Eine Klage-Welt

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A Note for Visitors to the Restricted District

The streets over there are narrow
because those people
love things that do them little good:
odd cloud formations,
breathless dark-eyed girls,
the rustle and stir
of stiff languages in the day's first heat.

At dusk, each person
carries that day's wound
back to a chilly, ill-lit room
and examines it
the way a child plays with a firefly.

(You know which child it has to be --
she laughs musically
when she chases the brief brightening
over grass slippery with dew,
then she plops down cross-legged,
bent over her cupped hands.
She moves a thumb and peers in,
waiting for a light,
then waiting for the light again.)


Originally published in The Adirondack Review, 2002

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Lost for Words

Slugs trace odd glyphs on the concrete walk.
Grandma had us sprinkle table salt on her porch
to discourage any messages from the other side.

Mornings now, when fog’s suspension drags a sheet
across the world’s view, I cipher curlicues
for word from you. But perhaps slugs, like angels,

have no word for grief, leaving us
to draft every horrible script.
These last hard years, frost’s

innumerable marigold corpses, blackened rose petals
offered up by February’s unexpected thaw, draw
the slugs out from their dens beneath the steps.


Rufus Skeens
(published here for the first time)


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Rufus Skeens is a poet of elegy with a penchant for noticing those moments when the day grows thin and the worlds nudge closer to each other, exchanging flashes of dark light, or – maybe, maybe not – messages in the tracks slugs leave on a concrete walk. At the same time, Skeens never loses contact with the world around him, as evidenced in the precision and music of his language. No poet has a better instinct for the shape and texture of words in the mouth.

Mostly, I want to let the poem speak for itself. It does not need my help. But I have to say that I love the ending. Understated and quiet, in touch with the earth, there is still an eerie stir of spirits from the underworld going on in the shadows beneath those steps.

Another poem online:

Red River Review

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The Real Woman in Sunlight

That day the river lay beautifully
like a woman on her lover’s bed,
as if a woman’s flanks could shine
the way sunlight caressed the water,

and she and I—the real woman,
not the river—climbed from the water
dripping, to eat bread and fruit
and lie on moss beneath the trees,

trying to take as much of the sky
as possible into our eyes. Spirit—
it seemed the bread in our hands
might verge into spirit, so lucid

was the air holding us, and the trees
were finally emblems of spirit
from the cool earth to the upper twigs
mixing with sky. The shine of a bee’s wings

as it crawled unstinging over the woman’s
belly became the shine
of spirit going abroad,
embodied there in sunlight

and the sun’s meeting with water
and skin. Who would not want a vision
of the world where this
would be enough for the woman,

a sufficient way of speaking about life,
or of the spirit speaking for itself
in the bee exploring her belly,
dipping around the rim of her navel

and flying from between her breasts?
Imagine that sort of world—
imagine that we watched the bee
and turned hungry toward each other.


from Loan of the Quick (Sow's Ear Press, 1998)

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Eingang

Wer du auch seist: Am Abend tritt hinaus
aus deiner Stube, drin du alles weißt;
als letztes vor der Ferne liegt dein Haus:
Wer du auch seist.
Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum
von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein,
hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum
und stellst ihn vor den Himmel: schlank, allein.
Und hast die Welt gemacht. Und sie ist groß
und wie ein Wort, das noch im Schwiegen reift.
Und wie dein Wille ihren Sinn begreift,
lassen sie deine Augen zärtlich los. . .

Ranier Maria Rilke


Initiation

Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.
Then with your eyes that wearily
scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone
slowly you raise a shadowy black tree
and fix it on the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world (and it shall grow
and ripen as a word, unspoken, still).
When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go. . .

Trans. C.F. MacIntyre

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In limine

Godi se il vento ch'entra nel pomario
vi rimena l'ondata della vita:
qui dove affonda un morto
viluppo di memorie,
orto non era, ma reliquiario.

Il frullo che tu senti non è un volo,
ma il commuoversi dell'eterno grembo;
vedi che si trasforma questo lembo
di terra solitario in un crogiuolo.

Un rovello è di qua dall'erto muro.
Se procedi t'imbatti
tu forse nel fantasma che ti salva:
si compongono qui le storie, gli atti
scancellati pel giuoco del futuro.

Cerca una maglia rotta nella rete
che ci stringe, tu balza fuori, fuggi!
Va, per te l'ho pregato,- ora la sete
mi sarà lieve, meno acre la ruggine…

Eugenio Montale


On the Threshold

Be happy if the wind inside the orchard
carries back the tidal surge of life:
here, where a dead web
of memories sinks under,
was no garden, but a reliquary.

The whir you’re hearing isn’t flight,
but the stirring of the eternal womb;
see this solitary strip of land
transform into a crucible.

There’s fury over the sheer wall.
If you move forward you may meet
the phantom who will save you:
histories are shaped here, deeds
the endgame of the future will dismantle.

Look for a flaw in the net that binds us
tight, burst through, break free!
Go, I’ve prayed for this for you—now my thirst
will be easy, my rancor less bitter….

Trans. Jonathan Galassi

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The house and the orchard are -- here and everywhere -- versions of the clearing in the woods, the open, lighted space in the thicket of Being (and we won’t forget that this is probably also the original meaning of the temple, so we will translate “temple” as “Lichtung”). The threshold (whose etymology in English is difficult) is perhaps not so much a place as a state, the mode of communication between humans and the earth, the moment where eternity enters into time or time into eternity.

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O fotografie de Roxana Ghiţă,
care vorbeşte in pragul dintre doua lumi

Vedi, in questi silenzi in cui le cose
s'abbandonano e sembrano vicine
a tradire il loro ultimo segreto,
talora ci si aspetta
di scoprire uno sbaglio di Natura,
il punto morto del mondo, l'anello che non tiene,
il filo da disbrogliare che finalmente ci metta
nel mezzo di una verità.

"I limoni"
Eugenio Montale


See, in these silences where things
give over and seem on the verge of betraying
their final secret,
sometimes we feel we’re about
to uncover a flaw in Nature,
the still point of the world, the link that won’t hold,
the thread to untangle that will finally lead
to the heart of a truth.

"The Lemons"
Translated by Jonathan Galassi (with one small revision by me)

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Just as the silence folded inside words makes it possible for them to call the world out of its long oubli --- though it is a form of heartbreak, knowing that even the endearments whispered in the lover’s ear are grounded in this profound no --- so it is space and time, woven over and under all, the womb of difference, which make all things possible --- but time and space are also the evils, the absences, separation, the distance between, the hours between….

I have always been searching, all life long, for, as Montale says, “uno sbaglio di Natura,” a flaw in Nature, a way --- and I’m sure it’s there, just on the other side of the air, on the other side of the essence of the air --- a way to reach through the distance, the hours, to touch there…. Almost, the moment grows numinous, almost…..

The lemon trees Montale gazes at in this poem stand at a threshold, the place where the dream that would abolish time and distance begins to glow in the air. In fact, the preceding poem in Ossi di seppia is titled “In limine,” “On the threshold,” and surely this poem’s title, “I limoni” re-calls the earlier title with intent --- the pun reaches through the distance between the words and, suddenly, momentarily, the two stand shining as one in the reader’s mind. This is the power of the secret language, is it not?, and the hidden goal of all poetry.

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Ist nicht die heimliche List
dieser verschwiegenen Erde, wenn sie die Liebenden drängt,
dass sich in ihrem Gefühl jedes und jedes entzückt?
Schwelle….

Ranier Maria Rilke
"Die Neunte Elegie"

Isn’t the secret intent
of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,
that inside their emotion all things may shudder with joy?
Threshold….

"The Ninth Elegy"
Translated by Stephen Mitchell (with one small revision by me)

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Poem în o

Acum când sângele meu s-a preschimbat
în apă vino să te scalzi seara
la lumina astrelor pure pleoapele
mele vor rămâme închise pe veci

ca doi lotuşi calmi şi palizi
pe am de negre pe atât de negre ape. O!


Poem in o

Now that my blood has changed
to water come tonight to swim
through transparent planetary light my
eyelids will lie flat forever closed

like pale lotuses floating calm
on water, so black, so black. O!


Nichita Danilov
from second-hand souls
translated by Sean Cotter

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Three poems at foam:e

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