787. Possible Answers to Prayer - Scott Cairns

Your petitions—though they continue to bear
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value—nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you—

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

786. Eavan Boland - From the Painting ‘Back from Market’ by Chardin

Dressed in the colours of a country day -
Grey-blue, blue-grey, the white of seagulls’ bodies -
Chardin’s peasant woman
Is to be found at all times in her short delay
Of dreams, her eyes mixed
Between love and market, empty flagons of wine
At her feet, bread under her arm. He has fixed
Her limbs in colour, and her heart in line.

In her right hand, the hindlegs of a hare
Peep from a cloth sack; through the door
Another woman moves
In painted daylight; nothing in this bare
Closet has been lost
Or changed. I think of what great art removes:
Hazard and death, the future and the past,
This woman’s secret history and her loves -

And even the dawn market, from whose bargaining
She has just come back, where men and women
Congregate and go
Among the produce, learning to live from morning
To next day, linked
By common impulse to survive, although
In surging light they are single and distinct,
Like birds in the accumulating snow.

785. Later - L. E. Sissman

Two last exhibits must be introduced
In evidence, if it please your honor. One,
Called "Two Comedians," painted at the end
Of Hopper's life, shows Pierrot, stage front,
Grim-lipped, in whiteface, presenting Pierrette
To an unseen audience; the figures are,
His wife said – following his death and soon
Before her own – intended to represent
The painter and his wife, Such comedy –
So high as to be cosmic – is perhaps
Played out in the second exhibit, "Sun
In an Empty Room," where the interiors
Of all his early years are fused in one
Apartment room movers have visited
With their pantechnicon of mise-en-scéne,
Taking away the givens of the past –
Bed, rugs, lamps, people, papers, chiffoniers –
And leaving a sizable memorial
To his life and to the state he lived it in:
A green tree blowing outside; streaming in
Through the two-light window, forming cream oblongs
On window wall and alcove wall and on
The bare wood floor, a shaft of morning sun
Peoples the vacuum with American light.

784. Brueghel In Naples - Diane Abse

.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: W. H Auden

Ovid would never have guessed how far
and father's notion about wax melting, bah!
It's ice up there. Freezing.
Soaring and swooping over solitary altitudes
I was breezing along (a record I should think)
when my wings began to moult not melt.
These days, workmanship, I ask you.
Appalling.

There's a mountain down there on fire
and I'm falling, falling away from it.
Phew, the sun's on the horizon
or am I upside down?

Great Bacchus, the sea is rearing
up. Will I drown? My white legs
the last to disappear? (I have no trousers on)
A little to the left the ploughman,
a little to the right a galleon,
a sailor climbing the rigging,
a fisherman casting his line,
and now I hear a shepherd's dog barking.
I'm that near.

Lest I have no trace
but a few scattered feathers on the water
show me your face, sailor,
look up fisherman,
look this way, shepherd,
turn around, ploughman.
Raise the alarm! Launch a boat!!

My luck. I'm seen
only by a jackass of an artist
interested in composition, in the green
tinge of the sea, in the aesthetics
of disaster––not in me.

I drown, bubble by bubble,
(Help, Save me!)
while he stands ruthlessly
before the canvas, busy busy,
intent on becoming an Old Master.

783. Annunciation - Kay Smith

for Kathy
(Artist Simone Martini, Sienese painter)

In all the old paintings
The virgin is reading––
No one know what,
When she is disturbed
By an angel with a higher mission,
Beyond books.

She looks up reluctantly,
Still marking the place with her finger.
The angel is impressive,
With red shoes and just
A hint of wing and shine everywhere.
Listening to the measured message
The Virgin bows her head,
Her eyes aslant
Between the angel and the book.

At the Uffizi
We stood
Before a particularly beautiful angel
And a hesitant Sienese Virgin,
We two sometimes woman.
Believing we could ignore
all messages,
Unobliged to wings or words,
We laughed in the vibrant space
Between the two,
somewhere in the angled focus
Of the Virgin's eye.

782. Rubins' Women - Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska - Rubens' Women (1)
Translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Titanettes, female fauna,
naked as the rumbling of barrels.
They roost in trampled beds,
asleep, with mouths agape, ready to crow.
Their pupils have fled into flesh
and sound the glandular depths
from which yeast seeps into their blood.

Daughters of the Baroque. Dough
thickens in troughs, baths steam, wines blush,
cloudy piglets careen across the sky,
triumphant trumpets neigh the carnal alarm.

O pumpkin plump! 0 pumped-up corpulence
inflated double by disrobing
and tripled by your tumultuous poses!
O fatty dishes of love!

Their skinny sisters woke up earlier,
before dawn broke and shone upon the painting.
And no one saw how they went single file
along the canvas's unpainted side.

Exiled by style. Only their ribs stood out.
With birdlike feet and palms, they strove
to take wing on their jutting shoulder blades.

The thirteenth century would have given them golden haloes.
The twentieth, silver screens.
The seventeenth, alas, holds nothing for the unvoluptuous.

For even the sky bulges here
with pudgy angels and a chubby god -
thick-whiskered Phoebus, on a sweaty steed,
riding straight into the seething bedchamber.

Wislawa Szymborska - Rubens' Women (2)
Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

Herculasses, a feminine fauna.
Naked as the crashing of barrels.
Cooped up atop trampled beds.
They sleep with mouths poised to crow.
Their pupils have retreated in the depths,
and penetrate to the heart of their glands,
trickling yeast into their blood.

Daughters of the Baroque. Dough bloats in a bowl,
baths are steaming, wines are blushing.
piglets of cloud are dashing across the sky,
trumpets neigh in physical alarm.

O pumpkinned, O excessive ones,
doubled by your unveiling,
trebled by your violent poses,
fat love dishes.

Their skinny sisters got up earlier,
before dawn broke within the painting,
and no one saw them walking single file
on the unpainted side of the canvas.

Exiles of style. Ribs all counted.
Birdlike feet and hands.
They try to ascend on gaunt shoulderblades.

The thirteenth century would have given them a golden backdrop.
The twentieth, a silver screen.
But the seventeenth has nothing for the flat-chested.

For even the sky curves in relief––
curvaceous angles, a curvaceous god––
a moustached Apollo astride a sweaty steed
enters the steaming bedchamber.

Wislawa Szymborska - The Women of Rubens (3)
Translated from the Polish by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire

Giantesses, female fauna,
naked as the rumbling of barrels.
They sprawl in trampled beds,
sleep with mouths agape for crowing.
Their eyes have fled into the depths
and penetrate to the very core of glands
from which yeast seeps into the blood.

Daughters of the Baroque. Dough rises in kneading–troughs,
baths are asteam, wines glow ruby,
piglets of cloud gallop across the sky
trumpets neigh an alert of the flesh.

O meloned, O excessive ones,
doubled by the flinging off of shifts,
trebled by the violence of posture,
you lavish dishes of love!

Their slender sisters had risen earlier,
before dawn broke in the picture.
No one noticed how, single file, they
had moved to the canvas's unpainted side.

Exiles of style. Their ribs all showing,
their feet and hands of birdlike nature.
Trying to take wing on bony shoulder blades.

The thirteenth century would have given them a golden background.
the twentieth––a silver screen.
The seventeenth had nothing for the flat of chest.

For even the sky is convex
convex the angels and convex the god––
mustachioed Phoebus who on a sweaty
mount rides into the seething alcove.

781. Waiting For Icarus - Muriel Rukeyser

.
He said he would be back and we'd drink wine together
He said that everything would be better than before
He said we were on the edge of a new relation
He said he would never again cringe before his father
He said that he was going to invent full-time
He said he loved me that going into me
He said was going into the world and the sky
He said all the buckles were very firm
He said the wax was the best wax
He said Wait for me here on the beach
He said Just don't cry

I remember the gulls and the waves
I remember the islands going dark on the sea
I remember the girls laughing
I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me
I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
I remember she told me those who try out inventions are worse
I remember she added : Women who love such are the worst of all
I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this.

780. The Sky - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

We should have started from this: the sky.
A window without a sill, frame, or pane.
An opening and nothing more,
but open wide.

I need not wait for a clear night
nor crane my neck
to examine the sky.
I have the sky at my back, at hand, and on my eyelids.
The sky wraps me snugly
and lifts me from below.

Even the highest mountains
are no nearer the sky than the deepest valleys.
There is no more sky in one place
than another.
A cloud is crushed by sky as ruthlessly as a grave.
A mole is as enraptured
as a wing-fluttering owl.
A object falling into a precipice
falls from the sky into sky.
Granular, liquid, craggy,
fiery and volatile
expanses of sky, crumbs of sky,
puffs and snatches of sky.
The sky is omnipresent
even in darkness under the skin.
I eat sky, I excrete sky.
I am a trap inside a trap,
an inhabited inhabitant,
an embraced embrace,
a question in answer to a question.

To divide earth and sky
is not the correct way
to consider this whole.
It merely allows survival
under a more precise address,
quicker to be found
if I were to be looked up.
My call words
are delight and despair.

779. January - Betty Adcock

.
Dusk and snow this hour
in argument have settled
nothing. Light persists,
and darkness. If a star
shines now, that shine is
swallowed and given back
doubled, grounded bright.
The timid angels flailed
by passing children lift
in a whitening wind
toward night. What plays
beyond the window plays
as water might, all parts
making cold digress.
Beneath iced bush and eave,
the small banked fires of birds
at rest lend absences
to seeming absence. Truth
is, nothing at all is missing.
Wind hisses and one shadow
sways where a window's lampglow
has added something. The rest
is dark and light together tolled
against the boundary-riven
houses. Against our lives,
the stunning wholeness of the world.

778. Sisyphus And The Sudden Lightness - Stephen Dunn

It was as if he had wings, and the wind
behind him. Even uphill the rock
seemed to move of its own accord.

Every road felt like a shortcut.

Sisyphus, of course, was worried;
he'd come to depend on his burden,
wasn't sure who he was without it.

His hands free, he peeled an orange.
He stopped to pet a dog.
Yet he kept going forward, afraid
of the consequences of standing still.

He no longer felt inclined to smile.

It was then that Sisyphus realized
the gods must be gone, that his wings
were nothing more than a perception
of their absence.

He dared to raise his fist to the sky.
Nothing, gloriously, happened.

Then a different terror overtook him.

777. Letter to Dr. B--, Diane Ackerman

I have found you among the texts
(but not the textures) of your life,
in the library of your cunning,
where the abstracts of forty papers
open, one by one, like small windows
partly sealed by terminology's lacquer.
They reveal you both aloof and enthralled,
a restless mind of intersecting planes.
How can I resist the paper "Artist and Analyst"?
Yet I do, thinking it best to stay
within the frame we've chosen,
using the palette we invent,
creating a mosaic in motion.
Whenever I set a shard in place,
the mosaic evolves, blurs a moment,
then a new scene refines, throwing past into relief,
drawing present into mind.
So I will sacrifice my yen to know
the what and whim of you. Though my curiosity
is swelling like a Magellanic Cloud
filled with a luminous starfield of questions,
I'll sacrifice them on the altar of our ineffable
cause. A padded altar. A cause quilted with passion,
and insight whose razors cut clean as thrill.
A sacrifice intoxicating as any pill.

776. Thanks - Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska - Thank-You Note
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

I owe so much
to those I don't love.

The relief as I agree
that someone else needs them more.

The happiness that I'm not
the wolf to their sheep.

The peace I feel with them,
the freedom––
love can neither give
nor take that.

I don't wait for them,
as in window-to-door-and-back.
Almost as patient
as a sundial,
I understand
what love can't, and forgive
as love never would.

From a rendezvous to a letter
is just a few days or weeks,
not an eternity.

Trips with them always go smoothly,
concerts are heard,
cathedrals visited,
scenery is seen.

And when seven hills and rivers
come between us,
the hills and rivers
can be found on any map.

They deserve the credit
if I live in three dimensions,
in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space
with a genuine, shifting horizon.

They themselves don't realize
how much they hold in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them a thing,"
would be love's answer
to this open question.

775. John & Mary - John Dunn

John & Mary had never met. They were like
two hummingbirds who also had never met.
—From A Freshman's Short Story

They were like gazelles who occupied different
grassy plains, running opposite directions
from different lions. They were like postal clerks
in different zip codes, with different vacation time,
their bosses adamant and clock-driven.
How could they get together?
They were like two people who couldn't get together.
John was a Sufi with a love of the dervish,
Mary of course a Christian with a curfew.
They were like two dolphins in the immensity
of the Atlantic, one playful,
the other stuck in a tuna net—
tow absolutely different childhoods!
There was simply no hope for them.
They would never speak in person.
When they ran across that windswept field
toward each other, they were like two freight trains,
one having left Seattle at 6:36 P.M.
at an unknown speed, the other delayed
in Topeka for repairs.
The math indicated that they'd embrace
in another world, if at all, like parallel lines.
Or merely appear kindred and close, like stars.

774. Night Morning - Grace Paley

.
To translate a poem
from thinking
into English
takes all night
night nights and days

English down
the best it can while
the mother's tongue Russian
omits the verb to be
again and again and
is always interfering
with the excited in-
dustrious brain wisely
the heart's beat asserts
control

also the newest English
argues with its old
singing ancestry
it thinks it know best

finally the night's
hard labor peers through
the morning window observes
snow birds the sun caught
in white and black winter
birches disentangles itself
addresses the ice-cold meadow
for hours on the beauty of
the color green

773. In Memory of M. B. - Anna Akhmatova

Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes, and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in, and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I, I, sick with grief for the buried past, I, smoldering on a slow fire, having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man so full of strength and will and bright inventions, who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.

772. Thomas Hardy - Lee Upton

.
There's not a chance.
Too late, he says. But it's never too late
for the poetry of regret.

Pines thicken with this rain.
Always, under complaint
storm clouds ride above

an ancient forest.
A child close to the earth
listens to the slow revolving of

accidents. Already the child knows
he is a ghost
and must practice becoming himself—

the cliff rising above him will not stop.
He's not one ghost but many,
and there's not enough pity in the world for them.

771. The Wolf's Postcript to 'Little Red Riding Hood' - Agha Shahid Ali

.
First, grant me my sense of history:
I did it for posterity,
for kindergarten teachers
and a clear moral:
Little girls shouldn't wander off
in search of strange flowers,
and they mustn't speak to strangers.
And then grant me my generous sense of plot:
Couldn't I have gobbled her up
right there in the jungle?
Why did I ask her where her grandma lived?
As if I, a forest-dweller,
didn't know of the cottage
under the three oak trees
and the old woman lived there
all alone?
As if I couldn't have swallowed her years before?
And you may call me the Big Bad Wolf,
now my only reputation.
But I was no child-molester
though you'll agree she was pretty.
And the huntsman:
Was I sleeping while he snipped
my thick black fur
and filled me with garbage and stones?
I ran with that weight and fell down,
simply so children could laugh
at the noise of the stones
cutting through my belly,
at the garbage spilling out
with a perfect sense of timing,
just when the tale
should have come to an end.

770. The Children - Joan Aleshire

(From Giovanni di Paolo's "Raising of Lazarus")

Before perspective or shadows or names ––
he is simply John son of Paul. Before mistakes
could be revised, each stroke was indelible
on the hardening wall. Before doubt,
or the consciousness of self before
the expression of doubt, the painter gave
to his flat, clear shapes a solid
definition –– Lazarus green from the grave,
with the odd, sheep-like eyes those Italians
thought eastern; the crowd at the tomb
one shape, a hilly landscape or a cloud
no gap between any figure and its neighbor,
lapping against the next.

Some heads have the gold scallop,
that coin the holy get; these are the ones
who stare awed and almost smiling
at the gaping tomb. But others, no haloes,
cover their noses; one even gags
at Lazarus' stench. Vomit sprays down
delicately on dotted lines from a red-rimmed
oval punctuated by chicklet teeth.
All of these doubters frown.

Christ stands at the center of course,
larger, welcoming Lazarus back
to the world –– the dark desert
with its mountains that loom darker,
more forbidding still. It will take faith,
or courage, to step from the ease of the tomb
toward those onlookers, into this landscape
where little lives. Christ
will be the magnet, but what drew me
most wasn't that expected beard and blessing
hand. The painter has added something on his own
to the scene –– two children, heads too large
for their bodies. He means them, the plaque says,
to be us, the watching world.

Back to back, almost joined, one looks
at the disciples, the faithful and Christ,
the other at Lazarus half-decayed.
One side all spirit and overcoming;
the other by what the body comes to
overcome. The heads, the heads
are what stopped me at this picture.
They look up so open-mouthed, in the way
of all children. You know, when they stumble
from sleep onto a scene they can make no sense of,
that paints itself as a fresco is painted:
instant, indelible in the soft blank wall.

769 - Three Figures Walking Through Grass

.
After impressionism we wade
through dabs from Monet's palette
orange and green
poppy and poplar
light hiking through meadows,
serial orgies of color
squirreled into his leafing shapes,
the mountains' hidden treasure
mined for the stillness
of a canvas we move upon
like grasses undulating in water
to refresh the tired eye
of the old man separating us
into creams and pinks, sleight
of the sun's brilliance,
blending us in all combinations
of three impossible things––
a symmetry unbounded
by his precise simulations
but framed by the hands
of a clock, as we trace
our shadows through this afternoon
and lengthen into night's erasure.

768. Archaic Torso of Apollo - Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated from the German by ?

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.