August Kleinzahler

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

Anniversary

You’d figure the hawk for an isolate thing,
commanding the empyrean,
taking his ease in the thermals and wind
until that retinal flick, the plunge and shriek –
cruelly perfect at what he is.
With crepe myrtle igniting the streets
and flowering pansy underfoot
I’d get out there just after dawn each day,
before the sun made it over the mesquite and honey locust.
Cliff swallows rocketed low over grass,
dragonflies darted above:
every day, on the heels of first birdsong, juice-heads
sleeping rough by the culvert.
Before the heat,
before the ebb and flow of cicada whirr swallowed the world,
when the crepe myrtle was still in bloom,
when it was the flowering pansies’ time in the park and untended lots,
and still a touch of cool in the air.
I remember once, a red-tail perched close by
on a branch or utility pole.
Maybe he came down for a better look,
but I think it was so that I might better see him,
who reigned over these few acres and beyond
and what it was about him so overmastering.
An ugly sheen encouraged some gold in his russet mantle.
His belly was white.
Look at me, he seemed to be insisting.
Behold, a pure wild heartless thing,
beautiful and horrible, nothing in-between.
I one day saw him tearing at his prey:
he was in the crook of a tree, low and close at hand,
fixed on it, drunk with it, mercilessly at it,
the sound like a cleaver tearing through meat,
cruelly what he was, nothing else.
But on another day, not long after, I heard him,
perched high on a branch, calling out,
crying out in distress, piteously,
kee-eeee-arrr, kee-eeee-arrr
a harsh, descending sound, and unrelenting,
kee-eeee-arrr kee-eeee-arrr,
panicked or wounded, terrible in his dismay,
until, suddenly, from some other corner of sky
another hawk flew down to join him,
not right there on the same branch but on another, close by.
And soon after that, off they flew together,
drifting, spiralling, higher and higher
in partnered loops, wheeling and diving,
enraptured by all they were, were able to do,
not as separate beings, but as two.

Three Rilke Translations by Seamus Heaney

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

published in London Review of Books, May 5 2005

Rilke: The Apple Orchard

Come just after the sun has gone down, watch
This deepening of green in the evening sward:
Is it not as if we’d long since garnered
And stored within ourselves a something which

From feeling and from feeling recollected,
From new hope and half-forgotten joys
And from an inner dark infused with these,
Issues in thoughts as ripe as windfalls scattered

Under trees here like trees in a Dürer woodcut –
Pendent, pruned, the husbandry of years
Gravid in them until the fruit appears –
Ready to serve, replete with patience, rooted

in the knowledge that no matter how above
Measure or expectation, all must be
Harvested and yielded, when a long life willingly
Cleaves to what’s willed and grows in quiet resolve.

Rilke: After the Fire

Early autumn morning hesitated,
Shying at newness, an emptiness behind
Scorched linden trees still crowding in around
The moorland house, now just one more wallstead

Where youngsters in a pack from god knows where
Went rip-roaring wild and yelled and wrecked.
Yet all of them fell silent when he appeared,
The son of the place, and with along forked stick

Dragged an out of shape old can or kettle
From under hot, charred, half-consumed house-beams;
And then, like one with a doubtful tale to tell,
Turned to the others present, at great pains

To make them realise what had stood so.
For now that it was gone, it all seemed
Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh.
And he was changed: as from a far-off land.

Rilke: Roman Campagna

Out of the sluggish, clogged-up city, which
Would rather sleep on, undisturbed, and dream
of its soaring baths, the road to the fever marsh –
The Appian tomb-road – heads past each last farm

And farmhouse, out under the malign
Gaze of windows that fasten on its back,
Unnerving it, driving it, ram-stam, on
Until, imploring, out of breath, in panic

And with a quick look backwards, to make sure
The windows have stopped watching, it entrusts
Its emptiness to the skies. And as the far

Aqueducts come striding up, alerted,
The skies that have absorbed its emptiness
Now substitute their own. Which will outlast it.

Philip Larkin – Aubade

 Poems
Nov 192010
 


I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

James Lasdun

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

The Question

We’re eating outside with our friends,
Woodstock Buddhists; our kids and theirs
are lighting sticks on citronella candles
to throw them at the woods like burning spears;
the Rainbow Family of Living Light
are drumming in Magic Meadow; I’ve drunk enough
that all I want to do is close my eyes,
when a voice rings like a summons from the darkness:
my six-year-old son asking: “Dad,
is America good or bad?”

He’s heard us talking; the litany:
stolen elections, torture memos, wars;
seen the picture of the hooded man
Haj Ali, our oppressor-victim,
arms spread, posed on his box
like Jesus on his mountain
blessing the peacemakers
(but for the dangling wires)
and wants to know whose side he’s on:
his own or someone else’s side against him…

What can I say? That depends
on what rots mean by ”good” or ”bad”
or for that matter “America”,
which might be a fool and his goons
war-gaming in the White House,
but might be, say, the Women in Black
down on the Green with their banner, Bring Our
Troops Back,
or the Rainbow People up in the meadow
drumming in the full moons,
or might just be just us and our friends…?

I think how I moved here;
settled with that long shock of ease
as if in my first lawn chair,
before it could dawn on me
I’d merely exchanged the curse
of being forever elsewhere
for that of the settler – worse,
the children of settlers,
for whom the root of existence
is precisely their fathers’ sins…

He’s waiting for his answer.
I open my mouth to speak
but something stalls me; a strange
heaviness on my tongue
as if after all I’d pledged silence
or struck some nocturnal pact
over whatever act,
doubtful or downright wrong,
secures our presence here,
and I can’t seem to say a damn thing,

and he drifts away, back to his game
of fending off the trees
that look as though they’d marched up the hill
to mass at the edge of our lawn
while we sat here talking,
and a dim shame
clouds in as if there were really something to do
other than drink and chill
and listen to the drums beat
and try to keep our eyes open.

Archilochos, P. Colon. 7511

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

Translation by Guy Davenport
From 7 Greeks (New Directions, 1995)

[ ]
Back away from that, [she said]
And steady on [ ]

Wayward and wildly pounding heart,
There is a girl who lives among us
Who watches you with foolish eyes,

A slender, lovely, graceful girl,
Just budding into supple line,
And you scare her and make her shy.

O daughter of the highborn Amphimedo,
I replied, of the widely remembered
Amphimedo now in the rich earth dead,

There are, do you know, so many pleasures
For young men to choose from
Among the skills of the delicious goddess

It’s green to think the holy one’s the only.
When the shadows go black and quiet,
Let us, you and I alone, and the gods,

Sort these matters out. Fear nothing:
I shall be tame, I shall behave
And reach, if I reach, with a civil hand.

I shall climb the wall and come to the gate.
You’ll not say no, Sweetheart, to this?
I shall come no farther than the garden grass.

Neobulé I have forgotten, believe me, do.
Any man who wants her may have her.
Aiai! She’s past her day, ripening rotten.

The petals of her flower are all brown.
The grace that first she had is shot.
Don’t you agree that she looks like a boy?

A woman like that would drive a man crazy.
She should get herself a job as a scarecrow.
I’d as soon hump her as [kiss a goat’s butt].

A source of joy I’d be to the neighbors
With such a woman as her for a wife!
How could I ever prefer her to you?

You, O innocent, true heart and bold.
Each of her faces is as sharp as the other,
Which way she’s turning you never can guess.

She’d whelp like the proverb’s luckless bitch
Were I to foster get upon her, throwing
Them blind, and all on the wrongest day.

I said no more, but took her hand,
Laid her down in a thousand flowers,
And put my soft wool cloak around her.

I slid my arm under her neck
To still the fear in her eyes,
For she was trembling like a fawn,

Touched her hot breasts with light fingers,
Spraddled her neatly and pressed
Against her fine, hard, bared crotch.

I caressed the beauty of all her body
And came in a sudden white spurt
While I was stroking her hair.