Reading on the Darkening Plain

[ex-assemble.livejournal.com]

for Rai Gaita

In the dusk of the plains
he held his hands together palms up
each open hand the page of the book -
'I would read until there was no more light.'

Then he'd leave the verandah
go inside to light the lamp
breathe the fumes of kerosene,
that singey smell that was weak heat

and light for the reading and waiting.
Eventually, across the plains, he heard
the crackling of the motorbike.
The father's head down over the handlebars,

the son's still over one last page
on the road to truth... Then the soup.
Night closed in. The dog warmed him.
Outside, the moon, mother of clouds, drifted.

Now, a father, a husband,
he dwells on the plains once more
reading among boulders -
books as solid as deeds, good as stone.

His house is beautifully lit
inside and out. A wood fire roars.
Under the moonless sky of the stone country
one word virtuously contests the other -

the other word, a lunar one
sails in under the bedclothes
reconnecting the sentences of the day.
The latest book cracks along its spine.

Barry Hill.

You know, I think more and more often by Tadeusz Borowski

[twoja-magdalena.livejournal.com]

You know, I think more and more often
that I should go back.
Maybe I'll meet you. And happiness?
Happiness is being sad together.

So I look through the moonlit window
and listen.
Nothing. A breeze stirs somewhere.
Alone among the leaves - the moon.

Like a golden wheel it rolls
above the windblown leaves.
Such moons, only paler,
shone over the Wisla.

Even the Big Dipper on its course
stops in a tree at midnight,
just like at home. But why here?
Truly, I don't know.

What's here? Longing and sleepless nights,
unknown streets and somebody's verse.
I live here as a nobody:
a Displaced Person.

I think of you. I know I must leave.
Perhaps we can return to our past,
but I know neither what youth will be like
nor where you are.

But I'm yours or no one's
forever. Listen,
listen, read this poem
if somewhere you are alive.

Simone Muench

[mutualmitten.livejournal.com]

The water owns her, wears her
like a blue ball gown embossed

with froth. Cypress swoon
from white light. Leaves fall

into goldfish. Beneath a boat,
a girl. Beneath the girl, a poppy

spilling into fire-tangles into
a balefire wheeling in the water.

In one version, she folds up

like a hand fan, her songs
pleated gills panting underwater.

In another, she fashions
the wires of her earrings

into antennae, transmitting
her story across the harbor,

her taffeta dress sliding
toward the lighthouse without her.


- "Till all the crimson changed, and past into deep orange o’er the sea"

Listen -- Alison Jarvis

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Listen -- Alison Jarvis

What I didn’t expect was the cold
the first, and what was the last summer
we lived in Paris. The apartment in the eighth
you thought might be too grand was pure
opera—its tiny rooms; the fireplaces
that needed fuel all June and July.
And how could I have expected you to move
through that summer on your own two feet?
Once, I read that longing, as a sickness of the heart
is endless, incurable. In my story
you will always walk, you will always
play quartets, you will never be sick
and you will never really die              
                                                      How did I manage
in my bad French, to rent a wheelchair?
When you had heartburn from all the pills you took
I asked that pharmacy to send us something
for a “fire in the heart.”
 
Whatever the French celebrated that frozen summer,
it didn’t matter, I was there layered
in unserious sweaters. On Bastille Day for the fireworks
at Trocadero, I wore three pairs of cotton socks and scarves
pulled around my neck, my breath in front of me.
I was wild to dance
at each Bastille Ball, in every firehouse,
in every quarter, stunned by wine,
no mind, no body.
 
Sometimes I used to think of us
as two parts of that huge stone sculpture
out in front of St-Eustache: You, the poised,
recumbent head, and me, the enormous hand,
a finger reaching for the sleeping cheek, longing
to stroke the body back . . .l ’ Ecoute
it was called, the whorled ear
big enough for crawling into, cocked
 
to hear the whole world turning.

-- Winner of Southern Poetry Review's Guy Owen Prize Contest [2004]