Poetry

The rain had long since stopped. In the pilgrimage church in Moravia, where I had sought shelter from a storm, they were chanting a Marian song which stopped me from leaving. I used to listen to it back home. The priest had genuflected at the steps and left the altar, the organ had sobbed and…

trans. Italian Alan Williamson You are life, you are death come with the wind of March onto the naked earth— your shiver grips, and holds. Blood of the young year, first anemone or spring cloud, your lightly passing footfall violates the earth. The way of sorrow opens. Under a poor sky the earth lay motionless…

And the night too resembles you, the remote night that grieves speechlessly, in the unreachable heart, and the stars pass, exhausted. One cheek touches another— it's a brief shiver, someone debates with himself and turns to you, but alone, shipwrecked in you, within your fever. The night suffers and waits for the dawn, poor leaping…

trans. Italian Ruth Felman This day, one of love and laceration so many years ago, finds us walking together, over sand and rocks, your hand helping me in the difficult places and your gaze directing mine toward the high barrier of agaves and reeds, the northeast boundary of the beach. “See,” you say to me,…

I went again to that place I loved not far from here, or from the noise of cars though quiet enough this early— where the sound of a stream found a deep ear in the woods, and came out in me; went to that place as one might go to the slain body of a…

trans. Italian Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann Mariarosa be good; I am leaving and deserting you* I'll never hear the May song again, daughter of oak and underbrush. You dressed in flowers of the broom, grown back on the uncultivated slope. You were inviolate, shut like a bittr blossom. Your frightened eyes were white beanflowers,…

We lived on the bottom floor, four rooms in a new brick complex (rooms stacked on rooms) with a view of world enough: the school, also brick; the paved playground and remnant meadow beaten to dust by Sears-shod kids. Beyond was not our need. From the gravelled (“No Admittance”) roof, we could see the small…

The Catherine-wheels ogled us from the embankment where the man who lit them was poking them, his face red from the fuse. Today, with the holiday over, my dear, you've gone back to your own city. Yesterday night the clarinets at the time of the explosions, and the voices of families sitting in the piazza…

Both Erato the Muse of Lyric Poetry and Mime and Apollo the God of Poetry and Music are said to be with us, in us, above us, and behind us, and are often figured to be with a lyre, one singing and playing with it, and the other having it at her feet and waiting…