Blog

When we were off the paths, where land
……..is rosy-scarlet dust —
Aline in fits of laughter, just
……..from having touched my hand —

the woodland echo laughed. The ground
……..made every footfall knell.
Aline went still; the empty dell
……..was filled with eerie sound….

But you, Cicada, from on high,
……..where perching, drunk with dew —
not sleepy, not lymphatic — threw
……..your sad, vermillion cry.

XXX: La cigale
by Paul-Jean Toulet

Quand nous fûmes hors des chemins
……..Où la poussière est rose,
Aline, qui riait sans cause
……..En me touchant les mains ; –

L’Écho du bois riait. La terre
……..Sonna creux au talon.
Aline se tut : le vallon
……..Etait plein de mystère…

Mais toi, sans lymphe ni sommeil,
……..Cigale en haut posée,
Tu jetais, ivre de rosée,
……..Ton cri triste et vermeil.

 

Echo-producing cicada, you make yourself tipsy on dewdrops,
……..belting your back-country song; wilderness warbles along.
Perching up high in the leaves with your serrated legs, you play music —
……..brown (as if toasted by fire) skin making sounds like a lyre.
Go and perform some new melody, though, for the Nymphs of the wood, dear.
……..Partner with pipe-playing Pan, thereby permitting my plan:
briefly escaping from Eros, I’ll slip into slumber at midday,
……..taking my ease where I’ve stayed — under your sycamore’s shade.

Untitled (Greek Anthology 7.196)
by Meleager of Gadara

Ἀχήεις τέττιξ, δροσεραῖς σταγόνεσσι μεθυσθείς,
……..ἀγρονόμαν μέλπεις μοῦσαν ἐρημολάλον·
ἄκρα δ᾽ ἐφεζόμενος πετάλοις πριονώδεσι κώλοις
……..αἰθίοπι κλάζεις χρωτὶ μέλισμα λύρας.
ἀλλά, φίλος, φθέγγου τι νέον δενδρώδεσι Νύμφαις
……..παίγνιον, ἀντῳδὸν Πανὶ κρέκων κέλαδον,
ὄφρα φυγὼν τὸν Ἔρωτα μεσημβρινὸν ὕπνον ἀγρεύσω,
……..ἐνθάδ᾽ ὑπὸ σκιερῇ κεκλιμένος πλατάνῳ.

Born in an ancient Syrian city whose ruins lie near modern Umm Qais, Jordan, Meleager of Gadara lived during the second and first century BCE (ca. 140–70). He spent most of his career in the Phoenician city of Tyre (in modern Lebanon), then retired to the Greek island of Kos/Cos, off the coast of modern Türkiye/Turkey. His anthology The Garland, which originally included about 4,000 lines from at least 46 lyric poets, formed an important basis for what today is known as the Greek Anthology. 134 of Meleager’s own epigrams survive.

Although at least one scholar titles this poem “The Cricket to the Cicada” (and its immediate predecessor in the Anthology “The Cicada to the Cricket”), this translation preserves the possibility that the narrator is human. The original’s elegiac couplets do not use rhyme, but in this English translation, internal rhyme emphasizes the even-numbered lines’s caesurae. Note that the Ancient Greek word for cicada (τέττιξ) is grammatically masculine.

Pools emit red now.
An inward tenet drawn in
a wonder: time’s loop.

After Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand,
composed for Paul Wittgenstein, who lost
his right arm in war.

A reader, as abstracted as a star,
detects rewards a secret bard erases:
cadaver, tattered bearers, bearded faces,
affected vertebrae set ever far.
A beggar feasts; a starved stargazer sees,
refracted as a desert tear—a raft,
a scattered seaweed sestet, severed draft,
sweet water terrace, eager treeward bees.
As fear, regret, dread, rage reverberate,
a ravager regards a fated crest—
a stage, a braggart’s target, a daft test—
as sacred art creates a cedar gate.
A reader reads deft verses as exact,
as faceted as Frege’s tesseract.

First Fall

The whole world between my hands
comes to a quivering lull,
and as I catch you, my skull
compresses and understands

the waves lashing at the sands
of its weathered shores have tried
to nudge me to step aside.
You learn to walk, and to be,
close to the edge of the sea,
this sea you carry inside.

Afternoon

The little one’s eyelids deep
in their quarrel with the mind,
the sky caressing each blind
is fading, falling asleep.

I keep pretending I reap
pages of poetry (right)
but my hand is feeling light
and icy toward what it’s spun.
I bundle up with my son
as day dissolves into night.

Sled

“We climbed together the hill
and reached the top, as I said,
and then you hopped in the sled
and left me there, standing still.”

He huddled close in the chill.
I turned away, bleary-eyed.
“It was just a dream,” I lied,
hoping he’d let the dream go,
but winter tracked what I know.

The sled stopped. I stepped aside.

“[Y]ou have to go away and take an oar
to people with no knowledge of the sea,
who do not salt their food. They never saw
a ship’s red prow, nor oars, the wings of boats”

– Odyssey, Book XI, trans. Emily Wilson

Though in this final trip of Nobody
a saffron polish saturates the dawn
illuminating fair Penelope,
it matters not, Eumaeus, if you’re gone.

Nor does it matter that there’s poetry
about bruised cloudscapes blanketing the year
and people who don’t know Poseidon’s sea,
if you, who cared for Argos, are not here.

The bard declaiming stories matters not,
no matter how prodigious or how keen,
no matter that Athena wove the plot.

Wine burns the throat, and Homer’s spell is broken,
without you, patient swineherd, who have been
the one to whom the poem was always spoken.

What routine nights. The house in steady dark,
we pile the dishes, lay tomorrow’s shirts.
Wine is uncorked and left to sit. We talk
in hushed tones, as though shy in a public place,
a waiting room, or deck of a moving ship.
Before, all this would wait, until we met
in his room, by his bed – and we would sing
not loud or well, but tuned enough for him
to fall asleep, assured that he was loved.
Life’s small and sung-out height. We have slipped past
the heyday of its church. Its windows broken,
the tiny silent grief of those old stars
in its holed roof. Its organ at the back
that might still play or break if it were touched.

The reader must be carried to the point where he should conclude
that the work is an accident, and the author a peculiarity.
—Paul Valéry

*

When I was young, I spit
into the pool, then watched
the tepid foam-of-me
dissolve and cool and ripple
outward from my self’s
cold calm reflection.

Grown into my desire,
in later years I rigged
a mirror system, reflecting
my reflection from behind.
By then, I knew my eyes,
but not my nape, my skull.

Now, I seldom stare,
or strain to catch a glimpse
in glass or puddled water.
But in the dark, I hold
my many selves as one—
the one I will relinquish.

*

When I was young, I spit into the pool
and marked that tepid foam-of-me a fool,

too swiftly cooled, too soon dispersed—dissolving
in the rings of ripples round my gaze revolving.

Full-grown into that gaze, in later years,
I blinked at frontal hopes.
……………………………………….Yet, nether fears! —

I studied them in mirrored mirrored mirrors,
and verified the darkened side of spheres.

My eyes are weary now, averse to glare.
Likewise, to knife-edged focus. I’ve stripped them bare

of all reflection in the dark that breeds them
and where, erased, I shall no longer need them.

*

I watched my gob of phlegm drip down
the polished glass that held my image
and I did not flinch, I faced my face, my own,
the thief and the reflector, both thrower and thrown.

I did not drown, but bathed my burning eyes
in time. The architect, the sculptor of my gaze,
time turned them, turned them on its wheel, its lathe,
to cradle, skull and bowl—to empty grave

where gather now the ghosts of all my faces,
camera-less, without obsessed reflection,
each fly’s eye calmed by cyclopean graces
of looming dark, which focuses, erases.

*

On recent shoreside visits, I still mark
…………..that rundown old motel,

that dreary room atop a single flight
…………..of creaky wooden steps,

and that battered bathroom mirror where I spit
…………..at my bemused reflection—

before I ventured out to cruise the bars,
…………..to seek the eyes of others.

It took some years to lose that tired textbook
…………..sense of self-contempt,

to clarify my self-to-self’s rude gesture.
…………..That single splash of spit

was the impatient boat by means of which
…………..I crossed my first abyss:

the distance, clear as glass, that lies between
…………..the seer and the seen.

I went exploring then, around and through,
…………..ahead and far behind—.

By now these eyes of mine, as mind, have mined
…………..ten thousand times

ten thousand selves, a shimmering collection
…………..of shades of seeing being.

The lamps have cooled, the current rises
…………..to scar the silvered surface

that carries all my faces out to sea,
…………..to where I am not me.

*

Slashed with spit, lost youth all bespattered in fragments;
pooled no more, my gaze, become re-definer;
eyes ashift through cisterns of bar-lit shadow—
…………..witness, collector!

Overcrowded lens! Soon re-polished by absence,
filled with eyeless skulls, with a vigil grown vatic!
Eye of mine, your pool once again awaits you,
…………..dry now, and blinded.

Focused face to no face with an empty place,
every vision, every snapshot is shrinking
from eye to inner eye to its closing lid—
…………..being un-manned.

*

My heart of spit lies scattered on a glass
which the fire in my soul can’t understand.
My colder self just dries its brow and laughs.
The mirror becomes pool. My eyes expand.

The pool is in my eye now. And what’s outside
will dive or float, will sink or splash or swim,
will share the naked truths, the brazen lies—
ten thousand are the ways to enter men!

I turn my face back to my refugee,
my poor self mired in riches. I close my eyes.
The many now are one. —Is one too many?
Ears scour the dark for vision’s vacant sighs.

I think I hear faint strains of Orphic flute.
When will the questioner fall senseless, mute?

*

There was a young faggot, self-schooled,
who’d studied his face in a pool.
When he glimpsed his own ass
in a cracked whiskey glass,
well, he knew he’d been played for a fool.

*

And also the recognition of the pure or absolute Me,
the Me = Zero which is identical in us all, rejects all, is opposed to all.

And yet is the nexus of sensibility and “consciousness”.
—Paul Valery

Watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade,
I cleared the year’s caches over morning coffee.
The floats, like malign overlords,
Trailed their regalia and sponsor names.

I cleared the year’s caches over morning coffee.
All those accretions of absent thought
Trailed their regalia and sponsor names.
Nothing is pure. It’s been contaminated—

All those accretions of absent thought
Amounting to a sinister presence.
Nothing is pure. It’s been contaminated
With marbled swaths of turkey gravy.

Amounting to a sinister presence,
The relatives who shook our hands and left
With marbled swaths of turkey gravy
Across their muzzles are with us yet.

The relatives who shook our hands and left
Now occupy a screen. The frozen smiles
Across their muzzles are with us, yet
We’re riveted as cartoon characters

Now occupy a screen. Those frozen smiles!
Watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade,
We’re riveted to cartoon characters:
The floats, our malign overlords.

The foreman, a woman in a bubble
jacket (the room was cold)
asked if we’d heard enough.

We could rewind the tape
or paw the evidence bags
ourselves, could grip the gun
through plastic, or even file
a clarifying question

with the monitor for whom
we were no exception
to the rules of confinement:
the boredom that succeeds
surprise upon learning the show

can entertain, if briefly.
Out of the box, we agreed
the prosecution had flair—
a crisply bearded Latino
who sprang up near the end

with a sudden reversal
in his closing argument.
This felt like no kink
in the yarn he fed us, rather
a jolt to make it taut.

The court-appointed lawyer
sniffed through it all, not
from spite, but from a cold.
Now and then he’d collect
corners of a handkerchief,

find a spot and blow.
His closing was a PowerPoint.
An occasional whisper
to the defendant, a Black
male in his 20s who stood

respectfully and smiled
whenever we came in, was
the depth of their communion.
Though who knows what passed
between them and their opposite

number, or perhaps the judge
while they all waited? We
didn’t keep them long.
First, silence. Then tentative
conclusions slid across

the folding table, so
like one at home. How
we parsed the adjective
in “beyond a reasonable
doubt”! I was myself

called out between sips
of bottled water by
a Potomac (Md.) mom
who argued that my doubt
was not in hailing distance.

She wouldn’t let her child
arrive at this pretty pass.
The admission of a world
outside the windowless room
started a subtle riot.

We paused to ask each other
about travel, deadlines,
and daycare options.
How long would this continue?
It was up to us.

The bud of contingency
bloomed, sending forth
its doctrine in ruddy
shoots. We could agree
not to disagree.

Ninety minutes on,
the face of the accused
hardened. No need to pretend
to us he had a chance.
We thought the counsel wept

but it was just the sniffles.
Grabbing our things later,
we saw the judge, de-robed,
enter our jury room.
So we sat back down.

“I’d like to take some time
to answer any questions
and learn how it went for you.
I do this twice a year.
We’re grateful for your service.”

The silence that followed was like
the one that had begun
when the foreman had asked us if
anyone wanted to start.
Now, as then, I spoke.

“How much do you think he’ll get?”
The judge waved, parting
an invisible curtain, or
batting a fly away.
“The minimum is twenty.”

As we went underground
to our separate parking spots,
taking our leave forever,
I couldn’t help but wonder
how things might change if only

we could rewind the tape
or paw the evidence bags
ourselves, could grip the gun
through plastic, or even file
a clarifying question.

We often claim to know what we would do
if, when we least expected it, the attic
door burst and Gestapo special agents came.
We tell ourselves it wouldn’t be the same.
Our outrage would compel an automatic
response—one brutal and effective, too.

How would we behave if on a flight
diverted to a grisly martyrdom
or grounded while the world negotiates?
No matter which alternative awaits—
a nullifying fear or tedium—
we’re certain we’d pull out of it all right.

Just so, we are assured that when extreme
contingencies arise, they will present
no challenge our resourcefulness can’t match—
no nightmare that our cunning won’t dispatch—
as if the tortures others underwent
were trials our wish fulfillment could redeem.