El Tigre

Soy el tigre.
Te acecho entre las hojas
anchas como lingotes
de mineral mojado.

El río blanco crece
bajo la niebla. Llegas.

Desnuda te sumerges.
Espero.

Entonces es un salto
de fuego, sangre, dientes,
de un zarpazo derribo
tu pecho, tus caderas.

Bebo tu sangre, rompo
tus miembros uno a uno.

Y me quedo velando
por años en la salva
tus huesos, tu ceniza,
immóvil, lejos
del odio y de la cólera,
desarmado en tu muerte,
cruzado por las lianas,
immóvil en la lluvia,
centinela implacable
de mi amor asesino.

- Pablo Neruda
Los Versos del Capitán. El Deseo.

Giving a Box of Books Away

Little caskets of my former dreams,
I feed you back into the Ganges
of living perceptions, extravagant
longings, that life, no matter how
scattered, buffeted, ridden by floods
of feeling and need, can’t do without.
Let somebody else finish Tasso.
Let somebody else put the citadel
of Plutarch, the shield of Proust
on the shelf above his bed to protect him
from a life without extravagant hope.
My underlinings in Freud, my shouts
in the margins of Dostoyevsky, my first
edition of Goodbye Wisconsin, my
Swap and Go: Home Exchanging
As a Way of Life, as the way of my life
becomes clear and less cluttered,
I set afloat in the sleepy bulrushes
of the delta like a child I couldn’t keep.
Good-bye ambitions, good-bye to keeping
around what even memory lets go.
The sea greets us like a long-lost friend
while gigantic mountains of cumulonimbus
collapse and inflate across the sky.

- Roger Mitchell
From The Paris Review, Issue 182

Siren Song

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who has heard it
is dead, and the others can’t remember.

Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?

I don’t enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery maniacs,
I don’t enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.

- Margaret Atwood
From You Are Happy

The Blind Leading the Blind

Take my hand. There are two of us in this cave.
The sound you hear is water; you will hear it forever.
The ground you walk on is rock. I have been here before.
People come here to be born, to discover, to kiss,
to dream, and to dig and to kill. Watch for the mud.
Summer blows in with the scent of horses and roses;
fall with the sound of sound breaking; winter shoves
its empty sleeve down the dark of your throat.
You will learn toads from diamonds, the fist from the palm,
love from the sweat of love, falling from flying.
There are a thousand turnoffs. I have been here before.
Once I fell off a precipice. Once I found gold.
Once I stumbled on a murder, the thin parts of a girl.
Walk on, keep walking, there are axes above us.
Watch for occasional bits and bubbles of light -
birthdays for you, recognitions: yourself, another.
Watch for the mud. Listen for bells, for beggars.
Something with wings went crazy against my chest once.
There are two of us here. Touch me.

- Lisel Mueller
From Dependencies

Death of a Pope

If my father had been pope, crowds would have filled
the hospice yard with tears and prayer. Bells would have rung.
Someone would have lowered flags at Marshfield City Hall.

I might have been his chamberlain,
touching a silver hammer to the creases in his forehead,
calling three times the name Grandmother gave him, declaring him dead.

Once home, we would have sealed his office, closet,
top drawer in the old oak dresser, locked the front door,
hung the heavy interregnum chain across the garden gate.

His wedding ring, broken to pieces. All address labels
with his name, destroyed. There would have been no pilgrimage
to Goodwill with unpolished shoes and fraying neckties in two paper bags.

Mother and I wouldn’t have argued in the kitchen
about the destination of his soul, about burning flesh and grinding
bones versus entombment in an ancient vault.

If Father had been pope, we would have gathered after eighteen days,
sequestered ourselves in the pine-paneled dining room,
and voted to elect another father.

- Stephanie Waldman
Zyzzyva, Vol XXII, No. 3 Winter 2007

Poem in the Prophetic Manner

They’re kicking butt at Yankee Stadium,
They’re tearing the old palace down,
The thieves have stolen the radium,
The professor’s as sad as a clown.

And the widows and orphans are crying
Because they’re allergic to dust,
The magazine husband is dying,
The preacher says yes, he must.

In jail when the turnkey is sleeping,
The poet picks locks in the dark.
Not all the old willows are weeping
As the pigeons come to roost in the park.

We’re just a bunch of bozos.
The barbarians are back at the gate,
Though the idols are losing to Moses,
And the grocer says it’s too late.

It must be my destiny calling.
It must be the onset of fall,
The clouds and the curtains are falling
The convicts are standing tall.

O bard in the belly of the whale,
O sinner pretending to pray,
Wherever you are, you’re in jail,
In jail at the end of the day.

- David Lehman
From The Atlantic Monthly, December 2007, Vol. 300, No. 5

The God Abandons Antony

When suddenly at midnight you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now;
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive – don’t mourn them uselessly;
as one long prepared and full of courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you;
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and full of courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion,
but not with the whining, the pleas of the coward;
listen – your final pleasure – to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

- C.P. Cavafy

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of notations.

They gave me a drug that allowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave;
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said;
my bleeding is under control.

A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt; the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed; hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say; those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

- Adrienne Rich
Courtesy of Jeanette Winterson’s wonderful website, www.jeanettewinterson.com

Waiting

Left off the highway and
down the hill. At the
bottom, hang another left.
Keep bearing left. The road
will make a Y. Left again.
There’s a creek on the left.
Keep going. Just before
the road ends, there’ll be
another road. Take it
and no other. Otherwise,
your life will be ruined
forever. There’s a log house
with a shake roof, on the left.
It’s not that house. It’s
the next house, just over
a rise. The house
where trees are laden with
fruit. Where phlox, forsythia
and marigold grow. It’s
the house where the woman
stands in the doorway
wearing sun in her hair. The one
who’s been waiting
all this time.
The woman who loves you.
The one who can say,
“What’s kept you?”

- Raymond Carver