Alphabet

A Primer of the Daily Round
Howard Nemerov

A peels an apple, while B kneels to God,
C telephones to D, who has a hand
On E’s knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod
For H’s grave, I do not understand
But J is bringing one clay pigeon down
While K brings down a nightstick on L’s head,
And M takes mustard, N drives to town,
O goes to bed with P, and Q drops dead,
R lies to S, but happens to be heard
By T, who tells U not to fire V
For having to give W the word
That X is now deceiving Y with Z,
Who happens, just now to remember A
Peeling an apple somewhere far away.

Buson for a Transitional Evening

Three times three lines by Buson:

A lightning flash-
the sound of water drops
falling through bamboo

A kite floats
At the place in the sky
Where it floated yesterday.

Dawn--
fish the cormorants haven't caught
swimming in the shallows.

For all who feel torn by love:

Love Lament
a Vietnamese folk poem
translated by John Balaban

Stepping into the field, sadness fills my deep heart.
Bundling rice sheaves, tears dart in two streaks.
Who made me the ferry's leaving?
Who made this shallow creek that parts both sides?

Buóc xuông ruông sâu man sâu tâc da
Tay ôm bó ma nuóc mát hai hàng
Ai làm lõ chuyên dò ngang?
Cho sông can nu'óc dôi dàng biêt ly?

Standing in the Sea

A Grave
Marianne Moore

Man looking into the sea,
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to
yourself,
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,
but you cannot stand in the middle of this;
the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.
The firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the
top,
reserved as their contours, saying nothing;
repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea;
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.
There are others besides you who have worn that look--
whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate
them
for their bones have not lasted:
men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave,
and row quickly away--the blades of the oars
moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such
thing as death.
The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx--beautiful under
networks of foam,
and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed;
the birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as hereto-
fore--
the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath
them;
and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bellbuoys,
advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped
things are bound to sink--
in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor
consciousness.

A Little Manhattan

What More Do I Need?
Stephen Sondheim
(from Saturday Night)

Once I hated this city,
Now it can't get me down.
Slushy, humid and gritty,
What a pretty town.

What, thought I, could be duller,
More depressing, less gay.
Now my favourite colour
Is grey.

A wall of rain as it turns to sleet,
The lack of sun on a one-way street,
I love the grime all the time.
And what more do I need?

My window pane has a lovely view:
An inch of sky and a fly or two.
Why, I can see half a tree.
And what more do I need?

The dusk is thick and it's galling;
It simply can't be excused.
In winter even the falling snow looks
Used.

My window pane may not give much light,
But I see you, so the view is bright.
If I can love you, I'll pay the dirt no heed!
With your love, what more do I need?

Someone shouting for quiet,
Someone starting a brawl,
Down the block there's a riot,
And I'll buy it all!

Listen, now I'm ecstatic,
Hold me close and be still.
Hear the lovely pneumatic
Drill!

A subway train thunders through the Bronx,
A taxi horn on the corner honks.
But I adore ev'ry roar.
And what more do I need?

I hear a crane making street repairs,
A two-ton child running wild upstairs.
Steam pipes bang,sirens clang,
And what more do I need?

The neighbours yell in the summer,
The landlord yells in the fall,
So loud I can't hear the plumber
Pound the wall.

An aeroplane roars across the bay,
But I can hear you as clear as day:
You said you love me
Above the sound and speed.

With your love,
What more do I need?

An Elegy, translated

The anchorage is consistent only in having verse. Sometimes, I write the next thing to an MA-level essay. Then, I'll go for weeks on end letting the verse speak for itself. As that is the least that verse can do (At its best, poetry does far more.), the latter course seems more honest . . . sometimes.

Translations can serve or undermine a work. The other day, I found on a bargain shelf Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus: In Praise of Mortality, translated and edited (I'd want for courage) by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Allow me, please, to offer you one poem from this book.

The Eighth Elegy
To Rudolf Kassner

With their whole gaze
animals behold the Open.
Only our eyes
are as though reversed
and set like traps around us,
keeping us inside.
That there is something out there
we know only from the creatures' countenance.

We turn even the young child around,
making her look backward
at the forms we create,
not outward into the Open,
which is reflected
in the animals' eyes.

Free from death.
We alone see that.
For the animals,
their death is, as it were, completed.
What's ahead is God. And when they move,
they move in timelessness, as fountains do.

Never, not for a single day, do we let
the space before us be so unbounded
that the blooming of one flower is forever.
We are always making it World
and never letting it be nothing: the puer,
the unconstructed, which we breathe
and endlessly know, and do not crave.

Sometimes, a child loses himself in this stillness
and gets shaken out of it. Or a person dies
and becomes it. For when death draws near,
we see death no more. We stare beyond it
with an animal's wide gaze.
Lovers also look with astonishment
into the Open, when the beloved doesn't block the view.
It surges up, unbidden, in the background.
But neither can get past the otehr,
so World closes in again.

Ever turned toward what we create, we see in it
only reflections of the Open, darkened by us.
Except when an animal silently looks us through and through.
This is our fate: to stand
in our own way. Forever
in the way.

If the confident animal coming toward us
had a mind like ours,
the change in him would startle us.
But to him his own being is endless,
undefined and without regard
for his condition: clear,
like his eyes. Where we see fortune,
he sees all, and himself
in all, made whole for always.

And yet in the warm, watchful animal
there is the weight of a great sadness.
For what at times assaults us
clings to him as well: the sense
that what we yearn for
was once closer and more real
and infinitely tender.
Here all is distance --
there it was braeth.
After that first home
the second feels altered and beset by wind . . .

And we: always and everywhere spectators,
turned not toward the Open
but to the stuff of our own lives.
It drowns us. We set it in order.
It falls apart. We order it again
and fall apart ourselves.

Who has turned us around like this?
Whatever we do, we are in the posture
of one who is about to depart.
Like a person lingering
for a moment on the last hill
where he can see his whole valley --
that is how we live, forever
taking our leave.

The World, Divided

Bicameral
Linda Gregerson

1

Choose any angle you like, she said,
the world is split in two. On one side, health

and dumb good luck (or money, which can pass
for both), and elsewhere . . . well,

they're eight days from the nearest town,
the parents are frightened, they think it's their fault,

the child isn't able to suck. A thing
so easily mended, provided

you have the means. I've always thought it was
odd, this part (my nursing school

embryology), this cleft in the world
that has to happen and has to heal. At first

the first division, then the flood of them, then
the migratory plates that make a palate when

they meet (and meeting, divide
the chambers, food

from air). The suture through which (the upper
lip) we face the world. It falls

a little short sometimes, as courage does.
Bolivia once, in May (I'd volunteer

on my vacations), and the boy was nine.
I know the world has harsher

things, there wasn't a war, there wasn't
malice, I know, but this one

broke me down. They brought him in
with a bag on his head. It was

burlap, I think, or sisal. Jute.
They hadn't so much as cut eyeholes.


2
(Magdalena Abakanowicz)

Because the outer layer (mostly copper
with a bit of zinc) is good for speed

but does too little damage (what
is cleaner in the muzzle—you've begun

to understand—is also cleaner in
the flesh), the British at Dum Dum (Calcutta) devised

an "open nose," through which
the leaden core, on impact, greatly

expands (the lead being softer). Hence
the name. And common enough in Warsaw

decades later (it was 1943), despite
some efforts in The Hague. I don't

remember all of it, he wasn't even German,
but my mother's arm—

that capable arm—was severed at
the shoulder, made (a single

shot) a strange thing altogether.
Meat. I haven't been able since

to think the other way is normal, all
these arms and legs.

This living-in-the-body-but-not-of-it.


3

Sisal, lambswool, horsehair, hemp.
The weaver and her coat-of-manyharrowings.

If fiber found in situ, in
agave, say, the living cells that drink

and turn the sun to exoskeleton,
is taken from the body that

in part it constitutes (the
succulent or mammal and its ex-

quisite osmotics), is
then carded, cut, dissevered

in one fashion or another from
the family of origin, and

gathered on a loom,
the body it becomes will ever

bind it to the human and a trail
of woe. Or so

the garment argues. These
were hung as in an abattoir.

Immense (12 feet and more from upper
cables to the lowest hem). And vascular,

slit, with labial
protrusions, skeins of fabric like

intestines on the gallery floor.
And beautiful, you understand.

As though a tribe of intimates (the
coronary plexus, said the weaver) had

been summoned (even such
a thing the surgeon sometimes has

to stitch) to tell us, not unkindly, See,
the world you have to live in is

the world that you have made.