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.