756. Drinking Wine - Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska - Drinking Wine (1)
Translated from the Polish by Graźyna Drabik and Sharon Olds

He looked, and gave me beauty,
and I took it as if mine.
Happy, I swallowed a star.

I allowed myself to be
invented in the likeness
of the reflection in his eyes.
I am dancing, dancing
in the flutter of sudden wings.

A table is a table.
Wine is wine in a glass
that is just a glass and stands
standing on a table. While
I am imaginary
to the point of no belief,
imaginary
to the point of blood.

I am telling him
what he want to hear: ants
dying of love under
the constellation of the dandelion.
I swear that a white rose,
sprinkled with wine, sings.

I am laughing, tilting
my head carefully
as if checking an invention
I am dancing, dancing
in astonished skin, in
an embrace that creates me.

Eve from a rib, Venus from sea-foam,
Minerva from Jove's head––
all were more real than I.

When he stops looking at me
I search for my reflection
on a wall. I see only
a nail from which a picture
has been removed

Wislawa Szymborska - Drinking Wine (2)
Translated from the Polish by ?

He looked at me, bestowing beauty,
and I took it for my own.
Happy, I swallowed a star.

I let him invent me
in the image of the reflection
in his eyes. I dance, I dance
in an abundance of sudden wings.

A table is a table, wine is wine
in a wineglass, which is a wineglass
and it stands standing on a table
but I am a phantasm,
a phantasm beyond belief,
a phantasm to the core.

I tell him what he wants to hear––about ants
dying of love
under a dandelion's constellation.
I swear that sprinkled with wine
a white rose will sing.

I laugh, and tilt my head
carefully, as if I were testing
an invention. I dance, I dance
in astounded skin, in the embrace
that creates me.

Eve from a rib, Venus from sea foam,
Minerva from the head of Jove
were much more real.

When he's not looking at me,
I search for my reflection
on the wall. All I see
is a nail on which a painting hun

755. This Way Out - Rui Pires Cabral

.
But is there a way out? Imagine
in insomnia the forests that grow
at such hours in other regions, the trains
that cross them to reach a destination
in the future of others.

Is there a way our? Imagine
night filled with violent cities,
the rumbling of engines in the subways
and rain falling on the black plastic
of strawberry fields, all the suffering
and uncertainty of the world.

And in the morning, look, it's a beautiful
day Your friends are getting up in the other room,
they're heading down to the kitchen to make coffee.

But is there a way out?

754. The Calm - David Wagoner

.
Drifting and mimicking the loss of the wind
With a loss of mind,
Left slack-sailed here in the sea, doing nothing at all
For days, we begin
Taking our lives uneasily. Only the daylight
And the cracked chronometer
Are moving. Though we turn away from the sun
Or rise under the moon
As if we were earth and tide, the rest is stillness.
If we broke our silence,
This palpable air would ripple obediently,
But our voices falter.
They melt on the sea, as brief as glints of starlight.
On the deep dry land
Why did we never think of the miles and miles
Under us, holding us?
Above half-leagues of water, we think of little
Else than how deeply
The two of us might sink, turning to food
For the thoughts of others.
We could have stayed on firmanent, on a desert
Where water waves goodbye,
Goodbye, and vanishes, a plain where it flows
On its own sight journeys,
Or on mountains where we could watch it frozen, toppling
(Instead of us) down cliffsides.
But here we huddle, surrounded. From miles below,
Now, come the monsters
Toward the glassy calm around us, uncoiling,
Lifting kelp-ragged
Slime-scaled snag-toothed cold impossible heads.
Eyes filled to the brim
With blankness, breaching and hulking, slewing toward us
Where we drift like lures.
Though they come closer, closer, blurred in the dark,
They never strike, never
Loom, ravenous, never thrash the surface
To break this mirror.

753. Alphabet Song - Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan - Alphabet Song

Like a train made up of 26 boxcars,
the alphabet drags such a heavy cargo
down the tracks, such strange,
compelling combinations

that we are left breathless, admiring
a world constructed of words
and sentences as much
as the sunsets and snowfalls

which perform their mysteries
before our distracted eyes.
Now we learn how alphabets of genes
produce jellyfish and roses

and the intricate brain
that invented language—then wrote
a poem which like a brief breeze
wafts over us and is gone.

752. Last Gods - Galway Kinnell

She sits naked on a rock
a few yards out in the water.
He stands on the shore,
also naked, picking blueberries.
She calls. He turns. she opens
her legs showing him her great beauty,
and smiles , a bow of lips
seeming to tie together
the ends of the earth.
Splashing her image
to pieces, he wades out
and stands before her, sunk
to the anklebones in leaf-mush
and bottom-slime—the intimacy
of the geographical. He puts
a berry in its shirt
of mist into her mouth
She swallows it. He puts in another.
She swallows it. Over the lake
two swallows whim, juke jink,
and when one snatches
an insect they both whirl up
and exult. He is swollen
not with ichor but with blood.
She takes him and talks him
more swollen. He kneels, opens
the dark, vertical smile
linking heaven with the underearth
and murmurs her smoothest flesh more smooth.
On top of the rock they join.
somewhere a frog moans, a crow screams.
The hair of their bodies
startles up. They cry
in the tongue of the last gods,
who refused to go,
chose death, and shuddered
in joy and shattered in pieces,
bequeathing their cries
into the human breast. Now in the lake
two faces, floating, see up
a great maternal pine whose branches
open out in all directions
explaining everything.

751. Vermeer - Howard Nemerov

.
Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvelous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things.

At one for once with sunlight falling through
A leaded window, the holy mathematic
Plays out the cat's cradle of relation
Endlessly; even the inexorable
Domesticates itself and becomes charm.

If I could say to you, and make it stick,
A girl in a red hat, a woman in blue
Reading a letter, a lady weighing gold . . .
If I could say this to you so you saw,
And knew, and agreed that this was how it was
In a lost city across the sea of years,
I think we should be for one moment happy
In the great reckoning of those little rooms
Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light,
Or standing invisible on the shore opposed,
Watching the water in the foreground dream
Reflectively, taking a view of Delft
As it was, under a wide and darkening sky.

750. Vermeer - Tomas Tranströmer

.
No sheltered world . . . on the other side of the wall the
noise beginTomas Tranströmer - Vermeer
Translated from the Swedish by ?

No sheltered world . . . on the other side of the wall the
noise begins
the tavern begins
with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, the din
of bells
and the mentally disordered brother-in-law, the bearer
of death that everyone must tremble for.

The great explosion and the delayed tramp of rescuers
the boats that strut at anchor, the money that creeps into
the pocket of the wrong person
demands piled on demands
Cusps of gaping red flowers that sweat premonitions of
war

Away from there and straight through the wall into the
bright studio
into the second that goes on living for hundreds of years.
Paintings titled The Music Lesson
or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter --
she's in her eighth month, two hearts kicking inside her.
On the wall behind her hangs a wrinkled map of Terra
Incognita.

Breathe calmly . . . An unknown blue material is nailed
to the chair.
The gold upholstery tacks flew in with unheard-of speed
and stopped abruptly
as if they had never been anything but stillness.
The ears ring with either depth or height.
s
the tavern begins
with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, the din
of bells
and the mentally disordered brother-in-law, the bearer
of death that everyone must tremble for.

The great explosion and the delayed tramp of rescuers
the boats that strut at anchor, the money that creeps into
the pocket of the wrong person
demands piled on demands
Cusps of gaping red flowers that sweat premonitions of
war

Away from there and straight through the wall into the
bright studio
into the second that goes on living for hundreds of years.
Paintings titled The Music Lesson
or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter --
she's in her eighth month, two hearts kicking inside her.
On the wall behind her hangs a wrinkled map of Terra
Incognita.

Breathe calmly . . . An unknown blue material is nailed
to the chair.
The gold upholstery tacks flew in with unheard-of speed
and stopped abruptly
as if they had never been anything but stillness.
The ears ring with either depth or height.
It's the pressure from the other side of the wall
that leaves every fact suspended
and holds the brush steady.

It hurts to go through walls, it makes you sick
but it's necessary.
The world is one. But walls . . .
And the wall is part of yourself --
Whether you know it or not it's the same for everyone,
everyone except little children. No walls for them.

The clear sky has set itself on a slant against the wall.
It's like a prayer to emptiness.
And the emptiness turns its face to us
and whispers,
"I am not empty, I am open."

Tomas Tranströmer - Vermeer
Translated from the Swedish by ?

No protected world . . . Just behind the wall the noise begins,
the inn
with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, the din of bells
and the insane brother-in-law, the death-bringer we all must tremble for.

The big explosion and tramp of rescue arriving late.
the boats preening themselves on the straits, the money creeping down
in the wrong man's pocket
demands stacked on demands
gaping red flowerheads sweating premonitions of war.

And through the wall into the clear studio
into the second that's allowed to live for centuries.
Pictures that call themselves The music Lesson
or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter––
she's in her eighth month, two hearts kicking inside her.
On the wall behind is a wrinkled map of Terra Incognita.

Breathe calming . . . An unknown blue material is nailed to the chairs.
The gold studs flew in with incredible speed
and stopped abruptly
as if they had never been other than stillness.

Ears sing, from depth of height.
It's the pressure from the other side of the wall.
It makes each fact float
and steadies the brush.

It hurts to go through walls, it makes you ill
but is necessary.
The world is one. But walls . . .
And the wall is part of yourself––
we know or we don't know but it's true for us all
except for small children. No walls for them.

The clear sky has leaned against the wall.
It's like a prayer to the emptiness.
And the emptiness turns its face to us
and whispers.
"I am not empty. I am open."

749. True Love - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

True love. Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way - in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.
Couldn't they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends' sake?
Listen to them laughing - its an insult.
The language they use - deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines -
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

It's hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who'd want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

748. Angel - James Merrill

.
Above my desk, whirring and self-important
(Though not much larger than a hummingbird)
In finely woven robes, school of Van Eyck,
Hovers an evidently angelic visitor.
He points one index finger out the window
As winter snatching to its heart,
To crystal vacancy, the misty
Exhalations of houses and of people running home
From the cold sun pounding on the sea;
While with the other hand
He indicates the piano
Where the Sarabande No. 1 lies open
At a passage I shall never master
But which has already, and effortlessly, mastered me.
He drops his jaw as if to say, or sing,
"Between the world God made
And this music of Satie,
Each glimpsed through veils, but whole,
Radiant and willed,
Demanding praise, demanding surrender,
How can you sit there with your notebook?
What do you think you are doing?"
However he says nothing –– wisely: I could mention
Flaws in God's world, or Satie's; and for that matter
How did he come by his taste for Satie?
Half to tease him, I turn back to my page,
Its phrases thus far clotted, unconnected.
The tiny angel shakes his head.
There is no smile on his round, hairless face.
He does not want even these few lines written.

747. Our Turn - Rui Pires

Translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin

It's the cold that cripples us on a winter
Sunday, when hope is at its
rarest. There are certain fixations
of consciousness, things that wander
about the house searching for their place

and secretly they slip into a poem.
It's envelopes from the water
company, a knife smeared with butter
on the tablecloth, that trail we leave
behind us and decipher without effort
and to no advantage. It's the wait

and the delay. It's the streets so still
at newscast time and the clinking of
neighborhood cutlery. It's the nighttime
aimlessness of memory: it's the fear
of having lost, quite casually,

our turn

746. On A Painting By Rousseau - Weldon Kees

Father Juniers Dog-Cart, 1908
Rousseau, Henri (le Douanier)
Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris, France

The clouds seem neater than the trees.
The sky, like faded overalls,
Breaks the distances of sight;
And shadow that defines the curb
shelters the silhouette of dog
Who, waiting patiently beneath
The amazing carriage with tangerine wheels,
Is eyeless, though he seems to sense
The black Chihuahua that the pavement grows.

The street is bare. The hooves and mane
Of the posing horse and his speckled flanks
Flow back to the six in the cart he draws:
The idiot aunt and the girl in white
(A Ventriloquist's doll with a colorless wig),
And a sexless figure upon whose lap
A beast is squatting, macabre, blurred.

These four and the one in the yellow hat
Regard us with eyes like photographs
That have been shown us long ago.
––All but the man in the driver's seat,
His wax hands fastened on the reins,
Who, from the corners of his eyes,
Watches the horse he does not trust.

745. The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House - Howard Nemerov

In memory of the painters Paul Klee and Paul Terence Feeley

I
The painter's eye follows relation out.
His work is not to paint the visible,
He says, it is to render visible.

Being a man, and not a god, he stands
Already in a world of sense, from which
He borrows, to begin with, mental things
Chiefly, the abstract elements of language:
The point, the line, the plane, the colors and
The geometric shapes. Of these he spins
Relation out, he weaves its fabric up
So that it speaks darkly, as music does
Singing the secret history of the mind.
And when in this the visible world appears,
As it does do, mountain, flower, cloud, and tree,
All haunted here and there with the human face,
It happens as by accident, although
The accident is of design. It is because
Language first rises from the speechless world
That the painterly intelligence
Can say correctly that he makes his world,
Not imitates the one before his eyes.
Hence the delightsome gardens, the dark shores,
The terrifying forests where nightfall
Enfolds a lost and tired traveler.

And hence the careless crowd deludes itself
By likening his hieroglyphic signs
And secret alphabets to the drawing of a child.
That likeness is significant the other side
Of what they see, for his simplicities
Are not the first ones, but the furthest ones,
Final refinements of his thought made visible.
He is the painter of the human mind
Finding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulness
That is in things, and not the things themselves.

For such a man, art is an act of faith:
Prayer the study of it, as Blake says,
And praise the practise; nor does he divide
Making from teaching, or from theory.
The three are one, and in his hours of art
There shines a happiness through darkest themes,
As though spirit and sense were not at odds.

II
The painter as an allegory of the mind
At genesis. He takes a burlap bag,
Tears it open and tacks it on a stretcher.
He paints it black because, as he has said,
Everything looks different on black.

Suppose the burlap bag to be the universe,
And black because its volume is the void
Before the stars were. At the painter's hand
Volume becomes one-sidedly a surface,
And all his depths are on the face of it.

Against this flat abyss, this groundless ground
Of zero thickness stretched against the cold
Dark silence of the Absolutely Not
Material worlds arise, the colored earths
And oil of plants that imitate the light.

They imitate the light that is in thought
For mind relates to thinking as the eye
Relates to light. Only because the world
Already is a language can the painter speak
According to the grammar of the ground.

It is archaic speech, that has not yet
Divided out its cadences in words;
It is a language for the oldest spells
About how some thought rose into the mind
While others, stranger still, sleep in the world.

So grows the garden green, the sun vermilion
He sees the rose flame up and fade and fall.
And be the same rose still, the radiant in red.
He paints his language, and his language is
The theory of what the painter thinks.

III
The painter's eye attends to death and birth
Together, seeing a single energy
Momently manifest in every form,
As in the tree the growing of the tree
Exploding from the seed not more nor less
Than from the void condensing down and in,
Summoning sun and rain. He views the tree,
The great tree standing in the garden, say,
As thrusting downward its vast spread and weight,
Growing its green height from dark watered earth,
And as suspended weightless in the sky,
Haled forth and held up by the hair of its head.
He follows through the flowing of the forms
From the divisions of the trunk out to
The veinings of the leaf, and the leaf's fall.
His pencil meditates the many in the one
After the method in the confluence of rivers,
The running of ravines on mountainsides,
And in the deltas of the nerves; he sees
How things must be continuous with themselves
As with whole worlds that they themselves are not,
In order that they may be so transformed.
He stands where the eternity of thought
Opens upon perspective time and space;
He watches mind become incarnate; then
He paints the tree.

IV
These thoughts have chiefly been about the painter Klee,
About how he in our hard time might stand to us
Especially whose lives concern themselves with learning
As patron of the practical intelligence of art,
And thence as model, modest and humorous in sufferings,
For all research that follows spirit where it goes.

That there should be much goodness in the world,
Much kindness and intelligence, candor and charm,
And that it all goes down in the dust after a while,
This is a subject for the steadiest meditations
Of the heart and mind, as for the tears
That clarify the eye toward charity.

So may it be to all of us, that at some times
In this bad time when faith in study seems to fail,
And when impatience in the street and still despair at home
Divide the mind to rule it, there shall some comfort come
From the remembrance of so deep and clear a life as his

Whom I have thought of, for the wholeness of his mind,
As the painter dreaming in the scholar's house,
His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought,
The same dream that then flared before intelligence
When light first went forth looking for the eye.

744. Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye - Gerald Stern

.
Every city in America is approached
through a work of art, usually a bridge
but sometimes a road that curves underneath
or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel-
you don't know it-that takes you through the rivers
and under the burning hills. I went there to cry
in the woods or carry my heavy bicycle
through fire and flood. Some have little parks-
San Francisco has a park. Albuquerque
is beautiful from a distance; it is purple
at five in the evening. New York is Egyptian,
especially from the little rise on the hill
at 14-C; it has twelve entrances
like the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived,
has two small floating bridges in front of it
that brought me in and out. I said good-bye
to them both when I was 57. I'm reading
Joseph Wood Krutch again-the second time.
I love how he lived in the desert. I'm looking at the skull
of Georgia O'Keeffe. I'm kissing Stieglitz good-bye.
He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a city
in every sense of the word; he wore a library
across his chest; he had a church on his knees.
I'm kissing him good-bye; he was, for me,
the last true city; after him there were
only overpasses and shopping centers,
little enclaves here and there, a skyscraper
with nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turf
where whores couldn't even walk, where nobody sits,
where nobody either lies or runs; either that
or some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum,
a flower sucking the water out of a rock.
What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstores
lost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stick
turning the bricks up, numbering the shards,
dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I left
with a glass of tears, a little artistic vial.
I put it in my leather pockets next
to my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys,
my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is there
beside his famous number; there is smoke
and fire above his head; some bowlegged painter
is whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waiting
is taking down his words. I'm kissing Stieglitz
good-bye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos
are making me cry; we're walking down Fifth Avenue;
we're looking for a pencil; there is a girl
standing against the wall-I'm shaking now
when I think of her; there are two buildings, one
is in blackness, there is a dying poplar;
there is a light on the meadow; there is a man
on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.

743. Brueghel: The Triumph of Time - Howard Nemerov

Passing a Flemish village and a burning city
possible Babylon the Great, bringing the Spring
from Winter and any beginning to its end, there go
the actors in the ramshackle traveling show
that does whatever's done and then undoes it:
the horses of the sun and moon, stumbling on plate
and bullion, patiently pull the flat-bed wagon
where Cronos munches a child and the zodiac-encircled world
bears up a tree that blossoms half and withers half;
Death on a donkey follows, sloping his scythe,
and last a trumpeter angel on an elephant
is puffing the resurrection and the end of days.

Under the wheels, and under the animals' feet,
palette and book are broken with the crowns of kings
and the instruments of music, intimating to our eyes
by means of many examples the Triumph of Time,
which everything that is, with everything that isn't,
as Brueghel patiently puts it down, exemplifies.

742. Landscape - Wislawa Szymborska

.
In the old master's landscape,
the trees have roots beneath the oil paint,
the path undoubtedly reaches its goal,
the signature is replaced by a stately blade of grass,
it's a persuasive five in the afternoon.
May has been gently, yet firmly, detained,
so I've lingered, too. Why, of course, my dear,
I am the woman there, under the ash tree

Just see how far behind I've left you,
see the white bonnet and the yellow skirt I wear,
see how I grip my basket so as not to slip out of the painting,
how I strut within another's fate
and rest awhile from living mysteries.

741. On A Celtic Mask By Henry Moore - Horace Gregory

.
The burnished silver mask hangs in white air,
The eyes stick out, the lips raised in a smile:
Where eyes had been, the hawk-winged Hebrides,
Tall, weeping waves against their friendless shores,

Rain in small knives that cut the flesh away,
And Sun the sword that flashes from the sky:
Sea-lion-headed creatures stalk these islands,
And breed their young to stand before their graves.

A crying Magdalen sings from her grotto,
Precarious life-in-death between the waters ––
None see her breasts, flushed limbs and winding hair ––
The women hear her in the new moon's madness.

740. 50 Years - Linda Pastan

.
Though we know
how it will end:
in grief and silence,
we go about our ordinary days
as if the acts of boiling an egg
or smoothing down a bed
were so small
they must be overlooked
by death. And perhaps

the few years left, sun drenched
but without grand purpose,
will somehow endure,
the way a portrait of lovers endures
radiant and true on the wall
of some obscure Dutch museum,
long after the names
of the artist and models
have disappeared.

739. Lost Friends - Rui Pires Cabral

Translated fro the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin

Friends carried off by life
are the most difficult to appease, the most
tyrannical. Barbarians of an unknown land,
they sip the poison of silence and they grow
beyond all limits in the distance, a blind eye
to our loneliness. And to think that we were
brothers in arms, that we dug up buried treasure
from the same islands, from the most
barren of books. How things turn out.
Could all have been in vain? It seemed
that we were destined for the same
songs, for a more certain kind of love.
Well, well. And we cannot even understand
what happened.

738. Breughel's Winter - Rutger Kopland

Translated from the Dutch by James Brockway


Winter by Breughel, the hill with hunters
and dogs, at their feet the valley with the village.
Almost home, but their dead-tired attitudes, their steps
in the snow––a return, but almost as
slow as arrest. At their feet the depths
grow and grow, become wider and further,
until the landscape vanishes into a landscape
that must be there, is there but only

as a longing is there.

Ahead of them a jet-black bird dives down. Is it mockery
of this labored attempt to return to the life
down there: the children skating on the pond,
the farms with women waiting and cattle?

An arrow underway, and it laughs at its target.

737. Brueghel's Snow - Anne Stevenson

Here in the snow:
three hunters with dogs and pikes
trekking over a hill,
into and out of those famous footprints -
famous and still.

What did they catch?
They have little to show
on their bowed backs.
Unlike the delicate skaters below,
these are grim, they look ill.

In the village, it's zero.
Bent shapes in black clouts,
raw faces aglow
in the firelight, burning the wind
for warmth, or their hunger's kill.

What happens next?
In the unpainted picture?
The hunters arrive, pull
off their caked boots, curse the weather
slump down over stoups. . .

Who's painting them now?
What has survived to unbandage
my eyes as I trudge through this snow,
with my dog and stick,
four hundred winters ago?