filled my mouth with a taste
of phosphorescence as from magnesium
streaking through the sky. But there was no light.
Black fabric, the halves of my lungs
slipped past each other and I spoke in half-song
when I rose through the quivering
wax-paper ceiling to wake as my ghost.
I found such exceptional people
With tongues of smoldering coal, also lips
From which a white light glowed
Like the corona of an eclipse. Each moment
Was held by the tiny crests
Of passing thoughts. And I remembered
(having never experienced) --remembered
That this was death, transformed as music,
Craving; rough; and sweet and bright and dark,
Akin to deepest sadness.

based on The heart's crimson bird flies through the night by Hildegard Jone

A throat's silver tail sleeps through the alarm.
The mind's fish, limp in the stillness,
sinks below, here or there in the darkness.
But now a current licks the sea-grass.
They often die, those who are reborn
with new scales. And at last a start,
alive and unburdened, at birth's eyelid;
darting forward to new deaths.

based on Many-Tiered Man by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by the author and Robert Hass

When the newspaper rolls
It reports foolishness and humiliation
From the tossed doorsteps
that are red all over.

The many-tiered dog is walked.
The color is a crisp dawn
and the smell, a dead fox
or a bitch in heat.

He plays dead
for the vacant shirts
with their swirling eyes
speaking and sitting alternately.

What does he do?
He avoids punishment,
and chokes off his bark,
all that's left of his wormy heart.

based on Tribut to the Angels [30] by H. D.

We are shown a man running.
Chaos punctuates this frantic turn

or that leapt fence;
he swallows a smooth alley;

and descends a square
wearing the light from an open window; 

we see his fingers untie a doorknob
or conjure a keyhole just previous

from an overcoat that recalls
the angle of a brilliant Galaxy
when viewed through a lens;

we peer into this image,

where star follows star in the darkness;
there is no way to close the window.

based on an excerpt from to the light house, time passes, part nine, by virginia woolf

The world had ended; the world was perfected. It was hung like a bulb on a branch to reflect the fine dry light of Christmas morning. An eternal sun had risen; the queer ticks, fidgeting, the wandering fingers, riffling, were stilled. The bridegroom arrived and vows were exchanged. The wedding guests slept in their seats. Unconsciously, continuously, an enormous pumpkin plumped in the soil. A comet paused while dozing through the cosmos. Time arrived at an impasse; the clocks clasp shut; the universe collapsed in patches; mass was dismissed; a blast of trumpets sounds here or there near the exit. The button lodged deep in the brain is undone and has dissolved into tissue. An endless string of beads is threading itself through the hall; each room is filled with floating chairs; the sofa has soaked through the carpet; a sack of crabs hangs motionless from the ceiling; while the simultaneous coming of cause and consequence has become, in turn, a formless presence hovering over the surface of the water. Who could now deny the finality, the certainty of creation?

based on Star Turns by Charles Wright

Something just as ill fitted as the way instruments
Feel in the wrong hands or mistaking a stranger
For a lover, 
                That loose coupling,
With just a string between them,
Of expectation and actuality, and passing between them.
   
Something just as brash,
                The hurried, snatched apparitions
Illuminated and riffling, arrived and vanishing, never
Easing into continuum.
I often wait for their crazy narrative, I often stare unwavering
Into the center of the square,
                Overrunning, the boundless image.

based on For Anya by Robert Creeley

An “instant” is forever something from which I’ve just stepped
Away, the vestigial tail
Chasing its man, plain clothes with un-ruled,
Quibbling citizens, the high collar
Taut with starch and the loosing neck

I’m distracted, nitwitted, diverted again
and Here I am! –answers someone not myself.
While I am marked present,
Stacking the incessant packages,
Sorting out messages, trying to converge?

Alcohol’s vapors gather consensus,
a brief and uninterrupted unfolding.
Radiators squeal at pitches.
My arms arrange themselves logically:
One to my left, one to my right. 

I am alive and because of this I divide.
There are no snaps to fasten,
No seams to mend.
The “instant” is fractured but complete, I observe
It everywhere around me, and I in it.

based on Song for a man in doubt by Kathleen Fraser

The analytical engine
Our minds are drawn to the thing

Without explanation
We hide ourselves, a deleted paragraph 

An error in accounting that is caught
And corrected

And the body is made
Implausible through disease

Go
You’ve bled my arm and you’ve bled

All of me, the whimpering algorithms
Find their place among the dogs

Pacing narrow passages
(drivel in drivel out)

Our effect here is indirect and reciprocal
The air holds my face like cellophane

based on Crossing the water by Sylvia Plath

Swollen face, swollen gums, four mindless swollen molars.
Who plants the sick roots that drink here?
These bones nose around in the darkness,

where a thin river nourishes a litter of lipless mouths.
Born blind and numb:
They grow hard and fat and whisper insults. 

Warm salt seeps up the hollow of a throat.
A pulse is in me, it is in my nerves.
A switch opens a searing circuit; 

A crescendo builds and spills in the brain.
Are you not deafened by the unrelenting violence?
This is the flora of flesh and pulp.

The Observer (transfiguration)

Necessarily, one pauses mid-thought
To observe gathering icicles or branches
Attached at roots buried in snowfall;

Or else remains untaught
When witnessing light descending on the deciduous,
A white oak cloaked in particles

From the nearest star; without considering
The cleverness of it all,
A collecting of things,

Which is the habit of things
Full of similar properties
Yet scattered about
 
For observers, who observe thoughtlessly,
And, unthinking, do not discern 
Disorder which is not there from the order which is.
01.01.09

The Forest Fire (transfiguration)

One must have a mind of tinder
To regard as fuel the body
Of a pine tree engulfed in flame;

Or have been boiled a long time
To observe the jumpers padded with Kevlar,
The aces ascending the hazy glow

Of an August sky; and not to hope 
For the world to be extinguished
At the location of a few trees

Which is part of the world
Full of the same fire
That is burning in another place

For onlookers, who watch at a distance
And, with nothing at stake, behold
Nothing that is not theirs and the nothing that is.
01.02.09

News on Math (anagram)

Man, how I fear dentist venom. U
roar and froth, teeths bogged shut,
or u frown with stitch-nested epees

then become aged and ill avon
ladies or bewitched phone thugs. The jig
is up and I elect to trust higher strength.

I taunt u toothy nerd haf jan snonk!
“Oyi tet” he whines “Oyi no fun for D.D.S. man!
Don’t unleash weaves Fi Foe

F… etc. on us!” I howl it. “AHHHH! Sendd
me no awful filth! Des-
ist! Please, no blab witching the ear! Am
 
I not th’ hewer of nine tonsils th’ slewers
of blind dental gnomes? Shhh! I
shine it, th’ great ninth tooth, and taste nothing.
01.03.09

The Snowman (cartoon)

The Snowman 01.04.09

The Nomad

Once upon a time the winters
would frost the boughs regardless
of how the trees would pine;

and the cold, at that time,
held jumbo perch shaking below the ice
at distances which recalled the aloofness

of an adjacent sun; and none thought
of any winding in the movements of the sky,
in all the leaving and returning,

which is the way of the world
to wind full turns
to place above and bury below

a center, which spins in place,
and, unmoving itself, goes
nowhere but where it is.
01.05.09

The dough-man

One must have a mind of ginger
To regard the frosting bowls
And rolling pins crusted with flour;
 
And have been baked a long time
To behold the toothy grins flecked with icing
Each tooth brilliant with the present glitter
 
Of Holiday cheer; and not to feel
Any hunger in the pit of ones stomach
At the look of a tiny sleeve

Attached to a tiny man
Slathered with an icy stare
Which returns year after year
  
For the marauder, who hungers for dough
And, a man himself, devours
Small men by quarters then quarters himself.
01.06.09

Snowman, The

Is that the nothing, and is that nothing not
beheld by, himself nothing, who 
in the snow listens, the listener for whom

in the same bare place blows the
same wind which fills
the land with sound, which is

a few leaves sounding
the wind’s sound without any misery
which is not thought of; The January sun

glittering in the distance on rough spruces,
ice shagging junipers, beheld through
a long time of being cold and

snow with crusted pine trees of
boughs and frost regarded by
a winter mind, which must have one.
01.07.09

The Mindless Winter

There was once a mindless winter
which consumed the tops of houses
and the street-cars bustling to and fro

and any who attended to it
found their ploughs confounded
their shovels blunted by the persistent blizzard

of the mindless winter; many theorized
about the cause of the storm,
the course it might run,

what conclusion might follow,
roughly the same line of questioning
that was considered

before the winter, which was mindless,
and, unaware of itself, remained
perched on the world as a vast Lammergeier.
01.12.09

The Diploic

One must have a mind of gray matter
to survey in a panorama
a sequence of moments 

and a pair of sleepy peepers
to perceive the unfolding
without noticing any interruptions

in continuity; yet always be pointing out
the irony of it all,
the opposing meanings, 

which is the way of meanings
to oppose
something that may also be 

for the diploic, who see with two eyes,
and, doubling themselves, see
something there, and something else that is there also
01.13.09

Oscar

Oscar had a fist of fingers.
I forget the particulars
of his hand and adjoining man.

He was not old long
when he grasped unfamiliarity,
the ability to see freshness in the face

of a visiting lover; and there were
other things, some of great importance,
there were things he told me,

this was something he did
by manipulating muscles in his throat,
which was also a tube for feeding

the man, who anyway you look at it
and, looking himself, found
it much easier to learn than unlearn.
01.14.09

The lump

The octopus and wriggly tendrils
must have chosen shapes from the knots and snags
of your flaxen hair

and the stillest of lumpy things
are humbled by your pile of limbs
when you recover

from a night of drinking; yet this lump
has forgotten the yogurt again
on the anniversary of your birth,

which is all you asked me for
on your birthday,
for you love yogurt as much as I

detest it, which may be why it was forgotten,
this lump asks forgiveness for
emptiness and misplaced remembrances
01.15.09

Exposure

Stomach sacks, a briny vintner,
twenty yards of cloth from the couch
of a kindly locksmith’s home

then imagine being frozen solid
your bone and living marrow switched to ice
your gooseflesh stretched

across a frozen core; and another thing
there’s someone in the room with you,
inhabiting the space between your skin

and the infinite,
it’s a composite man
with his many brain stems all thinking at once

about breathing, digesting and the like,
but you are a snowman and behold
none of it; you haven’t the metabolic processes.
01.16.09

Planet X

Pluto, the planet added to account for
perturbations in Neptune’s orbit,
is now not a planet

and the discrepancy that led
to discovery is not thought of
as perturbation, but as overstatement

in Neptune’s mass; and the people involved,
who longed to discover,
did what worked in the past

they looked into empty space
for years at points
where their miscalculations

converged, but the whole affair is now
known to be nothing more than chance
passing of telescope and hellish world
01.17.09

The Goodly Visitor

Welcome are the goodly visitors
who remove their shoes at the flat
of the door-mat damp with snow

and turn up slightly later
than expected, as is expected,
yet apologize for it

for they are gracious; and do not drink
of wine, partake of food, or converse
thoughtlessly, but instead

consider each thing,
weighing honesty and
pleasantries equally

for the hosts, who are novice,
and, occasionally disastrously, invite
their comrades to supper.
01.18.09