two by Yannis Ritsos

[cantahar.livejournal.com]

SQUANDERING

We spent glances, words, movement.
At noon we would gaze toward the sea somehow at a loss
among the sound of cicadas, among the leaves -
scattered looks so that we wouldn't see what we've already seen.
In the evening the shade hid our separate shadows.
A long, narrow wooden bench
with unsold shirts for athletes
stood out of the way in the neighborhood square.
The night smelled of extinguished candles.
No other pretense was left to us but that of listening
to the hiccup of a star behind the door.

ACCENTED-UNACCENTED

The world is a long cycle of songs
that you should sing, he said.
The world is a tree full of fruit
that only a sword can cut.

The sword cuts the song. The song
blunts the sword. What can you choose? he said.
How can you choose between the already chosen?
The world is a deep closed song.

--Yannis Ritsos, translated by Edmund Keeley

"Fall Song" - Mary Oliver

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Posting this because one hemisphere's spring is another hemisphere's autumn.



Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - - -roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - - - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

How To Make Amends -- David James

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

HOW TO MAKE AMENDS
by David James

            He was hungry, so he ate the couch, the one with the pull-out bed. Of
course, when the wife came home, she was disgusted.
            “Now what will we sit on, asshole? Last week it was the coffee table; the
week before, two kitchen chairs and a lamp. What next, the bed?”
            He hadn’t thought of eating the bed, but the idea was appealing. It
probably would taste like sleep. Comfort food. He couldn’t respond to her–she
was always right, so he went upstairs to lie down. Somehow, the bed knew
what was coming. It shivered in fear. The man stroked the mattress, saying,
“Don’t worry. I won’t eat you. I promise.” As the bed settled down, the man
fell asleep and dreamed of eating the bed, mattress, baseboard, springs,
pillows. He stuffed everything in his mouth, chewing, crunching, swallowing
until he could no longer stand up. He laid there on the floor in the bedroom.
When his wife came home after work, she undressed, climbed on top of him,
slid under some loose sheets and slept. His chest rose and fell in time to her
steady breathing. Wrapping himself around her, he knew she would be next.
He would eat her and finally there would be peace between them, which was
all he ever really wanted.

You Cannot Rest by Frank Bidart

[fleaux.livejournal.com]

You Cannot Rest
By Frank Bidart

The trick was to give yourself only to what
could not receive what you had to give,

leaving you as you wished, free.
Still you court the world by enacting yet once

more the ecstatic rituals of enthrallment.
You cannot rest. The great grounding

events in your life (weight lodged past
change, like the sweetest, most fantastical myth

enshrining yet enslaving promise), the great
grounding events that left you so changed

you cannot conceive your face without their
happening, happened when someone

could receive. Just as she once did, he did--past
judgment of pain or cost. Could receive. Did.

friction // alvin pang (from postcolonialweb.org)

[iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com]

i.

Tending to her, I run my hands
down the papyrus feel of her skin,
I rub away at the bruises,
where the veins had been
scrawled on too long
by the drip needle, have spilled
their blue in dull pools
beneath her skin.

They fascinate my touch –
Small, soft circles
from which warmth begins
to spread, as dead blood
disperses, and feeling
returns.

I imagine her
gaunt cheeks, soft hollow
fill and breathe with colour,
her eyes catching fire
as I rub at her wrists
for the heat of friction.

ii.

I remember what my grandfather did
when I ran out of the shower and slipped
and nearly broke my head on the wall:
He bore me on his back like a gunny sack
all the way to the hospital, although he was ill,
he waited in the silent corridors until

he was sure I was fine. I remember –
but this is what grandmother would tell me,
over and over, as I winced and flinched,
ungrateful with pain as she tended my bruises
with firm thumb and the soft balm of story,
the next time I fell, and the next time.

 

( Not the crease and hump of bones )