Poetry

My father, an American, was singing in dialect over the grave of my great-grandmother. The sun was setting. The country was in another war. My mother was planting nasturtiums over Nonna’s grave. Her green skirt was shorter than the grass. A northern shrike was piercing a songbird on a thorn of barbed wire. The old…

We don’t want to be shown, in photographs sent home, What the poet saw that summer, that evening In the mountains with the shepherds, that unspoiled Landscape with its caves and weathered ruins, Nor to be retold, in long scribbled letters After the wine was drunk, drunken revelations Of the shepherds’ joys and troubles, no…

I came across this word unexpectedly. It means fatty, greasy, unctuous—I can’t say exactly since I’ve not seen it before. That’s the beauty of language—such surprise and variation, each synonym a slightly different meaning. I think of unctuous as a wormy, mealy-mouthed flatterer; greasy, a male: disingenuous, pomaded, cigarette dangling from mouth. It’s in these…

Newlyweds, up at the Del Mar station, saw the woman stumble & fall, & ran back to pull her to safety, the train bearing down. For a thousand feet north of the point of impact, investigators found parts of a briefcase, sketches of gowns, a low-heeled black shoe. From the White House, the President screaming…

In the painting the twelve hats look pretty much alike. Tricorns, they’re called, and when studying them in their invisible grid, one inevitably thinks of his face. An allegory about Napoleon: The parts of his face had always hated each other. Like wild stars in a burning sky, many-a-time they came dangerously close to colliding….

In such darkness you’re not listening: bees, corn, and tumescence take up space, silence the landscape. The hour of your seeming quiet soon passes, plowed under. If I trouble your sinking so much you see the bottom and the matching silences of moth, money, and the worm, am I a prophet, or is it foretold,…

We swept up everything in sight: gobbled up Soutines, Bonnards Modiglianis. Lenny snagged Monet’s boat studio. Jim seized that mauve felicity of creamy lovers: Le Bonheur de Vivre. I took that terrifying Van Gogh nude, horrific & farouche, all poverty & pubic hair & suffering. Together after all those years—three hebephrenic & disheveled antiquarian collectors…

There are men like these, who stand above the loft and gloss of downtown rhetoric, who hold for us a quiet surplus, and think— not of present need and use—but, of what is necessary in dire times. There are those who go unnoticed, apart from the general chat, who have in mind the words we…

—translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak We are children of our era, the era is political. All affairs, day and night, yours, ours, theirs, are political affairs. Like it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political cast, your eyes a political aspect. What you say, has a resonance, what…