Passer-By, These Are Words by Yves Bonnefoy

Passer-By, These Are Words

 

Passer-by, these are words. But instead of reading

I want you to listen: to this frail

Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.

Lend an ear, hear first of all the happy bee

Foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.

It flits between two sprays of leaves,

Carrying the sound of branches that are real

To those that filigree the still unseen.

Then know an even fainter sound, and let it be

The endless murmuring of all our shades.

Their whisper rises from beneath the stones

To fuse into a single heat with that blind

Light you are as yet, who can still gaze.

May your listening be good! Silence

Is a threshold where a twig breaks in your hand,

Imperceptibly, as you attempt to disengage

A name upon a stone:

And so our absent names untangle your alarms.

And for you who move away, pensively,

Here becomes there without ceasing to be. 

 

(Translated by Hoyt Rogers)

 

She Ties My Bow Tie by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

She Ties My Bow Tie

 

What you thought was the sound of the deer drinking

at the base of the ravine was not their soft tongues

entering the water but my Love tying my bow tie.

We were in our little house just up from the ravine.

Forgive yourself. It’s easy to mistake her wrists

for the necks of deer. Her fingers move so deftly.

One could call them skittish, though not really because

they aren’t afraid of you. I know. You thought it was the deer

but they’re so far down you couldn’t possibly hear them.

No, this is the breeze my Love makes when she ties me up

and sends me out into the world. Her breath

pulled taut and held until she’s through. I watch her

in the mirror, not even looking at me. She’s so focused

on the knot and how to loop the silk into a bow.

won't you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton

won't you celebrate with me 

won't you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

The Archeologist by Hester Knibbe

The Archeologist 

In one who doesn’t speak the story petrifies,

gets stumbled over, causes hurt. Then,

says the man who should know about the past, then

is a word you need to learn now. Then

lived lives had has

a name a body, sacrificial hands

so god might help us. Feel with your hands and feet

back along these countless steps and hear

the incessant bloodrush, its dark red

presence. That was what the man insisted,

in so many words, pointing to the ornate

temple corridor, an altar

conjured at its vanishing point.

(Translated by Jaqueline Pope)

Lullaby in Echo by Fady Joudah

Lullaby in Echo

Our ancestors didn’t get everything right and died

like several of their dotted letters

and many declensions.

What they slanged we pidgin,

their lilliputian remains

string our present along our future’s feathers:

vane and calamitous, a history to weather,

they laid it on thick

and stabbed heavy

before they left us to us—

to alter them as mutation or idea,

cell or organelle,

strip or particle,

rock, paper, metal.

I swear by the genius phone

that what they did to the living

doesn’t match our binge.

They who revolted more than twice

kept their previous wives and multiple wings

and mistook justice for revenge…

though love after a point abandons reprimand.

They chiseled ore so that we may cement,

paved roads so that we may asphalt,

we guardians of children,

their apps and animations and kindergartens.

Dear daughter, when I was young

we had what had not been.

Dear daughter, I placed some of my heart

in you—no one’s ever lost who neighbors the dark.

And prophets spoke of kindness

up to the seventh neighbor seven floors

up or down from where you happen to be

in a skyscraper. Our ancestors who removed harm

off the roads their enemies took to them,

who microscoped the telescope

and telescoped the micron.

We printed what they sequenced

and drifted in replication. 

My Hole. My Whole. by Sam Sax

My Hole. My Whole.

what to call you who i’ve slept beside through so many apocalypses

the kind that occur nightly in this late stage of the collapsing west

boyfriend was fine even though we are neither boys nor men but love 

how it makes us sudden infants in the eyes of any listener—how 

it brings us back to some childhood we never got to live. that was, 

at the time, unlivable. my sweetheart. my excised sheep’s-heart. 

my fled garden. my metal garter. after yet another man calls his wife 

his partner at the dog park it’s clearly time to find another name for you—

he says it’s my partner’s birthday we’re going to buca di beppo then key largo—

and wild how quick a name becomes yet another vehicle 

through which to reproduce violence. partner fit like a skin and then 

that skin tightened and tore off—you who are neither my chain 

italian restaurant nor my all-inclusive vacation spot. not my owner

or my only or my own. not my down payment or my dowery

of sheep and crop. not lost. not loss. apophasis is a way of naming 

what is by what is not—but what is? my boutonniere. my goofy queer. 

my salt. my silk. my silt. my slit. my top and my basement. my vanquished 

prostate. my battered apostate. my memory. my memory. my meteor. 

all these names for what exactly? to introduce what is to those 

who don’t know. this is my whole. this is my hole. take part of me.  

Winter by Ruth Stone

Winter

The ten o’clock train to New York,

coaches like loaves of bread powdered with snow.

Steam wheezes between the couplings.

Stripped to plywood, the station’s cement standing room

imitates a Russian novel. It is now that I remember you.

Your profile becomes the carved handle of a letter knife.

Your heavy-lidded eyes slip under the seal of my widowhood.

It is another raw winter. Stray cats are suffering.

Starlings crowd the edges of chimneys.

It is a drab misery that urges me to remember you.

I think about the subjugation of women and horses;

brutal exposure; weather that forces, that strips.

In our time we met in ornate stations

arching up with nineteenth-century optimism.

I remember you running beside the train waving good-bye.

I can produce a facsimile of you standing

behind a column of polished oak to surprise me.

Am I going toward you or away from you on this train?

Discarded junk of other minds is strewn beside the tracks:

mounds of rusting wire, grotesque pop art of dead motors,

senile warehouses. The train passes a station;

fresh people standing on the platform,

their faces expecting something.

I feel their entire histories ravish me.