Hyper-Berceuse: 3 A.M.

Imagine all the debris of space

The countless trade names

   Jugurtha            Tuolumne         Chert-Farms

Some of these belong to you

Can you tell which ones

Each has its own sequence of microtones

Together they make up a kind of tune

Your tune

The ceiling and walls are star maps

Breathing, alive

Those aren’t stars, darling

That’s your nervous system

Nanna didn’t take you to planetariums like this

Go on, touch

Lovely, isn’t it

Like phosphorus on Thule Lake

Sweet summer midnights

Shimmery, like applause under the skin

Can you make it out

Almost a hiss

An old shellac LP of white noise

Playing in the distance

Foolish, troublesome boy

That hapless adventuring of yours

Be very still

Now you can hear it

August Kleinzahler

Sonnet to Orpheus II, 29

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring

what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Streets

As I wandered through the eight hundred and eight streets of the city,

I saw nothing so beautiful

As the Women of the Green Houses,

With their girdles of spun gold,

And their long-sleeved dresses,

Coloured like the graining of wood.

As they walk,

The hems of their outer garments flutter open,

And the blood-red linings glow like sharp-toothed maple leaves

in Autumn.

Amy Lowell

(adapted from Yakura Sanjin, 1769)

Yoshiwara Lament

Golden Peacocks

Under blossoming cherry-trees,

But on all the wide sea

There is no boat.

Circumstance

Upon the maple leaves

The dew shines red,

but on the lotus blossom

It has the pale transparency of tears.

Autumn

All day I have watched the purple vine leaves

Fall into the water.

And now in the moonlight they still fall,

But each leaf is fringed with silver.

At Toomebridge

Where the flat water

came pouring over the weir out of Loch Neagh

as if it had reached the edge of the flat earth

and fallen shining into the continuous

present of the Bann.

Where the checkpoint used to be.

Where the rebel boy was hanged in ’98.

Where negative ions in the open air

are poetry to me. As once before

the slime and silver of the fattened eel.

Seamus Heaney

No Title

Accepting’s impossible

and understanding too

you cannot will to accept or understand

You move on step by step

like a pedlarr

from one dawn to another

Philippe Jaccottet

(trans. Cid Corman)

Salopian

All day, the drone of a saw,

and resin across the pines

of dark Mortimer forest.

With each completed sever

it fell by a whining octave.

By dusk, in the clearing they’d made,

all that remained was their dust,

the dottle from someone’s pipe

and ranks of seasoning limbs

weeping congealing amber.

*

The heat, the fragrance of hay,

the incontrovirtible end

of summer, the country halt,

boarding a single-track train,

weeds prising the platform oblique

where they waved and waved and waved.

*

Dewed cowslips, roses, the grave

under a yew in the garden

of lichened Pipe Aston church,

a dusty Visitors’ Book….

We were once there: 17th

of June 1975.

Peter Reading

Ode To Emptiness

There comes a time when you stop hoping
for love. What then to live for?

There are substitutes: the lunch
on your lap, the power lines overhead,

the heritage buildings lining
your neighborhood—

razed yesterday, absent today, raised tomorrow
from the dead. These black-bean

noodles never nourished
you, only gave you that impression,

but perhaps their imprint was enough.
What sweetness touches you now,

you must thank if you notice. Trash
can be delicious, tart as limes. There is mercy

in the way milk sours. Convenience
in the way we throw our spoils

away. Because some emotions are made
of plastic, junking up inside. Your debris

becomes your whole composition—
your oeuvre of sorrow, it kills entire whales,

it litters your whole ocean—a super-isle
of flotsam, never to decompose.

Every night you beg it to die,
and every morning your wish is granted. 

Sally Wen Mao

8

Not as we are but as we must appear,

Contractual ghosts of pity. Not as we

Desire life but as they would have us live,

Set apart in timeless colloquy.

So it is required; so we bear witness,

Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,

Each distant sphere of harmony forever 

Poised unanswerable.  If it is without 

Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or

If it is not all echoes are the same

In such eternity, then tell me, love,

How can that comfort us – or anyone

Dragged half unnerved out of this worldly place,

Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

Geoffrey Hill

Poppies in the Wind

The honeybee

painting himself his delight inside her

the both of them

adrift

tossing in fits of wind

petals of her knees

raised up around him

petal arms

encircling in shadow his cameo’d frenzy

hosts of them

open or clenched

waving

sheathed or half out

of their witch-hats

at May’s meridian

drying like chicks in the air

August Kleinzahler

Flowers in the Attic

I hate Dublin and the radiography lectures

and the X-ray department even more,

they laugh at my Cork accent and one

of them said AIDS is a North Side disease.

I don’t want to be here with the snobby girls

with the Donnybrook accents or the registrar

who has nick-named me Cork even though

he is kind. The girl who loves sailing

asks every single one of us what our fathers

do – owning a pub

sounds like something dirty now.

Alone for a moment, I crawl into the shower

with Flowers in the Attic and a cinema-sized

bag of Maltesers. Minutes later, Sister

Patricia taps on the door. She smiles

at her fellow Corkonian.  I know she cycles

the underground corridors of  St. Vincent’s

in the dark evenings, her white veil flying.

I know she knows a fellow oddball.

Now, Tina. I hide my trashy book behind my back.

When you’ve wiped your face, you’ll

have to come back to Nuclear Physics.

The Siemens engineer’s been in there

for the last five minutes. I’m nearly twenty-one

scared I’m pregnant,

no qualifications, no hope yet

mournfully following her white habit.

Martina Evans