Stranger by John Glenday

Stranger

 

Today, I am a new man,

a stranger in the town that bore me.

 

How simple it is to become a ghost —

just one word, one gesture, and we slip

 

through the fretwork of other people’s lives

as easily as water through a stone.

 

Just for today, if I were to pass myself in the street

I wouldn’t even raise my hat, or say hello.

The Old Professor’s Book by Ishion Hutchinson

The Old Professor’s Book

Evening blooms in heat a braying of bells 

from August Town; my mind fizzles 

over “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” its sporadic arc 

welding and breaking the question, how to 

align poetry with truth. A stalled elevation, 

returning in my old professor’s blight 

marginalia, his book, offered abruptly, 

taken, stowed away, now posthumously examined: 

fragile pencil webbings of flickered exclamations, 

impatient the way he paced the blackboard, 

erased a word (“meteors”), hurled glances 

somewhere far off, beyond me, himself

a boy-comet, weeping to his duty. 

Once I strayed to the tubular steel chair 

chained in a corner, glistening sweat 

on one leg, our eyes wounded appraisal 

met there and he cracked the air, charged 

me pick up Browning’s chorus. I couldn’t. 

He died. His pupil flowered later into 

the voltage of self-alienating poetry, 

away from that moribund grammarian’s 

blind reluctance. Still, as moving iron 

will fuse and repel, by his book, I am 

the unspared prodigal of his abuse.

When You Lie by Paul Celan

When You Lie

 

When you lie

in the Bed of lost Flag-Cloth,

with blue-black Syllables, in Snow-Eyelash-Shadow,

the Crane through Thought-

showers,

comes gliding, steely-

you open for him.

His beak ticks the Hour for you

at every Mouth – at every

bell-stroke, with red-hot Rope, a Silent-

Millennium,

Un-Pulse and Pulse

mint each other to death,

the Dollars, the Cents,

rain hard through your Pores,

in

Second-Shapes

you fly there and bar

the Doors Yesterday and Tomorrow – phosphorescent,

Forever-Teeth,

buds the one, and buds the

other breast,

towards the Grasping, under

the Thrusts –: so thick,

so deeply

strewn

the starry

Crane-

Seed. 

(translated by Michael Hamburger) 

Washing the Elephant by Barbara Ras

Washing the Elephant

Isn't it always the heart that wants to wash

the elephant, begging the body to do it

with soap and water, a ladder, hands,

in tree-shade big enough for the vast savannahs

of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt,

the cratered full moon's light fueling

the windy spooling memory of elephant?

What if Father Quinn had said, "Of course you'll recognize

your parents in heaven," instead of

"Being one with God will make your mother and father

pointless." That was back when I was young enough

to love them absolutely though still fear for their place

in heaven, imagining their souls like sponges full

of something resembling street water after rain.

Still my mother sent me every Saturday to confess,

to wring the sins out of my small baffled soul, and I made up lies

about lying, disobeying, chewing gum in church, to offer them

as carefully as I handed over the knotted handkercheif of coins

to the grocer when my mother sent me for a loaf of Wonder,

Land O'Lakes, and two Camels.

If guilt is the damage of childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence.

Or the fall begins there, and never ends, desire after desire parading

through a lifetime like the Ringling Brothers elephants

made to walk through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel

and down 34th Street to the Garden.

So much of our desire like their bulky, shadowy walking

after midnight, exiled from the wild and destined

for a circus with its tawdry gaudiness, its unspoken

pathos. 

It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were,

the few real loves-of-your-life and how much of the rest—

the mad breaking-heart stickiness—falls away, slowly,

unnoticed, the way you lose your taste for things

like Popsicles unthinkingly.

And though dailiness may have no place

for the ones that have etched themselves in the laugh lines

and frown lines on the face that's harder and harder

to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life

will appear in a dream, arriving

with the weight and certitude of an elephant,

and it's always the heart that wants to go out and wash

the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories

that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean. 

Wake Up by Adam Zagajewski

Wake Up

 

Wake up, my soul.

I don’t know where you are,

where you’re hiding,

but wake up, please,

we’re still together,

the road is still before us,

a bright strip of dawn

will be our star.

 

(translated by Clare Cavanagh)

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart by Ada Limón

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen

years ago now, the L train came clanking by

where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart

on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day

(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).

Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one

(doing work, but also none). What were you wearing?

Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?

A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce

churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept

repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say

this made you want to live? No hand to hold

still here it was: someone giving someone comfort

and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

I Cannot Live With You by Emily Dickinson

I Cannot Live With You

 

I cannot live with You –

It would be Life –

And Life is over there –

Behind the Shelf

 

The Sexton keeps the Key to –

Putting up

Our Life – His Porcelain –

Like a Cup –

 

Discarded of the Housewife –

Quaint – or Broke –

A newer Sevres pleases –

Old Ones crack –

 

I could not die – with You –

For One must wait

To shut the Other’s Gaze down –

You – could not –

 

And I – could I stand by

And see You – freeze –

Without my Right of Frost –

Death's privilege?

 

Nor could I rise – with You –

Because Your Face

Would put out Jesus’ –

That New Grace

 

Glow plain – and foreign

On my homesick Eye –

Except that You than He

Shone closer by –

 

They’d judge Us – How –

For You – served Heaven – You know,

Or sought to –

I could not –

 

Because You saturated Sight –

And I had no more Eyes

For sordid excellence

As Paradise

 

And were You lost, I would be –

Though My Name

Rang loudest

On the Heavenly fame –

 

And were You – saved –

And I – condemned to be

Where You were not –

That self – were Hell to Me –

 

So We must meet apart –

You there – I – here –

With just the Door ajar

That Oceans are – and Prayer –

And that White Sustenance –

Despair –