Sunday, February 26, 2017

1005. Italy to Lord - Jane Draycott

(From:  The Occupant)

It’s dark in here and forest green: Britannica,
sixteen oak trees in a London living room,
the little girl, my mother, in the bookcase glass.
Italy, Ithaca, Izmail, Japan, each page a mainsail,
turning, HMS Discovery – none of the rivers
of southern Italy is of any great importance.
Like birds on a long-haul flight, let not seas
or deserts, cliffs or icy mountain-tops
impede you. Jews, Kabȋr, Kabul, Kaffir,
from up here all seems clear (all evil in the world’s
ascribed to Maya or illusion), then home at last
returned from all those navigable miles
to Lichen, Linnet, Logic, London, to find
a century has passed, the forest’s cleared,
the animals all bared and scorched, the gold
all brought to light. I look into the glass,
discover there myself in dense shade, deep

and shadowy as on any wooded island.

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

1004. Labyrinth - Jorge Luis Borges

Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler

There’ll never be a door. You are inside
and the fortress contains the universe
and has no other side nor any back
nor any outer wall nor secret core.
Do not expect the rigor of your path,
which stubbornly splits into another one,
which stubbornly splits into another one,
to have an end. Your fate is ironclad
like your judge. Do not expect the charge
of the bull that is a man and whose strange
plural form fills the thicket of endless
interwoven stone with your own horror.
It does not exist. Expect nothing. Not

even the beast obscured by the black dusk.

Saturday, February 11, 2017

1003. The Lake of Memories - Robert Altmann

.
Voices sit
like broken chairs
in a room.
A room stands
for the ceremony
of impermanence.
Impermanence cracks
the façade
of self.
The self builds
its walls
of healing.
Healing frames
the house
of wounds.
Wounds bridge
darkness and light
over time.
Time winds through
the lake of memories

in frozen tongue.