Poetry

There’s our son at the end of my hook     riding over the Detroit River where Tecumseh’s still rowing     towards his oblivion. This boy we’re casting to the land     of the leaping frogs. My lass lives on the floor     where the fish are frying, her spine snapped in half     the way…

translated by Clare Cavanagh     He dressed in black, like a clerk at an insurance bureau who specializes in lost causes. I’d spot him on Urzednicza rushing for a streetcar, and at Krzysztofory as he solemnly discharged his duties, receiving other artists dressed in black. I dismissed him with the pride of someone who’s…

Put your pain on one side, it is unwelcome tonight, we have guests, dinner is to be served, the pain must wait. I am sorry, do not be angry, do not hate, put your pain away for a more convenient day. The telephone rang with need, your hurt was huge, it was not unrecognized, but…

for Carl Hays Drizzle this morning, but a cool glare in the brain, and I’m staggering again down     Cherry Street toward that cratered-out joint on Broadway where one happy night, eons ago, I cut a rug with a hopped-up     redhead. Nothing came of that, Carl, except a few short hours of     inexplicable…

But as we rose from the café table in Trastevere who could not help but notice that it was as beautiful a day as could be imagined in Rome: an early October afternoon in mid-July. There’s little you can’t say against Rome, from the infernal roar to the eternal siestas. There are portents: the coppery-skinned…

translated by Clare Cavanagh Late afternoon, light snow. The Musée d’Orsay is on strike, beside it a gray lump huddled on the sidewalk’s edge: a bum curled in a ball (maybe a refugee from some country caught in civil war) still lying on the grate, packed in a quilt, a scrap-heap sleeping bag, the right…

Arriving in December on a Greyhound from Paducah, you saw the usual sun rising on your right over the bowed houses of Dearborn as a wafer of moon descended on your left behind the steaming rail yards wakening for work. “Where are we?” you asked. In 1948 people still talked to each other even when…

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…