Article

translated by Clare Cavanagh This year I bore no fruit, just leaves that give no shadows I am afraid, Rabbi, I am afraid, Lord, that I’ll be cursed by him who hungers, weary on the endless road to Jerusalem  

translated by Kirk Nesset I’ll be an easy cadaver to carry through woods and over the sea; in a carriage, on a white ship, as the oboe laments, or bassoon, over the droning croaking of toads. I’ll be an innocent cadaver, quietly regarding my remains, while despite me a requiem sounds, the moan of a…

Basho neither trusted nor distrusted the reeds. He was simply a poet on the way north. And being on the way north, he could choose to ignore them. That sound, after all— wind through them—was not the voice of a master. If there had been a master once, he was gone. Ah, to have loved…

translated by Clare Cavanagh I look into her face and see ever more clearly time’s subcutaneous machinations. Death’s terrifying progress. Which will alter nothing in her features, her mouth’s shape, the color of her hair. Nothing, since so little: only this light, this motion, this warmth. Only what isn’t actually there, what can’t be seen,…

It could come right now as a dit-dah of rain,     mere pine needle lost in a tree-stack of beads,        thorn expelled from red dot, print felt            an inch from a finger, pursed lips speaking in tears. It makes you look dotty. Easily amused. It starts     like a Spanish ¡—down on your…

There’s a kind of leaving when you arrive even though it’s the place you’ve come from— how love can be alive There, though not for you, and while it’s like none of the first feelings, a recognition of what is passing flashes, itself passing—there were more deaths, but now there’s     only one, And what…

The bell in you out of which I was rung long ago removed, I cannot go home. What did they do with your uterus? I think of it as a hat or a bird, resting on a head or flying away, over those mountains, on the other side of which I have never been. Maybe…

Federal holding cell, Hughes County jail Fights. Never quiet—like years back with the folks, but ratcheted-up, bloodied, multiplied, till the badge writes the last two shovers up, says he’ll do the same for all of us if we can’t keep the crybabies smothered I WANT SOME PEACE, SLEEP, NO MORE GETTING OUT OF THE CHAIR,…

Sometimes in the fading winter light     that streaks my desk by six o’clock        revealing grains in aging oak, like desert sands, I imagine, before leaving my     shelved books to laze with those I love        before the easy flicker of some talk show on TV, that I stay back this time,    …