Poetry

Ani DiFranco, 1995

Tiptoeing through the used condoms
Strewn on the piers
Off the west side highway
Sunset behind
The skyline of jersey
Walking towards the water
With a fetus holding court in my gut
My body hijacked
My tits swollen and sore
The river has more colors at sunset
Than my sock drawer ever dreamed of
I could wake up screaming sometimes
But i don't
I could step off the end of this pier but i got
Shit to do
And an appointment on Tuesday
To shed uninvited blood and tissue
I'll miss you i say
To the river to the water
To the son or daughter
I thought better of
I could fall in love
With jersey at sunset
But i leave the view to the rats
And tiptoe back

Jake Byrne, 2023

We passed on horseback without speaking
    Through cities of bleached bone and powdered glass
    When I plunged my pen into the lich's mirror
You told me you'd given me everything I needed

My marital bed a ditch where milk-sky and memory admix
    You said true love never promises to stay
    Some needs come second to the resumé
Relapse with me. Let's be adepts playing at cantrips

A pocketful of perfumed air
    Chokeberries' dark epistles
    Your cum congealing on the hair of my chest
These magic missiles

But all illusions wane, crumble like lichen in a dry season
    I can recall the rite but cannot perform the ritual
    You can lead a hearse to water, but it's no Viking funeral
Not for the cursèd opaque waterbed of your elfin immigration lawyer

Not for the scarred arms of the berserker otter
    Who fucked me raw against the wall
    Promising all the while he'd pull out graceful as
A siege of herons from the water

He showed me how to rip a bezoar from the stomach of a kid
    A sea of mead could not satisfy my id
    Nor could a kiss land gentle as a fist
My harvest-sworn companion, how did we come to this?

I meant to say I loved you
For you I'd remake the world as mine
Who cares. It doesn't matter. Forget about it. Nevermind

Marina Tsvetaeva, 1933

Thirty years together---
clearer than love.
I know your grain by heart,
you know my lines.

Wasn't it you who wrote them on my face?
You ate paper, you taught me:
There's no tomorrow. You taught:
Today, today.

Money, bills, love letters, money, bills,
you stood in a blizzard of oak.
Kept saying: For every word you want
today, today.

God, you kept saying,
doesn't accept bits and bills.
Nnh, when they lay my body out, my fool, my
desk, let it be on you.

One of my favorite unconventional translations, alongside Stephen Berg's With Akhmatova At The Black Gates and Dark Elderberry Branch by Kaminsky & Valentine.

War Music is a "variation" on the Iliad that became something of a lifelong project of Logue's. Unfinished at the time of his death, it nonetheless grew from the commissioned translation of a single passage (book 16, Patrocleia) to a rather complete interpretation of the whole epic, absent Logue's planned final section, Big Men Falling A Long Way. The most recent edition includes the author's notes on Big Men, for a glimpse at what the conclusion might have looked like.

Speaking of editions, of interest to me as a translation geek are Logue's constant self-revisions as War Music matured through several printings. From the opening words the 2023 edition contains notable differences to its 1997 sibling, itself changed from the '81, '91, '94 etc. drafts.

See how the '97 edition begins:

Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.

    Now look along that beach, and see
Between the keels hatching its western dunes
A ten-foot-high reed wall faced with black clay
Split by a double-doored gate;
Then through the gate a naked man
Whose beauty's silent power stops your heart
Fast walk, face wet with tears, out past its guard,
And having vanished from their sight
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath inch-high waves that slide
Over each other's luminescent panes;
Then kneel among those panes, beggar his arms, and say:

Now, here is the finalized text from literally six months ago (my pre-order copy is dated January 27th):

Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.

    Now look along that beach, and see
Between the keels hatching its western dunes
A ten-foot-high reed wall faced with black clay
Split by a double-doored gate;
Then through the gate a naked man
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath the inch-high waves that slide
Over each other's luminescent panes;
Then kneel among those panes, burst into tears, and say:

Finally compare both to the corresponding original, maybe the most famous opening lines since Genesis:

    Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the
    Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished since that time when first there stood in division of conflict Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus. ---Lattimore

Here is a second comparison, between Homer and the '23 Logue---from the initial rupture between Agamemnon and Achilles, the dispute over Chryseis:

    Then in answer again spoke brilliant swift-footed Achilleus:
'Son of Atreus, most lordly, greediest for gain of all men,
how shall the great-hearted Achaians give you a prize now?
There is no great store of things lying about I know of.
But what we took from the cities by storm has been distributed; it is unbecoming for the people to call back things once given. No, for the present give the girl back to the god; we Achaians thrice and four times over will repay you, if ever Zeus gives into our hands the strong-walled citadel of Troy to be plundered.'
    Then in answer again spoke powerful Agamemnon:
'Not that way, good fighter though you be, godlike Achilleus, strive to cheat, for you will not deceive, you will not persuade me. What do you want? To keep your own prize and have me sit here lacking one? Are you ordering me to give this girl back? Either the great-hearted Achaians shall give me a new prize chosen according to my desire to atone for the girl lost, or else if they will not give me one I myself shall take her, your own prize, or that of Aias, or that of Odysseus, going myself in person; and he whom I visit will be bitter. Still, these are things we shall deliberate again hereafter. Come, now, we must haul a black ship down to the bright sea, and assemble rowers enough for it, and put on board it the hecatomb, and the girl herself, Chryseis of the fair cheeks, and let there be one responsible man in charge of her, either Aias or Idomeneus or brilliant Odysseus, or you yourself, son of Peleus, most terrifying of all men, to reconcile by accomplishing sacrifice the archer. ---Lattimore

Cinch your jockstrap, here's Logue:

    Until Achilles said:

    'Dear sir,
Where shall we get this she?
There is no pool.
We land. We fight. We kill. We load. And then---
After your firstlings---we allot.
That is the end of it.
We do not ask things back. And even you
Would not permit your helmet to go round.
    Leave her to Heaven.
And when---and if---God lets me leap the Wall,
Greece will restock your dormitory.'

    'Boy Achilleus,' Agamemnon said,
'You will need better words
And more than much more charm
Before your theorising lightens me.
    Myself unshe'd, and yours still smiling in the furs?
Ditchmud.'

    Widening his stare:

    'Consult. Produce a string. Or---
Now listen carefully---I shall be at your gate
Demanding Uxa, Ajax, or
At my lord Diomed's for Gwi---
Kah!---What does it matter whose prize she I take?
But take I shall, and if needs be, by force.

    'Well . . .
We shall see.

    'And now
Let us select and stow a ship,
Captained by you, lord Thoal, or by you,
Our silencer, Idomeneo.
At all events, some diplomatic lord
To take my pretty Cryzia home
That holy smoke and thermal prayers
Commend the Son of God
To exorcise the insects we refresh.'

God damn.

C.P. Cavafy, 1919

It's like him, of course,
this little pencil portrait.

Hurriedly sketched, on the ship's deck,
the afternoon magical,
the Ionian sea around us.

It's like him. But I remember him as better looking.
He was sensitive almost to the point of illness,
and this highlighted his expression.
He appears to me better looking
now that my soul brings him back, out of Time.

Out of Time. All these things are from very long ago---
the sketch, the ship, the afternoon.

C.P. Cavafy, 1911

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon---don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon---you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind---
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you a marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

He screws all the girls he can find
and makes himself out a charmer,
and somehow he’s managed to escape
being sent to the grinding-mill
and donkey’s work.

versus

but he’s the guy that loves the gals
a Devastating Male—
my God, when will they catch the man
and lock him up in jail?

versus

This is the big lady the ladies all fuck for?
I’d plug his face with a horse dick instead.

Whoa.

I know nobody's here yet, just planting seeds

Gillian Weiss, 2007

I am fifteen years old and I have to decide
when to let Daniel Hazard kiss me.

He repairs old Fords. We drive past sand
dunes, until something rattles in his trunk

and he pulls over to investigate but instead crawls
on top of me in the front seat.

I have an artificial leg. He doesn't know
that and when his hand rubs against me

and I'm not real, he stops and says,
"What the hell?" like I've offended him.

Everything is different now. Daniel
Hazard calls every day except Sundays

which he spends with his family
and I guess that means he's a good guy

and has the values my mother talks about.
He's afraid to hold my hand because he thinks

it might throw me off balance. Hand-holding
doesn't throw me off balance.

I want you to know this, because maybe you
wondered about people with fake legs, maybe

you wanted to hold their hand but you didn't
because you thought you might trip.

Judy Grahn, 1969

Her words pour out as if her throat were a broken
artery and her mind were cut-glass, carelessly handled.
You imagine her in a huge velvet hat with great
dangling black feathers,
but she shaves her head instead
and goes for three-day midnight walks.
Sometimes she goes down to the dock and dances
off the end of it, simply to prove her belief
that people who cannot walk on water
are phonies, or dead.
When she is cruel she is very, very
cool and when she is kind she is lavish.
Fishermen think perhaps she's a fish, but they're all
fools. She figured out that the only way
to keep from being frozen was to
stay in motion, and long ago converted
most of her flesh into liquid. Now when she
smells danger, she spills herself all over,
like gasoline, and lights it.
She leaves the taste of salt and iron
under your tongue, but you don't mind.
The common woman is as common
as the reddest wine.

imogen xtian smith, 2022

it's me again, come clean. i hid behind brown whiskers, whiskey & shame, cloistered in girlfriend's closets from folk who'd clock me faggot out F-150s, hang your head Tom Dooley stuck in their teeth. Camouflage & excess, white lines & booze---everything inside me cardinals, prunes, pulls a rosin gut drone to recollect. i say remember bb, your first dress? Pink & pretty with blue lattice & curls, looking all Christina from Christina's World, high country Carolina. It was easy getting drunk in leotard, laughing. Easy spending summer among laurel, forgetting Laurie Foster, dead femmes drowned & raised americana. More difficult to untwist the thorn, tongue jelly & cauterize, divest from fear within. Could i ever be one of them---like that woman i'd pass on King St., 14-eyed Docs & stubble chin, rouge lips & black dress buying goth CDs on weekends?

    Not exactly---also yes.

Here i am, soldered together with Marlboro kisses, Vintage Seltzer sober in floral print, alter for rhododendron & metro rat---swap Brown Mountain for cherry tips, Maria Hernandez & chosen fam bound deep as Hodges Gap.    Appalachia,
i paint my eyelids bluer than blue ridges so neither of us gotta look far to find. If you see me out your window, i'm every name you spit---friend, sister, brother, fag---clad shameless in Queen Anne's lace. Find me staring up Bed-Stuy beeches, a bit of my heart back on Beacon with the scrappy mountain ash. Lonely town, i can smile now, remembering that first girl i knew---warm at home & listening to The Cure. i dream a dyke bar for every hollow, queeraoke sluts singin' Tammy off key, highways safe for walking, ballads & barn quilts & string figures claiming joy. i dream we dredge rivers & find no women there.

James Wright, 1971

Already she seems bone thin
When her clothes are on.
The lightest wind blows
Her dress toward the doorways.
Everybody thinks he can see
Her body longing to follow
Helpless and miserable,
Dreaming itself
Into an apparition of loneliness,
A spirit of vine wondering
At a grape here and there,
As the September spider,
The master, ascends
Her long spine.

Already she weighs more, yet
She still bows down slightly,
As I stand in her doorway.
It's not hunching, it's only
That children have been reaching
Upwards for years to gather
Sweetness of her face.
They are innocent and passionate
Thieves of the secret hillsides.
Now she rises, tall, round, round.
And round again, and, again, round.

I'm a fucking dork

Louise Glück, 2001

We were taught, in those years,
never to speak of good fortune.
To not speak, to not feel---
it was the smallest step for a child
of any imagination.

And yet an exception was made
for the language of faith;
we were trained in the rudiments of this language
as a precaution.

Not to speak swaggeringly in the world
but to speak in homage, abjectly, privately---

And if one lacked faith?
If one believed, even in childhood, only in chance---

such powerful words they used, our teachers!
Disgrace, punishment: many of us
preferred to remain mute, even in the presence of the divine.

Ours were the voices raised in lament
against the cruel vicissitudes.
Ours were the dark libraries, the treatises
on affliction. In the dark, we recognized one another;
we saw, each in the other's gaze,
experience never manifested in speech.

The miraculous, the sublime, the undeserved;
the relief merely of waking once more in the morning---
only now, with old age nearly beginning,
do we dare to speak of such things, or confess, with gusto,
even to the smallest of joys. Their disappearance
approaches, in any case: ours are the lives
this knowledge enters as a gift.

W.S. Merwin, 2005

The sky goes on living it goes
on living the sky
with all the barbed wire of the west
in its veins
and the sun goes down
driving a stake
through the black heart of Andrew Jackson

Hunter S. Thompson, 1955

(yes, that Hunter S. Thompson. He was 15. Submitted here as a curiosity.)

I could see the moon hung high in the sky and the mocking grin on his face.
I know he was looking straight at me, perched high in my lonely place.
His voice floated down through the crisp night air and I thought I heard him say, "It's too bad my boy, It's an awful shame that you have to go this way."
This chilled my heart and I shuddered with fear, for I knew he was right as right could be.
It was then that my skin began to crawl and I thought, "What I'd give to be free!"
Her face came back to me then like a flash, I remembered the touch of her lips.
I remembered the beautiful gold of her hair, her sky-blue eyes and the touch of her finger-tips.
Then I cursed myself and tore my hair for I knew I'd been wrong from the start.
I'd thrown away every chance I'd had and finally broken her heart.
My grief was of that special kind that only comes to men when they reach the end of a lonesome road and see what they could have been.
I cried as i thought of the people outside who were happy, and honest, and free.
And I knew that not even the lowest one would care to trade places with me.
Cold sweat broke out on my forehead now and my scalp felt tight and drawn.
What could I do to escape my fate, the electric chair at dawn?
I seized the bars, and shrieked, and wailed, like a soul who is lost in hell.
But the only voice that answered me was the mid-night toll of a bell.

W.B. Yeats, 1915

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out of love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

John Greenleaf Whittier, 1846

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The glory from his gray hairs gone
Forevermore!

Revile him not -- the Tempter hath
A snare for all;
And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,
Befit his fall!

Oh! dumb be passion's stormy rage,
When he who might
Have lighted up and led his age
Falls back in night.

Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark
A bright soul driven,
Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark,
From hope and heaven!

Let not the land, once proud of him,
Insult him now,
Nor brand with deeper shame his dim,
Dishonored brow

But let its humbled sons, instead,
From sea to lake,
A long lament,
as for the dead,
In sadness make.

Of all we loved and honored, nought
Save power remains --
A fallen angel's pride of thought,
Still strong in chains.

All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul has fled:
When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!

Then, pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!

Jane Kenyon, 1978

I scrub the long floorboards
in the kitchen, repeating
the motions of other women
who have lived in this house.
And when I find a long gray hair
floating in the pail,
I feel my life added to theirs.

Federico Garcia Lorca, 1922

The moon goes over the water.
How tranquil the sky is!
She goes scything slowly
the old shimmer from the river;
meanwhile a young frog
takes her for a little mirror.

Wisława Szymborska, 1993

Some people--
that means not everyone.
Not even most of them, only a few.
Not counting school, where you have to,
and poets themselves,
you might end up with something like two per thousand.

Like--
but then, you can like chicken noodle soup,
or compliments, or the color blue,
your old scarf,
your own way,
petting the dog.

Poetry--
but what is poetry anyway?
More than one rickety answer
has tumbled since that question was first raised.
But I just keep on not knowing and I cling to that
like a redemptive handrail.

Megan Fernandes, 2020

Mid-August. The moody Northeast.
Yellow moon undressing

herself in the bay. Shelter Island
all asleep. Turpentine skies

cooled by faint meteors,
a shower of bashful stars.

Virgil, in my ribcage, singing
to the sweet red-cedar scent.

Virgil, in my ribcage, singing.