Poetry

When I came back from Mexico, I looked like death. My mouth broke down, weather-beaten. I was paying for my sins, my palate had melted. I could touch my brain directly with my tongue. It was painful, terrible, and sweet. While Svetozar was sitting outside, the cabinet of dental instruments was crashing down. I brought…

translated by Maria Koundoura and the author   In its center all is water you were saying that night, if you remember as the fire was dimming the light on the moist fingernails slowly peeling the dry skin from the orange before sinking into its yellow succulence A woman, the boy, fruit in this world…

translated by Clare Cavanagh When he described the park, the path, sick fires glowed in his cooling eyes, his voice grew stronger and his hands tried to be what they once were, when deft squirrels trustingly took sugar from them. Now I’m here. And everything is as he’d remembered: the yellow forsythia, the poplars’ shady…

Poor white and pining, the full moon coins its antebellum image on a welling tide that rakes the shingle back across the bay. A sight whose sounds summon into mind the muffled ruckus of a million tiny broadcast die caroming off green baize, the bone-clatter by which fate decides the youngest child in a family…

1. In the yard of the children’s prison the fruit on the solitary tree is blue shriveled beyond recognition At the turn of the last century the inmates (aged 7 to 13) pickpockets petty thieves & vandals ate gruel from wooden bowls and slept on iron cots gazing down from their cells at that tree…

Broken tulip, 17th-century Holland The plain white petal between her finger and thumb belled into a sail pregnant with nothing it could bear, then split, dark seamed, its length. A whole fleet foundered in the field around her: bands of white tulips, red and yellow, diluted to shadow beneath a setting moon splinted against the…

translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh Thankless street—little dry goods stores like sentries in Napoleon’s frozen army; country people peer into shop windows and their reflections gaze back at the dusty cars; Long Street trudging slowly to the suburbs, while the suburbs head for the center. Lumbering trams groove the street, scentless perfume shops…

About that country there’s not much left to say. Blue sun, far off, like a watery vein in the cloud belt. The solid earth itself unremarkable: familiar ruins littered with standing stones our people had lost the ability to decipher. How deeply had we slept? Beneath the jellyfish umbels of evergreens, each one a dream,…

after Vittorio Sereni Now, from the sweet fragrance of roses bitterness stings our nostrils. Our bay’s withdrawn from us, our beach littered with broken things—splintered oars, bits of old clay pipe from a long-ago shipwreck, fragments of china plates. Exciting, those days my townspeople scavenged rare cargo, furnishing their long winters with random wares. Now,…