Poetry

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  

We meet day-plain and inches away, faces facing off in a garden,                                           kissing closed kisses, solemn, bone-dry, and exquisite as the leaves of our sweating faces                                   glisten, sheens giving back each tree’s green. My greenery grows untoward,                    branches burst windows, menace doors, what sky is wide enough to house me?                               Breath…

An Adirondack chair, painted in a primary color, in one corner, under the pergola, the blooming vine appealing above—people an abundance of themselves, prodigal in sunglasses, in the shade. Will I speak to him, and if so, do I call him “Mr. Secretary”? He groans into his chair, opens the Times, reads, then glances at…

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,…

Number following number,                                                 oscillations Neatly described, heart’s plunder Or loss, following,                                 that old saw, again and again, And the route taken always is the shortest Between two points,                                    between what must be And that lapsing cloud, a continental Dimming, and then stillness,                                                  and always the afterward, Trying to place it, 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…

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…

A spider webbed the cellar doorway the morning of my cleaning spree, pale star with him floating at the center. And for all his meanness, bigness, blackness, I let him be, having once squashed ants, crushed butterflies, stalking field and sidewalk. Love, come late in life, had softened all my anger. His net spanned half …

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…