Friday, May 30, 2014

Robert Creeley



Flowers

No knowledge rightly understood
can deprive us of the mirth of flowers.
--Edward Dahlberg

No thing less than one thing
or more--

no sun
but sun--

or water
but wetness found--

What truth is it
that makes men so miserable?

Days we die
are particular--

This life cannot be lived
apart from what it must forgive.

--Robert Creeley

fr.  Pieces
[New York: Scribner's, 1969]


Friday, May 23, 2014

Miroslav Holub


Haemophilia/Los Angeles

And so it circulates
from the San Bernardino Freeway
to the Santa Monica Freeway and
down to the San Diego Freeway and
up to the Golden State Freeway,

and so it circulates
in the vessels of the marine creature,
transparent creature,
unbelievable creature in the light
of the southern moon
like the footprint
of the last foot in the world,

and so it circulates
as if there were no other music
except Perpetual Motion,
as if there were no conductor
directing an orchestra of black angels
without a full score:

out of the grand piano floats
a pink C-sharp in the upper octave, 
out of the violin
blood may trickle at any time,
and in the joints of the trombone
there swells a fear of the tiniest staccato,

as if there were no Dante
in a wheelchair,
holding a ball of cotton to his mouth,
afraid to speak a line
lest he perforate the meaning,

as if there were no genes
except the genes for defects 
and emergency telephone calls,

and so it circulates
with the full, velvet hum of the disease,
circulates all hours of the day,
circulates all hours of the night
to the praise of non-clotting,

each blood cell carrying
four molecules of hope
that it might be something
totally different
from what it is.


fr. Vanishing Lung Syndrome
tr. David Young and Dana Hábová

[London: Faber and Faber, 1990]

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Gerardo Deniz

Evasion

There are many asylums in Tlalpan.
And to see in the waiting room those old French volumes
so thick
with arsonvalization and hydropathic treatment,
to cross that garden where three times a week narrow-track philosophies
roam
--tragical dogs squashed on the highway as we dash off,
and that's how we'll have to pass by now.
                                                            It's hot out.
Whoever goes, at the sentimental hour, like all, marching down the railway in the dark
will be able to listen (if they care to do so) to the buzz of swarming beetles
very much in love
between the cliff's rocks.
Beyond (supposedly) rest wealthy teenagers with emaciated limbs
and dry lips, laid out to oblivion
like stretched civet-cats.
(Have they eaten beans?
Will they erase, as one should, the impressions their bodies left on the bed? O risk.)
Yet this world of trains and beetles is a world of trains and beetles,
and although it is,
nagara.



tr. Mónica de la Torre 
fr. Gerardo Deniz: Poemas/Poems [Mexico City: Ditoria / Lost Roads Publishers, 2000]