Bill Knott

Paradise

Always reading the recto
translation of a verso
original, my eye fades.
I notice how the paper 
here on this side seems
darker than its opposite:
it is brighter over there
on the lefthand page, the
words of the real poem
give it that glow which
the prized act of creation
emits. We who must live
here in Righthandland
are damned no matter 
how hard we try to rhyme
minds with that perfect
realm across the gutter.
Even if our pulp comes
from the same stock,
we fear closing the book
will bring us face to face,
mouth to mouth with
that tongue we've always
lost, and can never kiss.


Fr. The Unsubscriber 
(New York: FS&G,2004)

Philip Whalen

La Condition Humaine

makes Friedrich Schiller, his personal
Oeconomy almost overrun by tubercle baccilli
Proclaim joy out of Elysium 
Joy and brotherhood also drive Schopenhauer,
And Nietzsche, to suicide
Sparks Wagner's megalomaniac theatricals
With humanity as "given"
Expect nothing but trouble: No omelet from rotten eggs
4:31 a.m. war, murder, misery,
But somebody recently arranged eggs without cholesterol
("O King, live forever!")
To take care of your plugged-up veins
Gibbon says, ". . . the wisdom and authority of the
Legislator are seldom victorious in a contest
With the vigilant dexterity of private interest."


San Francisco 
6:I:79

Gabe Gudding

On the Rectum of Peacocks

very little has been written. Moored to the ploppy mud by a languid mind, the bird is strapped to its tube of paste by a frail girdle. Having not much brawn, and being rickety in its construction, it is a kind of wicker bird.  The rectum of a Peacock is thus like a flask in a picnic basket, as it might fall out if the bird is jostled.  In this sense the Peacock’s rectum is a fender on an antique car: it sits at the back and rattles.  If one kicks a Peacock, it is not unusual to knock the rectum clear out of the bird.

Peacocks have one rectum in common which they pass among them from Peacock to Peacock like a relay baton. Some people think that talent is like that. But it isn’t: talent is not like the butt-baton of Peacocks. Any community has a surplus of talent and is unlike the community of Peacocks, which has an insufficiency of rectums.

The anus is a kind of larynx of the nether region: it is the only vocal cord unattached to the lungs.  As such, it is an “independent” vocal cord ­ a kind of “colony” among vocal cords ­ a settlement of the voice in one of the body’s distant regions. The rectum, for instance, is the rec room of the body, where our feces romp as children before entering the world.  There is a certain amount of pomp at their graduation.

Each rectum is highly personal. Whereas a colostomy bag is a much more public device inasmuch as it hangs outside the body. A dog’s rear end is public, but a human one is not. Insofar as the anus will allow light into the rectum during a fart, the rectum is a kind of camera obscura. Diarrhea, before it is released from the body, is like an annoyed Raven in a leather jar. Once I tried to kill a Walleye after a large dinner, but I had grown so fat at table that I had to relearn how to punch, and I felt like Humpty Dumpty trying to learn kung fu. My rectum became essential to my weight loss. It is best not to gallop while wearing a colostomy bag.

In the center of even the best display, is a little jumble of mush essential to the survival of said display. Once when a boy, I saw my mother’s vulva reflected in a puddle. And do we all not come from puddles, waddling out with clapboard plumage ­and eyes to be seen?

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]

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]

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]

Wallace Stevens

July Mountain

We live in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches,
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano, and in speech,
As in a page of poetry--
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos,
The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together.

Ron Padgett

History Lesson

I think that Geoffrey Chaucer did not move
the way a modern person moves.
He moved only one inch at a time, in what
we call stop action. Everyone in his day
moved like that, so they could be shot into a tapestry,
but also because time moved in small lurches
and was slightly jagged and had fewer colors
for them to be in. But that was good. Humanity
has to take it one step at a time.

--fr. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, How to Be Perfect (2007)

Amiri Baraka

Political Poem

(for Basil)

Luxury, then, is a way of 

being ignorant, comfortably

An approach to the open market

of least information. Where theories

can thrive, under heavy tarpaulins

without being cracked by ideas.

(I have not seen the earth for years

and think now possibly "dirt" is

negative, positive, but clearly

social. I cannot plant a seed, cannot

recognize the root with clearer dent

than indifference. Though I eat

and shit as a natural man. (Getting up

from the desk to secure a turkey sandwich

and answer the phone: the poem undone

undone by my station, by my station,

and the bad words of Newark.) Raised up

to the breech, we seek to fill for this

crumbling century. The darkness of love,

in whose sweating memory all error is forced.

Undone by the logic of any specific death. (Old gentlemen

who still follow fires, tho are quieter

and less punctual. It is a polite truth

we are left with. Who are you? What are you

saying? Something to be dealt with, as easily.

The noxious game of reason, saying, "No, No,

you cannot feel," like my dead lecturer

lamenting thru gipsies his fast suicide.

--Amiri Baraka (1964)

fr. Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961-1995 

[New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1995]

Paavo Haavikko

The children get this face of mine

When I start a new life

As soil, as vegetation,

   retiring from poems.

But where does my breath go then?

And how can I be happy

Not seeing the pigs sprouting hooves,

   the asparagus ripening, golden . . . Oh,

It is late,

My grandfather's fate,

A terrifying example.

He was too slow, all of forty-four

   (and that

Is too damn late) when he retired,

Oh, it takes the whole man

Just to listen to the winds

From sunrise to sunset

   and all night long,

Oh, it takes all your strength

   to really be at rest:

There is no footpath

   to the gods.

--Paavo Haavikko

tr. Anselm Hollo

in Paavo Haavikko and Tomas Tranströmer: Selected Poems

[Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1974]

Katherine Coles

The Double Leash

*       Blizzard to lilac. Dandelion
to leaf. Endless
variation of seasons I note

                in passing, smells
        I cannot smell: rotting
        gardens, feces, musk of cat.


*       These two

                run in front of me, golden
        shoulder to patchwork, heads
        lifted or lowered into

                scent, tongues lolling. Ears
        damp with their own
        spittle and each other's

                tell me, tethered a pace behind,
        their journey's epic: tipping
        forward to the familiar or
        stranger's distant yap; angling

                to my breathing, whispered
        praise, my slightest
        suggestion.


*       Ignored.

*       The shepherd

                throws herself into

                any whirring wheel, to herd
        the neighbor's tractor mower or
        the UPS truck's packets
        home; pulling her back,

                the golden's oblivious
        ballast, instinct heading
        always for the gutter's

                deepest puddle, her own way
        within the forked leash's
        one-foot range. As we pass,

                the clans set up
        their barking, as if we
        were news, gathering center

                of a congenial warning
        din--mine answer with
        disturbances of pace, an extra pull
        or lollop, grins thrown

                slant-eyed over shoulders
        until one hears a call
        she can't ignore, surrenders

                to baying's ferocious
        joy moving through
        muscle and bone. Moving
        storm, storm's eye: happy

                universes whirl in their skins
        as I do in mine. Unknowable,
        their fate. Mediums between
        foreign principalities, they're tied

                to me, to each other, by my will,
        by love; to that other realm
        by song, and tooth, and blood.

       
        fr. Poetry (Chicago), August, 1998

Gene Frumkin

Variations on the Taste

of Dried Apricots

1

Tongue and palate are darkly lit

by the afterglow of the dried apricot

in its sour sunset.

2

An ear

heard on the lips:

the sound

is soft and round.

3

The dark orange gong,

struck by the tooth,

vibrates on the tongue.

Pablo Neruda

For Everyone

I can't just suddenly tell you
what I should be telling you,
friend, forgive me; you know
that although you don't hear my words,
I wasn't asleep or in tears,
that I'm with you without seeing you
for a good long time and until the end.

I know that many may wonder
"What is Pablo doing?" I'm here.
If you look for me in this street 
you'll find me with my violin,
prepared to break into song,
prepared to die.

It is nothing I have to leave to anyone,
not to these others, not to you,
and if you listen well, in the rain,
you'll hear
that I come and go and hang about.
And you know that I have to leave.

Even if my words don't know it,
be sure, I'm the one who left.
There is no silence which doesn't end.
When the moment comes, expect me
and let them all know I'm arriving
in the street, with my violin.


tr. Alastair Reid
fr. Fully Empowered, 1975

Jackson Mac Low

Manifesto

To manifest: to be, visibly.
To make visible what was formerly invisible or otherwise to make sensible what was formerly not.
To present or make present, vocally, visibly, or otherwise, one's views, sentiments, objections, etc. in reference to a matter of public concern.
Manifest: a commercial document listing constituents of cargo or names of passengers on a plane, ship, or other vehicle.
A manifest of meanings.
To make evident or certain by showing or displaying.
Readily perceived by the senses, especially by sight.
Easily understood or recognized.
Obvious.
To become obvious.
To be, obviously.
To be, recognizably.
To become recognizable.
To emerge as a figure from a ground.
To become visible, or otherwise perceptible, as an agent.
To act.
To make interior states perceptible to others.
Manifesto: a public declaration of principles, intentions, views, or feelings.
A document in which is said explicitly what otherwise might have remained implicit in political, artistic, or other practice.
To present or make present.
To present for inspection what might not otherwise have been able to be inspected.
To make the implicit explicit.
To make the hidden unhidden.
To say what might not otherwise have been said.
Choose one or more of the following:
Every text is a manifesto.
Every (adjective) text is a manifesto.
Every text worth reading is a manifesto.

18 June 1983
New York

***

Unmanifest

What the maker of a manifesto does not comprehend or acknowledge is the basic unmanifestness from which and within which each manifestation take place. It is this neglect or ignorance that calls forth repugnance when a manifesto is proclaimed or published, especially one regarding art. As if what comes to being in and as the work of art could ever be totally manifest or even manifest at all without its abiding steadfastly in the unmanifest! A work of art is a manifesto only insofar as it is its own antimanifesto.

21 June 1983
New York

Fernando Pessoa

Raining

Raining. There is silence since rain's self
Makes no noise unless a noise of peace.
Raining. The sky's gone to sleep. When the soul is
Widowed of unknowing, feeling gropes.
Raining. My essence (who I am) I repeal.

So calm the rain is, it seems to disappear
(Not even made of clouds) into air, seems
Not to be rain even, only a whisper
Which itself, in the whispering, dislimns.
Raining. Nothing gleams.

No wind is hovering. There is no sky
That I can feel. It's raining, distinct, indistinct,
Like something certain which may be a lie,
Like what a lie does to us, some great thing desired.
Raining. In me nothing's stirred.

(2.10.33)

tr. Jonathan Griffin
in Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems
[Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1974]