My Aunts by Adam Zagajewski

My Aunts

 

Always caught up in what they called 

the practical side of life 

(theory was for Plato), 

up to their elbows in furniture, in bedding, 

in cupboards and kitchen gardens,

they never neglected the lavender sachets 

that turned a linen closet to a meadow. 

 

The practical side of life, 

like the Moon’s unlighted face, 

didn’t lack for mysteries; 

when Christmastime drew near, 

life became pure praxis 

and resided temporarily in hallways, 

took refuge in suitcases and satchels. 

 

And when somebody died--it happened 

even in our family, alas—

my aunts, preoccupied

with death’s practical side, 

forgot at last about the lavender,

whose frantic scent bloomed selflessly 

beneath a heavy snow of sheets.

Don’t just do something, sit there.

And so I have, so I have,

                    the seasons curling around me like smoke,

Gone to the end of the earth and back without sound.

(Translated by Clare Cavanagh)

Without by Joy Harjo

Without

The world will keep trudging through time without us

When we lift from the story contest to fly home

We will be as falling stars to those watching from the edge

Of grief and heartbreak

Maybe then we will see the design of the two-minded creature

And know why half the world fights righteously for greedy masters

And the other half is nailing it all back together

Through the smoke of cooking fires, lovers’ trysts, and endless

Human industry—

Maybe then, beloved rascal

We will find each other again in the timeless weave of breathing

We will sit under the trees in the shadow of earth sorrows

Watch hyenas drink rain, and laugh.

The Wind, One Brilliant Day by Antonio Machado

The Wind, One Brilliant Day

 

The wind, one brilliant day, called

to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

 

“In return for the odor of my jasmine,

I’d like all the odor of your roses.”

 

“I have no roses; all the flowers

in my garden are dead.”

 

“Well then, I’ll take the withered petals

and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.”

 

the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:

“What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

 

(Translated by Robert Bly)

Things My Grandmother Said by Amit Majmudar

Things My Grandmother Said

 

Turmeric can heal anything

but a broken heart.

I’ve got some Benadryl I bet could shush

that dog of yours. Sounds fun

but what does it pay. You can’t shoot

the spots without shooting the leopard.

If dressmaker’s dummies could cook,

we’d all be old maids.

Poetry? You’re grinding water

with a pestle of ice,

but when you’ve never thirsted a day

in your life, I guess

you can play. I know plenty

of family history, but don’t ask me

where green eyes got into the bloodline.

India invented recycling, we called it karma,

but trash now is trash later.

I wasn’t crying, I was dicing onions

in a memory in Ahmedabad.

Every time I stand up

there’s Rice Krispies in my knees.

This girl is perfect for you, I know

her aunt. Read that to me at

my funeral, boy, right now my show is on.

I got to be this old by nibbling a little

raw ginger every morning.

Ambition’s a sinkhole that deepens

the more you dump in it,

but that doesn’t mean don’t get a job.

In the old days, families were so big,

counting nephews felt like counting stars.

Every kite forgets its string.

Sure, the Ganga is holy

but who told you to drink from it?

In the Afterlife by Mark Strand

In the Afterlife

She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn’t. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.

Loving After Loss by Cass Donish

Loving After Loss

 

for RP

 

when two people kissing             

reinitiate each other’s foundation

—Malva Flores (trans. Jen Hofer)

 

 

 

all night long, the curtain was pulled back

and dawn drew me toward it, through the dark hours

in which, missing you, and feeling the strangeness

of missing you along with her, I swarmed above the pages

of a book searching for a lost syntax that could lead me

to this new form of desire, desire after obliteration,

I shouldn’t overstate this, the death of myself

when she died, I shouldn’t overstate it:

obliteration

 

                              the first time I saw you

I was already held in your arms,

we held each other standing in the grass in a storm,

it was the night my basement flooded and my house

vanished do you remember how the first time

we met we were already making love

in the rain we were already walking between

two houses at dawn we were already right here

in the early summer storm and then

you were in another city and I was already

missing you the day we met and realizing

I was in love with you the day we met you were

out of town and I met you in the dream I had

of walking by your house and looking up

just as you were opening the window

 

                      [when a lover’s mouth

                      reinvents a lost equation]

 

the first time I saw you, you were standing in the street

in front of my house and you waved hello

and said something from under your mask

the pandemic was ending soon on our block

we only had to be careful for a few more years

we didn’t touch for several more years

talking all night on the porch as we grew older

looking at our watches, turning pages on calendars

the first time I saw you, you were seconds

from being inside me for the first time

the first time I saw you I was pulling you

toward me, one foot on the earth,

one in the water, one star above us the first time

I saw you I was in a field without you

with the smell of thyme, animals wading in the river,

the heat of dusk on my skin, the air soaked with dusk-light

layered with dawn-light where we met for the first time

laughing nervously because we hadn’t slept

and we heard the birds beginning to fill with sound

 

           [how a lover’s voice

           reignites a new sensation]

 

                                             you were remarkable

                                            we were going to make love

for the first time and we knew it, I kept seeing

you at each moment for the first time and never

wanted this to end, resisted the urge

to know the end, I want to learn a different way to

            love I always want you         I always want to

see you for the first time and meet you

for the first time every time I wake up beside you

each morning resisting an anxiety I carry

under the surface of my skin because I am falling

in love for the first time and seeing you for the first

time each time I see you and I know the cost of love

            and yet poured forth this wish and yet couldn’t

have imagined you which is why I float in the half-night

sleepwalking with my eyes open

a sight that frightens even the animals

wading in the river and the butterflies

landing on my face who try to close my eyes for me

I tell them I’m on fire, that I carry love now

under my skin, that the love in me obliterated

me when she died and now it’s rebirthing

me into myself, this my own return

to my own transmuted bedrock the way

the way we touch becomes its own occasion

 

American Dreams by Julia Alvarez

American Dreams

                                          Queens, NY, 1963

 

All day I dreamed of candy from the store

on Hillside Avenue: barrels filled with

caramels, tins of pastel mints and tiers

of chocolates beckoning in the window,

and a tinkling bell that tattled I was coming

in the door, a skinny girl, who didn’t look

thirteen, still reeling from the shock of

losing everything, and hungry all the time

for candy, more candy than I’d ever seen,

a whole store dedicated to delights,

proof we had arrived in the land of Milk

Duds, Chiclets, gumdrops, from the country

sugar came from but candy never got to.

I roamed the aisles, savoring the names:

Necco Wafers, Atomic Fireballs, Butterfingers,

while the fat man owner watched me, sitting

on a stool by the cash register, his pale eyes

like ice mints behind his foggy glasses, lingering

at my chest, as if the swelling buds under

my uniform’s white blouse were Candy Buttons,

Jujubes I’d shoplifted; while his tiny, perfumed

mother in black pumps and white lace collar

waited on older patrons, boxing chocolates,

petit-fours, assortments made to order

for wives and sweethearts, May I help you, dahlink?

in a heavy accent, an immigrant herself

from some past purge or pogrom; her “boy”

born here, the obese product of an American

dream gone greedily awry. He chatted as I

lingered over barrels, asking none-of-your-

business questions about my parents, grades,

what my people did on holidays. He knew

my favorites, commenting as he rang me up,

I see you like those Sweet Tarts. Candy necklaces

sure are a hit with your set. A hit? My set?

It was an intimacy I resented; my cravings

were dark secrets I didn’t want to share.

Will that be all today? he asked, as if he hoped

I’d say, Actually, I would like something else,

to marry you and help you run your candy store.

Outside, my new America was waking up

to nightmare: freedom fighters

marching; storefronts, some with candy

stores like this one, burning; girls like me

in bombed-out churches; dreams deferred,

exploding; dreams I didn’t know

still needed fighting for; all I knew

was hunger, as I learned the names

that promised sweeter dreams beyond

these candied substitutes, Juicy Fruits,

Life Savers, Bit O-Honey, Good & Plenty.

Elms by Louise Glück

Elms

 

All day I tried to distinguish

need from desire. Now, in the dark,

I feel only bitter sadness for us,

the builders, the planers of wood,

because I have been looking

steadily at these elms

and seen the process that creates

the writhing, stationary tree

is torment, and have understood

it will make no forms but twisted forms. 

Before Getting Dark 2 by Lee Seong-Bok

Before Getting Dark 2

 

Dripping their watercolors the flowering trees

walk in a line

Their modest lantern parade unending

 

Where were we going

Our wedding clothes smeared with deathly light

Everyone laughing in fragrant white

 

Where were we

Before it got too dark

I saw you again and again

 

Before it got dark

my sight dimmed and

in the lines of flowering trees I saw you not

 

(Translated by Anton Hur)

The Distance of a Shout by Michael Ondaatje

The Distance of a Shout

 

We lived on the medieval coast

south of warrior kingdoms

during the ancient age of the winds

as they drove all things before them.

 

Monks from the north came

down our streams floating—that was

the year no one ate river fish.

 

There was no book of the forest,

no book of the sea, but these

are the places people died.

 

Handwriting occurred on waves,

on leaves, the scripts of smoke,

a sign on a bridge along the Mahaweli River.

 

A gradual acceptance of this new language.

Tender Bitter by Sharon Olds

Tender Bitter

 

When I started having tender thoughts about

myself as a child—that long, pointed

chin, those tiny eyes—I started having

tender thoughts of my mother. She would look

up, a lot—short for an adult—

with a look of dazed longing, her fine

straight hair wrapped wet around

many small rollers, and bound back with combs

put in backward, to give her hair

some height, or with a fillet like a goddess. My hair was

loopy, soft, lollopy like

flop-eared rabbits’ ears, she wrote

about it in my Baby Book, “Shar’s

not conventionally beautiful—but that

naturally curly hair!” I don’t think she would have

traded with me, she remembered her cold

Pilgrim mother, in my mom’s sleep,

slipping the bobby-pins out of the dreaming child’s

spit curls. We were big on trading—you were

supposed to want to take Jesus’s place

on the cross, as he had taken yours. I think

my mother would have died for me—

and I think I would have died for her—

is that how the other animals do it? Who

dies for whom? My mom sometimes

liked my mind—the odd things

I said—she would write about my mind in my pink

Baby Book. She came from ignorant

educated people of self-importance

and leisure. She did not see that what I

said was funny, like joking, it was

metaphor. But it charmed her. She would not have

taken it from me, she would not have known

what to do with it, nor did she want to

mar me, as her mother had marred her. My mother . . .

loved me. If she had not beaten me,

I would have been purely enamored with her—she was so

sad, and pretty. Her eyes were a hundred

bright bright blues, like a butterfly’s scales

but crystal electric, like a shattered turquoise goblet.

She did not take away my ability

to love—with her elder sister, and my elder

sister, she taught it to me. And she did not

take my mind—the one thing

of value I was born with—my mother did not

take the simile away from me.

Bruise by Cynthia Zarin

Bruise

 

          Black bruise an inch

below my knee; white bone, my

     kneecap wrenched askew;

 

          knee a blind eye, bruise

a shiner, the pair of them two

     goggle-eyes, bridged by

 

          a shiny, half-moon scar.

A battered aviatrix? She

     flies above a dream island.

 

          At three, I fell from

a knee-high curb. Mind yourself,

     I hear the voices say,

 

          when decades later,

in the bath, my knee, drowned

     face, knucklehead, rises

 

          above the water table,

volcano with its violet flame.

     Bedpost? Doorjamb?

 

          The hours last week

turned to glass? And if asked

     to swear to it, say

 

          what’s to blame?

The mind trolls, reels back,

     and begins, and begins

 

          again to prove how if

I’d only done that one thing—

     but there are so many.

Dear America by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Dear America

 

I pick you up

& you are a child made of longing

clasped to my neck. Iridescent,

lovely, your inestimable tantrums,

I carry you back & forth

from the famine in your mind.

 

Your alphabet wraps itself

like a tourniquet

around my tongue.

 

Speak now, the static says.

 

A half-dressed woman named Truth

tells me she is a radio.

 

I’m going to ignore happiness

& victory.

I'm going to undo myself

with music.

 

I pick you up

& the naked trees lean

into the ocean where you arrived,

shaking chains & freedom

from your head.

 

No metaphor would pull you

out of your cage.

 

Light keens from the dead.

& I’m troubled

by my own blind touch.

 

Did the ocean release

my neck? Did the opal waves

blow our cries to shore?

 

You don’t feel anything

in the middle of the night.

The Road by Muriel Rukeyser

The Road

 

These are roads to take when you think of your country

and interested bring down the maps again,

phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend,

 

reading the papers with morning inquiry.

Or when you sit at the wheel and your small light

chooses gas gauge and clock; and the headlights

 

indicate future of road, your wish pursuing

past the junction, the fork, the suburban station,

well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.

 

Past your tall central city’s influence,

outside its body: traffic, penumbral crowds,

are centers removed and strong, fighting for good reason.

 

These roads will take you into your own country.

Select the mountains, follow rivers back,

travel the passes. Touch West Virginia where

 

the Midland Trail leaves the Virginia furnace,

iron Clifton Forge, Covington iron, goes down

into the wealthy valley, resorts, the chalk hotel.

 

Pillars and fairway; spa; White Sulphur Springs.

Airport. Gay blank rich faces wishing to add

history to ballrooms, tradition to the first tee.

 

The simple mountains, sheer, dark-graded with pine

in the sudden weather, wet outbreak of spring,

crosscut by snow, wind at the hill’s shoulder.

 

The land is fierce here, steep, braced against snow,

rivers and spring. king coal hotel, Lookout,

and swinging the vicious bend, New River Gorge.

 

Now the photographer unpacks camera and case,

surveying the deep country, follows discovery

viewing on groundglass an inverted image.

 

John Marshall named the rock (steep pines, a drop

he reckoned in 1812, called) Marshall’s Pillar,

but later, Hawk’s Nest. Here is your road, tying

 

you to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice.

Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river

cutting fast and direct into the town.

 

White Dog by Carl Phillips

White Dog

 

First snow—I release her into it—

I know, released, she won't come back.

This is different from letting what,

 

already, we count as lost go. It is nothing

like that. Also, it is not like wanting to learn what

losing a thing we love feels like. Oh yes:

 

I love her.

Released, she seems for a moment as if

some part of me that, almost,

 

I wouldn't mind

understanding better, is that

not love? She seems a part of me,

 

and then she seems entirely like what she is:

a white dog,

less white suddenly, against the snow,

 

who won't come back. I know that; and, knowing it,

I release her. It's as if I release her

because I know.