Poetry

Porco cane! Another day breaks with a gunshot and a chorus of yelping bloodhounds after boar. I ache to join in, but stay quiet, loyal dog-pig that I am. Pig-dog. Purebred cur in a pen: Sono io. The hunt’s trained out of me. Bark and growl, the baser instincts, I renounced them long ago. My…

Drunk off his can and pissed at the ruse of another day, backache a bum rap and woodpile shrunk to kindling, the old man stood at the kitchen sink and stared out at his neighbor’s cow. What a filthy beast, he thought. What a stinking, cud-chewing, gas-spewing waste of a field. And then, because what…

after Lena Cronqvist Whose girls are these, Lena, yours, mine, ours, everyone’s? So many deny them (Oh, no, not more of those!) Often your sister Sometimes another girl Always your parents (For me dark is normal) Is it conceivable your parents or my own actually could have done anything deserving of how the girls treat…

Because we wanted things the way they were in our minds’ black eyes we waited. The beaver raising ripples in a vee behind his head the thing we wanted. A weed is what might grow where you don’t want it; a dahlia could be a weed, or love, or other notions. The heart can’t choose…

Hoping to find my way to the river, wide with April’s rain, and to see, perhaps, a few wildflowers, and maybe a cardinal whistling in a blossoming tree, I took a path I’d never taken before, first through woods and then a sloping meadow, across a fast stream, then into another meadow, above whose green…

The blinds of midnight are your hands saved from freezing. Such is the heart, and that pause, the somber hollow beneath. Sweet prophet, I name you and your ancestors fidget. I say your temples spill with losses and your shadow bursts with laughing. I say morning thickens with peregrines, flowing soft above the waves, flowing…

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,…